^mtll mmmii^ f ihwi n«>'£ solicitations of desire and the identification of the self with a desired object (§ 103 foil.) . 161 144. To refuse to call this identification 'desire' would be arbitrary ; and in this sense of desire will and desire are not difierent nor in conflict . 163 145. But to call the will ' the strongest desire' is to obliterate the distinction between the mere solicitations of desire and the desire which the self has identified with itself . . .163 146. The former act upon the man, but in the latter the man him- self acts : 164 147. and this equally whether he acts on impulse or after a conflict of ' desires ' 165 Will and Intellect 148. In spite of the involution of intellect and desire or will (§ 134 foil.), there is a clear distmction between the speculative and practical employments of the mind ; and therefore, if the former be called thought and the latter will, these may be distinguished and even opposed 166 149. But it is misleading to say that mere thought is not will, or that will is more than thought ; whether by ' thought ' is meant speculative activity in general (for this is not an element in will but co-ordinate with it) ; . . . . 168 150. or (2) the otiose contemplation of an action as a possible future event (for thinking in this sense is not the thinking involved in willing) ;........ 169 151. or (3) the thought which is involved in willing (for such thought is, like the desire involved in willing, not a separable part, but only a distinguishable aspect, of will) . . . 17° xxii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 152. The desire and thought which are separable from will and from each other are antecedent conditions of will, but are not the desire and thought !« will 171 153. The will then is not some distinct part of a man, separable from intellect and desire, nor a combination of them. It is simply the man himself, and only so the source of action . 172 BOOK III. The Moral Ideal and Moral Progress CHAPTER I GOOD AND MORAL GOOD 154. The distinction between the good and the bad will is the basis of Ethics. The form of «//acls of will being the identifi- cation of the self with the idea of an object in which self- satisfaction is sought, the moral quality of the act depends ou the nature of this object . 174 155. Different senses in which these statements could be accepted by a Utilitarian and by Kant 175 Pleasure and Desire 156. If the difference between objects willed is a difference in respect of motive, there can be, according to strict Hedonism, no intrinsic difference between them ; the moral quality of an act depends on its effects, and while these differ the motive is always the same, viz. pleasure 177 157. But this theory, which offends the unsophisticated mind, owes its plausibility to a confusion , . . . .179 158. For, although in all desire self-satisfaction is sought, and although in all self-satisfaclion there is pleasure, it does not follow that the object desired is pleasure .... 179 159. Not only is self-satisfaction sought in ways known to involve a sacrifice of pleasure certain never to be made good ; . . 180 160. but whatever object a man seeks self-satisfaction in, — whether he be a voluptuary or a saint or an ordinary man, — it is not the pleasure q/' self-satisfaclion that he seeks . . 181 161. For this presupposes direct desire for the object ; and though desire for the object may be reinforced by desire for the pleasure expected in it, yet if the latter desire supersede the former it tends to defeat itself ...... i8a 162. Owing to the confusion just indicated, Mill is unaware that in holding some kinds of pleasure to be intrinsically more desir- able than others he gives up the first principle of Hedonism 183 163. For if pleasure alone is the ultimate good or desirable, on what ground can some pleasures be described as in their quality better than others ? 1 84 164. On the ground, according -to Mill, that men knowing both do prefer the former to the latter. But, if tlie strongest desire is always for the greatest pleasure, this only shows that the former are,, for such men, jMawWaftW/y superior . . , 185 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxiii PAGE 165. Mill's meaning however is not this, but that (for example) the sense of dignity is much more essential to such men's happiness than the rejected pleasures 187 166. But the inconsistency of this position with Hedonism is not perceived, because the desire for the sense of dignity is con- fused with the desire for the pleasure it may bring . . 188 167. Whereas, in truth, to say that the desired object is essential to happiness is not to say that the desire for it is a desire for pleasure 189 168. The same confusion is present in other arguments on which Mill rests the proof of Utilitarianism 190 169. It is only through it that certain desires, on the reality of which he insists, can be considered desires for pleasure ; e.g. the disinterested desire of virtue, and the desires of money, power, and fame 191 170. It appears therefore that Hedonism involves the denial of an intrinsic difference between the good and the bad will, and that the grounds of this denial will not bear examination . 193 The Intrinsic Nature of Moral Good 171. Good, then, being defined as that which satisfies desire, true good or moral good will be that which satisfies a moral agent, as such ........... 194 172. What in its fulness this true good is we cannot tell ; but the idea that it is is the spring of progress towards it, and we can see in what direction it lies by this progress as so far made . 196 173. The assumptions that it is, that it is present to a divine con- sciousness, that the idea of it has been the spring of progress hitherto and is the condition of further moral effort, . . 197 174. rest in part on future discussions, in part on the conclusions arrived at already, that intellectual and moral activity neces- sarily imply the reproduction in man of an eternal conscious- ness which is object to itself ...... 198 175. As being such reproduction under limitations, man is not merely determined by natural wants, but has the idea of himself asdifferentlyor more completelyrealisedorsatisfied than he is 199 176. Hence comes the search, and the vanity of the search, for satisfaction in mere pleasure or other selfish ends ; hence also the differentia of moral goodness, search for satisfaction in devotion to an end absolutely desirable ..... 199 177. And this implies the union of developed will with developed reason; i.e. the seeking for satisfaction in that which con- tributes to realise a true idea of the end .... 201 178. In this definition a certain precedence is given to reason, because (though it is also the condition of vice), as rightly developed, it has the initiative of ail virtue ; . . . . 202 179. the good actually pursued being in most cases discrepant from, or inadequate to, the idea of true good ; and this idea being the medium through which the object of actual pursuit is changed or developed. At the same time this language must not be taken to' imply an unreal separation of will and reason 203 xxiv ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER II CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MORAL IDEAL A. The Personal Character of the Moral Ideal page 180. If moral goodness then is devotion to the moral end or ideal, and if the idea of this end is a divine principle of improve- ment in man, ......... 206 181. what is its relation to the will and reason of man ? Does it realise itself in individuals, or in a society to which individuals are only means, or In ' Humanity ' ? 207 182. Inanycase in/>«>-so«s(personalitymeaningself-consciousness); for it is only because we cannot reduce this self-objectifying consciousness to anything else that we believe that a divine principle realises itself in man ...... 208 183. But the development of our personality depends on society, and on the other hand is thereby so limited as to seem in- capable of realising the ideal ...... 209 184. Hence we suppose it to be realised in nations, or in the progress of Humanity towards a perfect society. But, while it is true that apart from the nation the individual is an abstraction, it is also tru^ that a na,tion or national spirit is an abstraction unless it exists in persons .... 210 185. Progress of Humanity, again, can mean only progress of personal character to personal character : however we try to explain the imperfection of this progress on the earth, it must be personal ......... 212 186. Whatever be the difficulties attending it, the idea of human progress or development, which, like any idea of development, does not rest ultimately on observation of facts and cannot be destroyed by it, involves necessary presuppositions : . . 213 187. (i) that the capacities gradually realised in time are eternally realised for and in the eternal mind ; 214 188. (2) that the end of the process of development should be a real fulfilment of the capacities presupposed by the process. And if it be objected that our knowledge of these capacities is not such as to give us an idea of the end that would fulfil them, 216 189. we may answer that from our knowledge of them we can say (i) that their development cannot be a mere process to infinity, but must have its end in an eternal state of being ; and (2) that no state of being could be such end, in which the self- conscious personality presupposed by the process was either extinguished or treated as a mere means .... 2x6 190. On the other hand, as society implies persons regarding themselves and others as persons, so also the realisation of human personality means its realisation in a society, . . 217 191. And although this realisation would seem to imply a diflfer- ence of functions in the different members of society, it would imply in all the fulfilment of the idea of humanity, ('. I?, devotion to the perfection of man aig ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxv B. The Formal Character of the Moral Ideal or Law p.nr 192. Thus the idea which the good will seeks to realise is identical in form with the idea of the end as realised in the eternal mind. We have now to see how it becomes the medium through which the latter idea determines the moral development of man . 220 193. It does so by presenting to us an unconditional good, and by laying on us an unconditional law of conduct . . . 221 194. When asked what this good is, we can only answer that it is the good will or the object of the good will ; which again is the will for the unconditional good (§§ 171, 172). Hedonism avoids this circle, but only because its ideal is not a moral ideal 223 195. The circle is inevitable; for in the account of an agent whose development is governed by an ideal of his own perfection the good will must appear both as end and means . . 224 196. This ideal, in a being who has other impulses than those which draw to it, must take the form of a law or categorical imperative : but this again cannot enjoin unconditionally any- thing but obedience to itself ....... 225 197. It does enjoin, however, at least all the particular duties in which progress is made towards the realisation of man ; and it enjoins them unconditionally as against everything except some new application of itself ...... 226 198. The practical value of the idea of good as a criterion will be considered later (Book iv) : the present question is the historical one, how this idea can have defined itself in the formation of particular duties and virtues .... 227 CHAPTER III THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL A. Reason as Source of the Idea of a Common Good 199. The idea of the end or unconditional good is that of the self as realised. And this self is social; i. e. its good includes that of others, who are also conceived as ends in themselves . 229 200. This social interest is a primitive fact, and though it may have been conditioned by, it cannot have been developed from, any animal sympathy in which it is not presupposed . . . 229 201. It implies the consciousness of self and others as persons, and therefore the consciousness of a permanent well-being in which the well-being of others is included . . .231 202. The idea of unconditional good then will express itself in some form of general social requirement, irrespective of likes and dislikes ; and this is what underlies the more developed ideas both of moral and legal right 232 203. In this sense Reason, as necessary to the idea of an absolute and a common. good, is 'the parent of Law,' in the wider sense of law ; 233 204. and must have been present in any primitive state from which our present state has been, in the strict sense, developed ; . 234 xxvi ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 205. for there is no identity between the developed state of man and any state which has not these characteristics. What then are the movements into which development from this germ may be analysed ! ....... 23^ B. The extension of the Area of Common Good 206. In the first place (cf. § 218), this development consists in the extension of the range of persons whose common good is sought. The primitive duty to a narrow circle gradually widens into a duty to man as man ..... 237 207. This duty is felt by the highest minds to be morally as binding as any legal obligation, and cannot be explained as a modification of self-interest 238 208. The humanitarian idea is no unreal extension of the social obligations of man, and must, as it becomes part of recognised morality, greatly further the development of human capa- bilities ; and that not only for the many .... 240 209. Hastened in various ways, and especially through its expression by Stoic philosophers, Roman jurists, and Christian teachers,it isyet the natural outcomeoftheoriginal idea of a common good : 242 210. and is now fixed to a certain extent in law and in social requirement ......... 243 211. If we take its abstract expression in the formula 'suumcuique,' whatdoesthis imply as to the ideals of good and hence of conduc t? 243 212. It Implies a refinement of the sense oi Justice ; i.e. that no one should seek the good, either of himself or of any one else, by means which hinder the good of others, or should measure the good of different persons by diiferent standards . . 244 213. The recognition of this idea by Utilitarianism in the formula, ' Every one to count as one, and no one as more than one,' has been the main source both cf its beneficence and of its unpopularity 246 214. The formula is however inferior to Kant's maxim, 'Treat humanity always as an end ' ; since, strictly interpreted in accordance wilh Hedonistic principles, it could only com- mand equality of treatment in case that equality led to greater total pleasure 247 21-5. This idea of justice, and of a duty to man as man, is at once a priori^ as an intuition of conscience, and a posteriori^ as a result of social progress embodied in institutions . . 249 216. For the extension of the range of duty to the whole of humanity is the work of the same reason which is implied in the most elementary idea of common good, aud the immanent action of which has overcome and utilised the opposition raised to it by selfishness ;.,... 250 217. Reason being the beginning and end of the process, and its action without the individual and within him being only different aspects of the operation of one and the same principle 253 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxvii CHAPTER IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL — CONTINUED C. The Determination of the Idea of Common Good PAGE 218. In the second place, moral progress is not only the widening of the range of persons whose common good is sought, but the gradual determination of the content of the idea of good 254 Pleasure and Common Good 219. Owing to the presence of reason in man, the self is dis- tinguished from particular desires, and their satisfaction is accompanied or followed by the idea of something that would give full and lasting satisfaction 255 220. And this idea of a good on the whole, by relation to which the value of a particular satisfaction is estimated, is involved in all moral judgment 256 221. It is supposed, on the ground that all desire is for pleasure, to be the idea of a greatest sum of pleasures. But if all desire is for pleasure, it rather follows that a sum of plea- sures cannot be desired, since it is not a pleasure and can only be conceived, not felt or imagined :..... 257 222. so that, if a sum of pleasures is, as a matter of fact, desired, this fact only shows that there is in man a desire wholly difiFerent from the desire for pleasure, vis. a desire for the satisfaction of a permanent self 259 223. But can the good which satisfies the self be a sum of pleasures ? No ; for tlie good is conceived as at least relatively permanent 260 224. If, nevertheless, many persons aCSrm that their idea of this good is the idea of a sum of pleasures, the reason is that the desire for objects which will yield satisfaction is misinter- preted as desire for pleasure, whence the conclusion is drawn that good on the whole must be a number of pleasures . 261 225. And even when the misinterpretation is rejected and a dis- interested desire for the good of others is asserted, this is supposed to be a desire for their pleasure .... 263 226. Such a view however requires us to suppose two co-ordinate principles of moral action and judgment, viz. Reasonable Self-l,ove ^nd Benevolence ; and this result can be avoided only by reducing Benevolence to Self-Love, or by showing that the object of Self-Love is not a sum of pleasures . . 263 227. That the second alternative is the truth is seen when we consider that a sum of pleasures cannot be enjoyed, and that each successive enjoyment of pleasure brings us no nearer to the good pursued ......... 264 228. And, though it is true that a man might think of his good or happiness (not indeed as a sum of pleasures, but) as a con- tinuous enjoyable existence, still what men really do pursue is not this, but a well-being consisting in the attainment of desired objects ......... 266 xxviii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 229. Such an ideal and permanent object, and probably the most generally prevalent one, is the welfare of a family : and the desire for this is absolutely different from a desire for pleasure. 268 230. Whether or no the true good was at first identified with family well-being, it must have had the two characteristics of inspiring an interest and of being permanent like the self it has to satisfy 269 231. And the well-being of a family, which is identified by a man with his own well-being and outlasts his life, has these charac- teristics . . . , 270 232. Thus the true good is, and in its earliest form was, a social good, in the idea of which a man does not distinguish his own good from that of others . . . . . . .271 233. Even if it were conceived as a succession of pleasures, desire for it would still not be reducible to desire for an imagined pleasure (§ 222) ; and, on the other hand, the Self-Love and Benevolence which would, on this supposition, each be directed to pleasures, would remain co-ordinate, not identical. 273 234. But in reality the good which a man seeks for himself is not a succession of pleasures, but objects which, when realised, are permanent contributions to a social good which tfius satisfies the permanent self ,....., 274 235. And this obviously involves the permanent good of others; so that, though a man may also seek his own pleasure, or, again, their pleasure, his idea of the true good is not an idea of pleasure, and in it there is no distinction of self and others . 275 236. The happiness he seeks for them is the same as that he seeks for himself, viz. the satisfaction of an interest in objects . 277 237. If he nevertheless supposed that he soOght pleasures for others, this mistake, though probably of no great practical moment, would still be a mistake 278 238. And this would be seen if the questions were considered, (i) whether he values the pleasures he supposes himself to seek for others by their quantity alone, and (2) whether what he seeks for others is not some permanent good such as is not to be found in experiences of pleasure 279 239. This permanent good may be conceived in very different forms according to circumstances, but in any of its forms it consists not in pleasures, but in a realisation of a good common to self and others 280 Virtue as the Common Good 240. There is a common basis in the lowest form of interest in the continued ' being ' of the family, and in the highest form of interest in social ' well-being ' ; and the latter developes out of the former 281 241. For the former already involves the idea of a good which consists in the development of the capacities of persons ; and this idea, acting unconsciously, gradually creates institutions and modes of life, reflection upon which shows what these capacities really are 283 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxix PAGE 242. In the early stages of this progress the social good may appear to be conceived merely as material well-being ; but reflection would show that this was not its whole content, and that the interest in it was really an interest in persons capable of a like interest, i. e. an interest in virtue ...... 284 243. At some time such reflection has arisen, and with it a con- scious interest in virtue ; as is shown by the distinction made in the earliest literature between the possession of external goods and merit, or goods of the soul ...... 286 244. The progress from this beginning to the conviction that the only true good is to be good is complementary to the process described above (§§ 206-217) j ^o"" "is only good that is really common is the good wUl ....... 287 245. And if the idea of the community of good for all men has even now little influence, the reason is that we identify the good too little with good character and too much with good things . 288 CHAPTER V THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL— CONTINUED JP. The Greek and the Modern Conceptions of Virtue 246. Thus progress with regard to the standard and practice of virtue means the gradual recognition that the true end consists not in external goods, nor even in the virtues as means to these, but in the virtues as ends in themselves : . . . 290 247. the recognition, that is, that the true end is the good will, which is to be conceived not merely as determined by the idea of moral law, but as active in the various endeavours to promote human development ...... 291 248. Out of the earUest conception of virtue as valour in the struggle for common good grows the more complete Greek idea of it as including any eminent faculty, but the estimation of it has always been governed by an interest in man himself, not in what happens to him ........ 293 249. At a certain stage of reflection arises an effort to discover a unity in the virtues and the various aspects of the good ; and this effort, as is clear in the case of Socrates and his successors (to whom we owe our chief moral categories), has a great practical importance ........ 294 250. By such reflection the reason which had been active in social development became aware of its achievement, and so pro- duced not merely an ethical theory but a higher order of virtue 296 251. For the idea of virtue as one and conscious is equivalent to the idea of the good will or of purity of heart ; . . .297 252. and this is what Plato and Aristotle require, when they insist that the condition and unity ofall viHue lie in the conscious direction of the will to the human good .... 297 253. That good was to them not pleasure but the exercise of the virtues themselves. In this respect their definition of the good is final ; artd if they could only imperfectly define the content of the idea, that defect is due mainly to the nature of morality itself 299 XXX ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 254. The good was defined, to the extent then possible, by the actual pursuit of it in the recognised virtues : , . . 3°' 255. and the philosophers still further defined it, and also raised and purified the idea of it, by making men realise that these virtues wrere different expressions of one principle . • 3°^ 256. Thus we inherit from the Greek philosophers both the principle of morality and the general articulation of that principle 3°3 257. Only our idea of the end has become fuller, because the end is more fully realised ; and accordingly the standards of virtue, though identical in principle, are more comprehensive in their demands. This will appear if we examine the ideas of Fortitude and Temperance ....... 303 258. Fortitude seems at first sight to have changed its character since Aristotle's time. For, with the recognition of human capacities in all and not merely in a few, .... 304 259. Fortitude has come to involve, not merely the self-devotion of the citizen-soldier to his state, but self-devotion to the service of others, even of those whom the Greeks would have re- garded as ignoble and useless 306 260. But the principle of unlimited endurance for the highest social cause known remains the same, and the motive is neither more nor less pure ......... 307 261. Temperance and Self-denial were limited by Aristotle to the pleasures of animal appetite 308 262. But the principle on which these pleasures were to be con- trolled or renounced was the same as in our wider virtue of self-denial; even when most ascetically conceived . . 309 263. The motive of temperance was interest in something wider and higher than these pleasures, this higher object being to the Greek his state 310 264. To us also the higher object is the state or some other asso- ciation ; but the requirements of this virtue, as of fortitude, have become much more various and comprehensive . .311 265. Accordingly, if we dismiss, as mistaken, the idea that the pleasures in question ought to be rejected because they are not distinctively human, ...,,., 313 266. we find (i) that the really tenable principles used by Aristotle did not yield a standard adequate to the modern ideal of sexual morality. But the fault lay not in these principles, which are the only true ones, but in the social conditions of the time ; . 315 267. just as a further improvement now must depend mainly on a further improvement in social conditions, and especially in the position of women 316 268. Further, (2) the range of the actions which issue from tem- perance, as conceived by Aristotle, is far more limited than that of the actions in which self-denial, as now conceived, is shown , . . . 317 269. For in the highest formsof self-denial the pleasures renounced are not those of animal appetite, but the higher pleasures ; , 318 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxi PAGE 270. the call for such sacrifice arising from that enfranchisement of all men which implies a claim of all upon each, necessarily unrecognised by Aristotle 320 271. Thus, here again, progress is due to the greater comprehen- siveness of the idea of social good ; and, while the good will is the same in the Greek and the modern ideals, it demands now a new and larger self-denial . . . . . .321 272. It may be objected that this change is not a progress but a retrogression, because it involves a larger renunciation of pleasures not mischievous but valuable ..... 322 273. But this renunciation, though not in itself desirable, does, when considered in its reality and in relation to society as a whole, imply a fuller realisation of human nature . . 323 274. For the realisation described in the Greek ideal, and appar- ently so much fuller than any attainable by the self-denying Christian, was possible only to a few, and to them only through the exclusion of others :..,,.. 324 275. wher.eas Ijie end sought by the modem ideal character is sought for all, and the activities called out by the pursuit of it are correspondingly wider ; and of this advance the larger renunciation of pleasures seems to be a condition . . 325 276. Further, while the more developed state of man certainly implies a corresponding pleasure, it is doubtful whether it implies a greater amqunt of pleasure than the less developed, and whether even the perfection of man may not involve a large renunciation of possible pleasure .... 326 277. In any case it can hardly be held that the self-denying man obtains, because he follows his strongest desires, more plea- sure than he forgoes ; nor is it at all clear even that his self-denial increases the aggregate of human pleasures . 327 278. So that the superiority must be claimed for the modern ideal, not on Hedonistic grounds, but on those given in §§ 273-275 329 279. To sum up : the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of virtue is final in so far as it defines the good as goodness ; but as a concrete ideal it was conditioned by the moral progress then achieved, and is therefore necessarily inadequate ; , . 329 280. since the idea of human brotherhood leads to social require- ments then unrecognised 331 281. On the other hand, the social development to which this idea is due was in part the result of the Greek conception of the good as something in essence universal : for no good except goodness is really this 332 282. It is an illusion to suppose that the desires of difierent men for pleasure would, if left to themselves, produce the greatest possible general pleasure or a social union .... 333 283. On the contrary, interest in the common good, in some of its various forms, is necessary to produce that good, and to ijeutrglise or render useful other desires and interests . , 335 xxxii ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE 284. Now the good, as defined by the Greek philosophers, was in principle a universal good (though they did not so imagine it), and thus their work prepared the way for the idea of human brotherhood 336 285. For it provided the intellectual medium through which men, influenced by Christian enthusiasm and by the results of Roman conquest, could definitely conceive goodness as realised in the members of a universal society . . . 337 286. Ideal virtue, then, being defined as self-devoted activity to the perfection of man, this perfection itself may be defined as a life of such activity on the part of all persons . . 339 287. Nor is the objection valid that self-devotion, as implying an impeded activity, cannot be an element in ultimate good, but must belong only to the effort to attain that good . . 340 288. For though the perfection of man would mean such a realis- ation of human possibilities as we cannot imagine, it must still find its principle in the same devoted will which is manifested in all effort to attain it ..... 341 289. It may however be objected, (i) that our definition of virtue does not cover artistic and scientific excellence, and there- fore leaves their value unexplained ; 343 290. (2) that it does not help us to decide what ought to be done, and whether we are doing it. With this second objection we have now to deal ........ 343 BOOK IV. The Application of Moral Philosophy to the Guidance of Conduct CHAPTER I THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF THE MORAL IDEAL 291. The question, Ought an action to be done? may refer (i) to its effects, (a) to its motive. The latter question is the wider, as it includes the former ....... 346 292. The answers to either question must be regulated by one and the same principle. According to Utilitarianism, relation to pleasure must be the standard for both effects and motive ; but the goodness of the act depends on the effects alone . . 347 293. According to our theory, the act cannot be in the full sense good, unless the motive is good : but we may estimate it apart from the motive, and we must do so when (as is commonly the case with the acts erf others) the motive is unknown to us . 348 294. Thus this theory differs from Utilitarianism in holding (i) that the effect to be considered is contribution not to pleasure but to the perfection of man, (a) that this effect by itself cannot make the act in the full sense good . . . 350 295. Indeed, but for our imperfect knowledge, we should see that in all cases the character of the effects really represents accurately that of the motive ...... 3=3 ANALYTICAL TABLE OF CONTENTS xxxiii PAGE 296. But since for practical purposes enquiry into motive is re- stricted to acts of our own, whether past- or future, the ques- tion is, Can such enquiry give a truer knowledge of what we ought to do, or a better disposition to do it ? . . . . 354 ^_297. The habit of such enquiry is cgnscientiousness : and, admitting that self-devotion need not imply this habit, and that, in a sense, a man may be ' over-conscientious,' . . . . 355 298. it remains true that the comparison of our actions with an ideal of goodness is the spring of moral progress, social as well as individual 356 299. For there is a real identity between such self-scrutiny as to motives, and the reformer's comparison of what is actual with a social ideal ; the social ideal of the reformer being at the same time the idea of himself as promoting it . . . 357 300. But, it may be said, the effect in this case is a new kind of action, whereas the acts of the conscientious man probably do not differ outwardly from those of the ordinary dutiful citizen . 359 301. The latter statement is however not entirely true : for con- Ta to knowledge, and other objects, described as ra lUTa^v, which stand in a corresponding relation to mere opinion. Of this fallacy, as of most others that are to be found in him, Plato himself supplies the correction, but much of our language about the real implies that we are ourselves its victims. If there is a valid opposition between the work of the mind and something else which is not the CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 27 work of the mind, the one must still be just as real as the other. Of two alternatives, one. Either ' the work of the mind' is a name for nothing, expressing a mere privation or indeterminateness, a mere absence of qualities — in which case nothing is conveyed by the proposition which opposes the real or anything else to it : or, on the other hand, if it has qualities and relations of its own, then it is just as real as anything else. Through not understanding the relations which determine the one kind of object — that ascribed to the work of the mind — as distinct from those which deter- mine the other — that ascribed to some other agency — we may confuse the two kinds of object. We may take what is really of the one kind to be really of the other. But this is not a confusion of the real with the unreal. The very confusion itself, the mistake of supposing what is related in one way to be related in another, has its own reality. It has its history, its place in the development of a man's mind, its causes and effects ; and, as so determined, it is as real as anything else. 23. It is thus in vain that we seek to define the real by finding, either in the work of the mind or elsewhere, an unreal to which it may be opposed. Is there, then, no meaning in an opposition which is constantly on our tongues ? Undoubtedly that which any event seems to us to be may be — nay always is — more or less different from what it really is. The relations by which we judge it to be determined are not, or at any rate fall short of, those by which it is really determined. But this is a distinction between one particular reality and another; not between a real, as such or as a whole, and an unreal, as such or as a whole. The illusive appearance, as opposed to the reality, of any event is what that event really is not ; but at the same time it really is something. It is real, not indeed with the particular reality which the subject of the illusion ascribes to it, but with a reality which a superior intelligence might understand. The relations by which, in a false belief as to a matter of fact, we suppose the event to be determined, 28 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I are not non-existent. They are really objects of a con- ceiving consciousness. As arising out of the action of such a consciousness, as constituents of a world which it presents to itself, they are no less real than are the actual conditions of the event which is thought to be, but is not really, deter- mined by them. It is when we reflect on the judgments in which we are perpetually deciding that what has previously been taken to be the reality of a particular event is a mere appearance, i.e., not the reality of that particular event — or rather when we reflect on the language in which those judgments have been expressed — that we come to speak of the real, as an abstract universal, in contrast with another abstract universal, the unreal. Thus for a contrast which is in truth a contrast between two acts of judgment — the act of judging an event to be determined by certain relations which, according to the order of the universe, do determine it, and that of judging it to be determined by relations other than these — we substitute another, which exists merely in words, but to which we fancy that we give a meaning by identifying the unreal with the work of the mind, as opposed to a real which has some other origin, we cannot say what. 24. What we have so far sought to show has been (i), generally, that an attempt to define the real by distinction from anything else is necessarily futile — the result of a false abstraction from the distinction between the real nature of one event or object and that of another — and (2), specially, that the antithesis between the real and the work of the mind is invalid, not because the real is the work of the mind — whether it is so or not we have yet to enquire — but because the work of the mind is real. The ' mere idea * of a hundred thalers, to use the familiar instance, is no doubt quite different from the possession of them, not because it is unreal, but because the relations which form the real nature of the idea are different from those which form the real nature of the possession. So much it was necessary to show, in order that the enquiry, whether it is due to 'understanding' not merely CH.i] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 29 that we are able to conceive a nature but that there is such a thing as nature at all, might not be prejudiced by a precon- ception which would make it seem equivalent to an enquiry whether the real could be the work of the unreal. If now from the futile question, What is the real ? which we can only answer by saying that the real is everything, we pass to one more hopeful — How do we decide whether any particular event or object is really what it seems to be, or whether our belief about it is true ? — the answer must be that we do so by testing the unalterableness of the qualities which we ascribe to it, or which form its apparent nature. A certain hill appears to-day to be near : yesterday under different con- ditions of atmosphere it appeared to be remote. But the real nature of the event which took place in yesterday's ap- pearance cannot, we judge, thus change. What it was really, it was unalterably. There may have been a change from that appearance to another, but not a change of or in whatever was the reality of the appearance. The event of yesterday's appearance, then, must have been determined by conditions other than those which determine to-day's. But if both appearances depended solely on the position of the hill, they would be determined by the same conditions. Therefore we must have been wrong in believing the hill to be so remote as we believed it to be yesterday, or in believing it to be so near as we believed it to be to-day, or in both beliefs : wrong in respect of the relation which we supposed to exist between the several appearances and the distance of the hill. 25. With sufficient time and command of detail it would not be difficult to show how the conviction here illustrated, that whatever anything is really it is unalterably, regulates equally our most primitive and our most developed judgments of reality — the every-day supposition of there being a multitude of separate things which remain the same in themselves while their appearances to us alter, and the scientific quest for uniformity or unalterableness in a law of universal change. Through a slight confusion of thought and expression, this conviction may issue either in the sensational atomism of 30 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I Locke or in the material atomism of popular science. A sen- sation is the unalterable effect of its conditions, whatever those conditions may be. It is unalterably related to other sensations. Our opinion about its conditions or relations may vary, but not the conditions or relations themselves, or the sensation determined by them. Hence when a man looks into his breast, as Locke bids him do, simple feelings — feelings apart from intellectual interpretations and combina- tions of them — seem alone unalterable in contrast with our judgments about them. In truth the unalterableness be- longs not to any simple feeling, for our feelings change every moment upon us, but, as we have said, to the relation be- tween it and its conditions or between it and other feelings ; and such a relation is neither itself a feeling nor represented in our consciousness by a feeling. This distinction, how- ever, is overlooked. The unalterableness of the fact that a certain feeling is felt under certain conditions, is ascribed to the simple feeling, or simple idea, as such : and unalterable- ness being the test by which we ascertain whether what we have believed to be the nature of any event is really so or not, the simple feeling, which by itself cannot properly be said to be really anything, comes to be regarded either as alone real, according to the ideal form of sensationalism, or as alone representing an external reality, according to the materialistic form of the same doctrine. On the other hand, reflection upon the ' perpetual flux ' of sensation suggests the view that it is not real in the same sense as its material conditions. The old dictum ascribed to DemOCritUS — voixw yKvKV koI vofia mKpov, vofito depfjiov, v6na> ijruxpov, vofia xp°''h' *"5 ^^ aTojia Koi Ktvov^ — expresses a way of thinking into which we often fall. The reality which in truth lies in the relations, according to one law or system of relation, between feelings and their material conditions — not in the material conditions abstracted from the feelings any more than in the feelings abstracted from their material ' Sweet, bitter, hot, cold, colour, are by convention ; only atoms end void are real. CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 31 conditions — we are apt to ascribe exclusively to the latter. We think obscurely of matter and motion as real in some way in which nothing else is. Nor do we stop here. The demand for unalterableness in what we believe to be real, when once we are off the right track of seeking it in a uniform law of change, leads us to suppose that the ' reality of things ' is only reached when we have penetrated to atoms which in all changes of their motion and distribution remain intrinsically the same. 26. Let us consider now how we stand. We have rejected the question, What is or constitutes the real ? as intrinsically unmeaning, because it could only be answered by a distinc- tion which would imply that there was something unreal. The question arises, we have seen, out of an abstraction from our constant enquiry into the real nature of this or that par- ticular appearance or event — an enquiry in which we always seek for an unchanging relation between the appearance and its conditions, or again for an unchanging relation between these and certain other conditions. The complete deter- mination of an event it may be impossible for our intelligence to arrive at. There may always remain unascertained con- ditions which may render the relation between an appearance and such conditions of it as we know, liable to change. But that there is an unalterable order of relations, if we could only find it out, is the presupposition of all our enquiry into the real nature of appearances ; and such unalterableness implies their inclusion in one system which leaves nothing outside itself. Are we then entitled to ask — and if so, are we able to answer — the further question, What is implied in there being such a single, all-inclusive, system of relations ? or, What is the condition of its possibility ? If this question can be answered, the condition ascertained will be the condition of there being a nature and of anything being real, in the only intelligible sense that we can attach to the words ' nature ' and ' real.' It would no doubt still be open to the sceptic, should this result be attained, to suggest that 32 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I the validity of our conclusion, upon our own showing, depends upon there really being such an order of nature as our quest of knowledge supposes there to be, which remains unproven. But as the sceptic, in order to give his language a meaning, must necessarily make the same supposition — as he can give no meaning to reality but the one explained — his suggestion that there really may not be such an order of nature is one that conveys nothing at all. 27. First, then, is there any meaning in the question just put ? Having set aside as unmeaning the question, What is the real ? can we be entitled to ask, What is implied in there being a nature of things ? If the former question would have been only answerable on the self-contradictory supposition of there really being something other than the real from which it could be distinguished, will not the latter in like manner be only answerable on the equally impossible supposition of there being something outside the nature of things, outside the one all-inclusive system of relations, by reference to which this nature or system can be explained ? To this we reply that the question stated is or is not one that can be fitly asked, according as the conception of nature, of a single all-inclusive system of relations, is or is not one that can stand alone, is or is not one that requires something else to render it intelligible. To suppose that this ' something else,' if nature were found unthinkable without it, is related to those conditions, of which the relation to each other forms the system of nature, in the same way in which these are related to each other, would no doubt be in contradiction with our account of this system as one and all-inclusive. It could not therefore be held to be related to them as, for instance, an invariable antecedent to an invariable sequent, or as one body to another outside it. But there would be no contradiction in admitting a principle which renders all relations possible, and is itself determined by none of them, if, on considera- tion of what is needed to constitute a system of relations, we found such a principle to be requisite. CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 33 28. This, then, is the consideration which we have now to undertake. Relation is to us such a familiar fact that we are apt to forget that it involves all the mystery, if it be a mystery, of the existence of many in one. Whether we say that a related thing is one in itself, manifold in respect of its relations, or that there is one relation between mani- fold things, e.g., the relation of mutual attraction between bodies — and one expression or the other we must employ in stating the simplest facts — we are equally affirming the unity of the manifold. Abstract the many relations from the one thing, and there is nothing. They, being many, determine or constitute its' definite unity. It is not the case that it iirst exists in its unity, and then is brought into various relations. Without the relations it would not exist at all. In like manner the one relation is a unity of the many things. They, in their manifold being, make the one relation. If these relations really exist, there is a real unity of the mani- fold, a real multiplicity of that which is one. But a plurality of things cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations. It is true, as we have said, that the single things are nothing except as determined by relations which are the negation of their singleness, but they do not therefore cease to be single things. Their common being is not something into which their several existences disappear. On the contrary, if they did not survive in their singleness, there could be no relation between them — nothing but a blank featureless identity. There must, then, be something other than the manifold things themselves, which combines them without effacing their severalty. 29. With such a combining agency we are familiar as our intelligence. It is through it that the sensation of the present moment takes a character from comparison with the sensation of a moment ago, and that the occurrence, consisting in the transition from one to the other, is presented to us. It is essential to the comparison and to the character which the sensations acquire from the comparison, essential, too, to D 34 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I their forming an observable event or succession, that one should not be fused with the other, that the distinct being of each should be maintained. On the other hand, in the relation to which their distinctness is thus necessary they are at the same time united. But if it were not for the action of something which is not either of them or both together, there would be no alternative between their separateness and their fusion. One might give place to the other, or both together might be combined into a third ; but a unity in which their distinctness is preserved could not be constituted without the relating act of an intelligence which does not blend with either. The above is an instance of relation between sensations which, as brought into relation by intelligence, become sen- sible objects or events. But the same or an analogous action is necessary to account for any relation whatever — for a relation between material atoms as much as any other. Either then we must deny the reality of relations altogether and treat them as fictions of our combining intelligence j or we must hold that, being the product of our combining intelligence, they are yet ' empirically real ' on the ground that our intelligence is a factor in the real of experience ; or if we suppose them to be real otherwise than merely as for us, otherwise than in the 'cosmos of our experience,' we must recognise as the condition of this reality the action of some unifying principle analogous to that of our understanding. 30. As we have seen, the first of these alternative views, if consistently carried out, will not allow us to regard anything as real of which anything can be said, since all predication is founded on relation of some kind. It therefore naturally leads to the second. All that we in fact count real turns out to be determined by relations. Feeling may be the revela- tion or the test of the real, but it must be feeling in certain relations, or it neither reveals nor tests anything. Thus we are obliged to recognise a reality, at least of that kind which in our every-day knowledge and action we distinguish from illusion, in what is yet the work of the mind, or at any rate CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 35 must be held to be so until relations can be accounted for without a relating act or that act referred to something else than the mind. Hence with those who adhere to the oppo- sition between the real and the work of the mind, and who at the same time cannot ignore the work of the mind in the constitution of relations, there arises a distinction between reality in some absolute sense — the reality of 'things-in-them- selves,' which are supposed to be wholly exempt from any qualification through relating acts of the mind, but of which, for that reason, nothing can be known or said — and the 'em- pirical ' reality of that which we distinguish from illusion, as standing in definite relations to the universe of our experience. 31. This distinction governs the theory of Kant. It is more easy to point out the embarrassments and inconsis- tencies into which it leads him, than to get rid of the dis- tinction itself. Ordinary criticism of Kant, indeed, has not taken much heed of the distinction or of its perplexing results. It has been too busy in refuting his doctrine that ' laws of nature ' are derived from understanding, to enquire closely into his view of the relation between nature, in his sense of the term, and 'things-in-themselves.' It has been gaining apparent triumphs, due to a misunderstanding of the question at issue, over the strongest part of his system, while it has left the weakest unassailed. There have been abun- dant proofs of what was not in dispute, that our knowledge of laws of nature is the result of experience ; but the question whether phenomena could be so related as to constitute the nature which is the object of our experience without the unifying action of understanding is seldom even touched. Given an experience of phenomena related to each other in one system — so related that, whatever an object is really, or according to the fulness of its relations, it is unalterably — it is easy to show that our knowledge of laws of nature is derived from it. Such experience in its most elementary form is already implicitly a knowledge that there are laws of nature, and only needs to be reflected on in order to become so explicitly. When it has become so explicitly, the develop - o 3 36 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I ment of the experience — through cognisance of relations of which there has previously been no experience, or of which the experience has not been reflected on— becomes a grow- ing knowledge of what the laws of nature in particular are. But the derivation of knowledge from an experience of unalterably related phenomena is its derivation from objects unalterably related in consciousness. If the relation of the objects were not a relation of them in consciousness, there would be no experience of it. The question then arises how a succession of feelings becomes such a relation of objects in consciousness. If a relation of objects existed or could be known to exist otherwise than for consciousness, this would not help to account for what has to be accounted for, which is wholly a process of consciousness. The feelings which succeed each other are no doubt due to certain related con- ditions, which are not feelings. But granting forthe moment that these conditions and their relation exist independently of consciousness, in accounting for a multitude of feelings they do not account for the experience of related objects. Of two objects which form the terms of a relation one cannot exist as so related without the other, and therefore cannot exist before or after the other. For this reason the objects between which a relation subsists, even a relation of succession, are, just so far as related, not successive. In other words, a succession always implies something else than the terms of the succession, and that a 'something else' which can simultaneously present to itself objects as existing not simul- taneously but one before the other. 32. Thus, in order that successive feelings may be related objects of experience, even objects related in the way of succession, there must be in consciousness an agent which distinguishes itself from the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally present in their succession. And so far from this agent being reducible to, or derivable from, a succession of feelings, it is the condition of there being such a succession ; the condition of the existence of that relation between feelings, as also of those other relations CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 37 which are not indeed relations between feelings, but which, if they are matter of experience, must have their being in consciousness. If there is such a thing as a connected experience of related objects, there must be operative in consciousness a unifying principle, which not only presents related objects to itself, but at once renders them objects and unites them in relation to each other by this act of presentation ; and which is single throughout the experience. The unity of this principle must be correlative to the unity of the experience. If all possible experience of related objects — the experience of a thousand years ago and the experience of to-day, the experience which I have here and that which I might have in any other region of space — forms a single system ; if there can be no such thing as an experi- ence of unrelated objects ; then there must be a correspond- ing singleness in that principle of consciousness which forms the bond of relation between the objects. 33. It is such a principle that Kant speaks of sometimes as the ' synthetic unity of apperception,' sometimes simply as ' understanding.' For the reasons stated there seems no way of escape from the admission that it is, as he says, ' the basis of the necessary regularity of all phenomena in an experience ' : ' the basis, that is to say, not merely of our knowledge of uniform relations between phenomena, but of there being those uniform relations. The source of the relations, and the source of our knowledge of them, is one and the same. The question, how it is that the order of nature answers to our conception of it — or, as it is some- times put, the question, whether nature really has, or, having, will continue to have, the uniformity which belongs to it in our conception — is answered by recognition of the fact that o ur conception of an order of nature, and the 1 relations which form that order, have a commo n spiritual^ squrce^__ TSenuniformity'oT nature does not mean that its constituents are everywhere the same, but that they are • Kant's Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, II. p. 114; ed. Hartenstein (1867), III. p. 585- 38 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I everywhere related ; not that ' the thing which has been is that which shall be,' but that whatever occurs is determined by relation to all that has occurred, and contributes to determine all that will occur. If nature means the system of objects of possible experience, such uniformity neces- sarily arises in it from the action of the same principle which is implied in there being any relation between the objects of experience at all. A relation not related to all other relations of which there can be experience, is an impossibility. It cannot exist except as constituted by the unifying subject of all experienced relations, and this con- dition of its possibility implies its connexion with all other relations that are, or come to be, so constituted. Every real relation, therefore, that is also knowable, is a necessary or ' objective ' or unalterable relation. It is a fact of which the existence is due to the action of that single subject of experience which is equally, and in the same way, the condition of all facts that can be experienced ; a fact which thus, through that subject, stands in definite and unchange- able connexion with the universe of those facts, at once determining and determined by them. 34. The result of this view is to overcome the separation, which in our ordinary thinking we assume, between the faculty or capacity or subjective process of experience on the one side and the facts experienced on the other. In first reflecting on our knowledge of a world, we always regard the facts known as existing quite independently of the activity by means of which they are known. Since it is obvious that the facts of the world do not come into existence when this or that person becomes acquainted with them, so long as we conceive of no intellectual action but that which this or that person exercises, we necessarily regard the existence or occur- rence of the facts as independent of intellectual action. Hence arises the antithesis between the known or knowable world and the subject capable of knowing it, as between two existences independent of each other, or of which the former is at any rate independent of the latter. The mind is CH. l] THE SPIRITUALPRINCIPLE IN NATURE 39 supposed to derive its materials from, and to act only in response to, the action of the world upon it ; but the rela- tions which it establishes between the materials, so derived, in its processes of distinction and comparison, of conception, judgment, and discourse, are supposed to be quite different, and to have a diiferent source, from the relations between things or matters of fact in the world known. Upon further reflection, however, the untenableness of this view becomes apparent. It renders knowledge, as of fact or reality, inex- plicable. It leaves us without an answer to the question, how the order of relations, which the mind sets up, comes to reproduce those relations of the material world which are assumed to be of a wholly different origin and nature. Nor, as we pursue the analysis of the operations involved in the simplest perception of fact, are we able to detect any residuary phenomenon amounting to a fact at all, that can be held to be given independently of a combining and relating activity, which, if the antithesis between the work of the mind and the work of things be accepted, must be ascribed to the former. 35. The necessity, therefore, of getting rid of the antithesis in question forces itself upon us : and it is natural that the way of doing so, which at first sight most commends itself to us, should consist in treating the mind and its work as a secondary result of what had previously been opposed to it as operations of nature. The weakness of such a method is twofold. In the first place there is the objection upon which we have already dwelt and which may be put summarily thus : that ' nature ' is a process of change, and that the derivation of a consciousness of change from such a process is impossible. Secondly, such an explanation of the work of the mind, if nothing is known of it otherwise, is an explanation of it by the inexplicable. It is taking nature for granted, and at the same time treating that as a result of nature which is neces- sary to explain the possibility of there being such a thing as nature. For nature, as a process of continuous change, implies something which is other than the changes and to 40 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I which they aire relative. As a system of related elements it implies a unity, through relation to which the elements are related to each other. But with the reduction of thought or spirit or self-consciousness to a result of nature, if such reduction were possible, we should be eliminating the only agent that we know as maintaining an identity with itself throughout a series of changes, or as a principle that can unite a manifold without cancelling its multiplicity. In so explaining spirit we should be rendering the basis of our explanation itself inexplicable. 36. From the Kantian point of view, the dualism of nature and knowledge is disposed of in a different way. They are not identified but treated as forming an indivisible whole, which results from the activity of a single principle. It is not that first there is nature, and that then there comes to be an experience and knowledge of it. Intelligence, experi- ence, knowledge, are no more a result of nature than nature of them. If it is true that there would be no intelligence without nature, it is equally true that there would be no nature without intelligence. Nature is the system of related appearances, and related appearances are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence. They are not indeed the same as intelligence ; it is not reducible to them nor they to it, any more than one of us is reducible to the series of his actions or that series to him ; but without it they would not be, nor except in the activity which constitutes them has it any real existence. Does this then imply the absurdity that nature comes into existence in the process by which this person or that begins to think ? Not at all, unless it is neces- sary to suppose that intelligence first comes into existence when this person or that begins to understand — a supposi- tion not only not necessary, but which, on examination, will be found to involve impossibilities analogous to those which prevent us from supposing that nature so comes into existence. The difference between what may be called broadly the Kantian view and the ordinary view is this, that whereas, according to the latter, it is a world in which thought is no CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 41 necessary factor that is prior to, and independent of, the process by which this or that individual becomes acquainted with it, according to the former it is a world already deter- mined by thought, and existing only in relation to thought, that is thus prior to, and conditions, our individual acquain- tance with it. The growth of knowledge on our part is re- garded not as a process in which facts or objects, in them- selves unrelated to thought, by some inexplicable means gradually produce intelligible counterparts of themselves in thought. The true account of it is held to be that the concrete whole, which may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts' of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence, partially and gradually reproduces itself in us, communicating piece-meal, but in inseparable correlation, understanding and the facts understood, experience and the experienced world. 37. There are difficulties enough, no doubt, in the way of accepting such a form of ' idealism,' but they need not be aggravated by misunderstanding. It is simply misunder- stood if it is taken to imply either the reduction of facts to feelings— impressions and ideas, in Hume's terminology — or the obliteration of the distinction between illusion and reality. The reduction of facts to relations is the very reverse of their reduction to feelings. No feeling, as such or as felt, is a relation. We can only suppose it to.be so through confusion between it and its conditions, or between it and that fact of its occurrence which is no doubt related to other facts, but, as so related, is not felt. Even a relation between feelings is not itself a feehng or felt. A feeling can only be felt as successive to another feeling, but the terms of a relation, as we have seen, even though the relation be one of succession, do not succeed one another. In order to constitute the relation they must be present together ; so that, to constitute a relation between feelings, there must be something other than the feelings for which they are equally present. The relation between the feelings is not felt, because 42 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I it is only for something that distinguishes itself from the feelings that it can subsist. It is our cognisance of the successiveness or transitoriness of feelings that makes us object intuitively to any idealism which is understood to imply an identification of the realities of the world with the feelings of men. Facts, we are sure, are in some way per- manent. They are not 'like the bubble on the fountain,' a moment here, then ' gone, and for ever.' But if they were feelings as we feel them, they would be so. They would not be ' stubborn things ; ' for as each was felt it would be done with. They would not form a world to which we have to adapt ourselves ; for in order to make a world they must coexist, which feelings, as we feel them, do not. But the idealism which interprets facts as relations, and can only understand relations as constituted by a single spiritual principle, is chargeable with no such outrage on common- sense. On the contrary, its very basis is the consciousness of objectivity. Its whole aim is to articulate coherently the conviction of there being a world of abiding realities other than, and determining, the endless flow of our feelings. The source of its differences from ordinary realism lies in its being less easily satisfied in its analysis of what the existence of such a world implies. The mere statement that facts are not feelings, that things are not ideas, that we can neither feel nor think except contingently upon certain functions of matter and motion being fulfilled, does not help us to under- stand what facts and things, what matter and motion, are. It does not enable us, when we seek to understand these expressions, to give them any meaning except such as is de- rived from experience, and, if from experience, then from relations that have their being only for an intelligent con- sciousness. 38. So far we have been following the lead of Kant in enquiring what is necessary to constitute, what is implied in there being, a world of experience — an objective world, if by that is meant a world of ascertainable laws, as distin- CH. THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 43 guished from a world of unknowable ' things-in-themselves.' We have followed him also, as we believe every one must who has once faced the question, in maintaining that a single active self-conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances to consciousness, can be related to each other in A single universe. This is the irrefragable truth involved in the pro- position that 'the understanding makes nature.' But so soon as we have been brought to the acceptance of that proposition, Kant's leading fails us. We might be forward, from the work thus assigned to understanding in the con- stitution of nature, to infer something as to the spirituality of the real world. But from any such irjference Kant would at once withhold us. He would not only remind us that the work assigned to understanding is a work merely among and upon phenomena ; that the nature which it constitutes is merely a unity in the relations of phenomena ; and that any conclusion we arrive at in regard to ' nature ' in this sense has no application to ' things in themselves.' He in- sists, further, on a distinction between the form and matter of 'nature' itself, and, having assigned to its 'form' an origin in understanding, ascribes the 'matter' to an un- known but alien source, in a way which seems to cancel the significance of his own declarations in regard to the intellectual principle necessary to constitute its form. We do not essentially misrepresent him in saying that by the ' form ' of nature or, as he sometimes phrases it, ' natura formaliter spectata,' he means the relations by which pheno- mena are connected in the one world of experience ; by its 'matter,' or 'natura materialiter spectata,' the mere phe- nomena or sensations undetermined by those relations'. ' Natura formaliter spectata ' is the work of understanding ; but ' natura materialiter spectata ' is the work of unknown things-in-themselves, acting in unknown ways upon us. ' Kant's Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, II. p. 755 ; ed. Hartenstein (1867), III. p. 133. 44 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I 39. Now, if the distinction, thus drawn, between the form and matter of the world of experience were necessary or even admissible, the effect of tracing those relations between phenomena, which form the laws of nature as we know it, to the action of a spiritual principle, would simply have been to bring us to a dead-lock. The distinction implies that phenomena have a real nature as effects of things-in-them- selves other than that which they have as related to each other in the universe of our experience : and not only so, it puts the two natures in a position towards each other of mere negation and separation, of such a kind that any cor- respondence between them, any dependence of one upon the other, is impossible. As effects of things-in-themselves, phenomena are supposed to have a nature of their own, but they cannot, according to Kant's doctrine, be supposed to carry any of that nature with them into experience. All the nature which they have in experience belongs to them in virtue of relations to each other which the action of the in- tellectual principle, expressly opposed to the action of things- in-themselves, brings about. The nature which a sensation is supposed to possess ' materialiter spectata,' as the appear- ance of a thing-in-itself, must not be confused with its nature as conditioned by a particular mode of matter and motion — the nature which the man of science investigates. It is pro- bably from this confusion that Kant's doctrine of the rela- tion between phenomena and things-in-themselves derives any plausibility which it may have for most of his readers : but, after what has been said above, a moment's considera- tion will show how unwarrantable according to his principles it is. The nature of a sensation, as dependent upon any motion or configuration of molecules, is still a nature deter- mined by its relation to other data of experience — a relation which (like every other relation within, or capable of coming within, experience) the single self-distinguishing principle, which Kant calls understanding, is needed to constitute. It is not such a nature, but one to which no experience or interrogation of experience brings us any the nearer, that we CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 45 must suppose to belong to the phenomenon as an appearance of a thing-in-itself, if Kant's antithesis is to be maintained. And if phenomena, as ' materialiter spectata,' have such another nature, it will follow — not indeed that all our know- ledge is an illusion in the ordinary sense of the term, for that implies a possibility of correction by true knowledge — but that there is no ground for that conviction of there being some unity and totality in things, from which the quest for knowledge proceeds. The ' cosmos of our experi- ence,' and the order of things-in-themselves, will be two wholly unrelated worlds, of which, however, each determines the same sensations. All that determination of a sensible occurrence which can be the object of possible experience or inferred as an explanation of experience — its simple position of antecedence or sequence in time to other occur- rences, as well as its relation to conditions which regulate that position and determine its sensible nature — will belong to one world of which a unifying self-consciousness is the organising principle : while the very same occurrence, as an effect of things-in-themselves, will belong to another world, will be subject to a wholly different order of determinations, which may have — and indeed, in being so described, is assumed to have — some principle of unity of its own, but of which, because it is a world of things-in-themselves, the principle must be taken to be the pure negation of that which determines the world of experience. If this be so, the conception of a universe is a delusive one. Man weaves a web of his own and calls it a universe ; but if the principle of this universe is neither one with, nor dependent on, that of things-in-themselves, there is in truth no universe at all, nor does there seem to be any reason why there should not be any number of such independent creations. We have asserted the unity of the world of our experience only to transfer that world to a larger chaos. 40. A tempting but misleading way out of the difficulty is to reduce the world of experience to dependence on that of- things-in-themselves by taking the intellectual principle, 46 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I which, in the sense explained, ' makes ' the world of experi- ence, to be not, as Kant considered it, an independent thing-in-itself, but itself a product of things-in-themselves. Our readiness to confuse things-in-themselves, as just pointed out, with the material conditions of sensation, may easily bring us to put the case in this way to ourselves. Certain combinations of moving matter, we are ready to believe, issue, by processes yet to be ascertained, in those living organisms which again, in reaction upon certain modes of motion, yield sensation ; and the sensitive subject, under a continuance of like physical influences, somehow grows into the intellectual subject of which the action is admitted to be necessary to constitute the ' cosmos of our experience.' But we have learnt Kant's lesson to very little purpose if we do not understand that the terms, which in such psycho- genesis are taken to stand for independent agents, are in ■ fact names for substantiated relations between phenomena ; relations to which an existence on their own account is fictitiously ascribed, but which in truth only exist for, or through the action of, the unifying and self-distinguishing spiritual subject which they are taken to account for. If this subject is to be dependent on things-in-themselves, something else must be understood by these ' things ' than any objects that we know or can know ; for in the existence of such objects its action is already implied. The question then arises whether, when we have excluded from things-in-themselves every kind of qualification arising from determination by, or relation to, an intelligent subject, any meaning is left in the assertion of a dependence of this subject upon them. Does not any significant assertion of that dependence, either as a fact or even as a mere possi- bility, imply a removal of the things-in-themselves from the region of the purely unknowAle, and their qualification by an understood relation to the intelligent subject said to be dependent on them ? But if this is so, and if it is impossible for such a relation, any more than any other, to exist except through the unifying action of spirit, what becomes of the CH.l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 47 independence of the things-in-themselves ? Are they not being determined by a spiritual action exactly of that kind which is being alleged to depend on them, and their exclusion of which is the one point expressed by their designation as things-in-themselves ? 41. These considerations seem to preclude us, when once we have recognised the ground of distinction between a world of experience and a world of things-in-themselves, from any attempt to overcome that absolute separation between the two worlds, which Kant's doctrine implies, by treating the organising subject of the world of experience as in any sense a product of things-in-themselves. Kant himself lends no countenance to any such attempt ; but on further reflection we may begin to question whether the view, which Kant himself gives, of the relation between things-in-themselves and the ' matter ' of experience, or ' natura materialiter spe- ctata ' — the view out of which the whole difficulty arises — is not itself open to the same charge of inconsistency as that method of escape from its consequences which we have examined. When we say that sensations, or phenomena in respect of their mere 'matter,' are effects of things-in-them- selves, we may exclude as carefully as possible all confusion of the things-in-themselves with the ascertainable material conditions, or formal causes, of feeling, but we cannot assert such a relation of cause and effect between the things and sensation without making the former a member of a relation which, as Kant himself on occasion would be ready to remind us, we have no warrant for extending beyond the world of experience, or for considering as independent of the intellectual principle of unity which is the condition of there being such a world. Causation has no meaning except as an unalterable connexion between changes in the world of our experience — an unalterableness of which the basis is the relation of that world throughout, with all its changes, to a single subject. That sensations therefore, the matter of our experience, should be connected as effects with things-in-themselves, of which all that can be said is that 48 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE . [,BK. I they belong to a world other than the world of our experience and are not relative to the subject to which it is relative, is a statement self-contradictory or at best unmeaning. That Kant should not have seen this merely goes to show that his own doctrine, being the gradual conquest of his later years, had not obtained full possession of his mind. The antithesis between the real and the work of thought had still such command over him that, after he had himself traced the agency of thought in all that gives the world of experience a definite character, he still could not help ascribing to this world, in terms of the knowable, a relation to an unknowable opposite ; though that very relation, if it existed, would according to his own showing bring the unknowable opposite within that world (dependent on an intelligent subject) from which it is expressly excluded. 42. At this point we may probably anticipate a rejoinder to some such effect as the foUowihg. It appears to be im- possible to take the matter of experience to be the effect of things-in-themselves, since these things, if they are to be things-in-themselves, cannot be supposed to exist in a rela- tion which only holds for the world of experience, as deterr mined by an intelligent subject. But it must be equally impossible to consider it a product of the intelligent subject, to which, when we have allowed every function that can be claimed for it in the way of uniting in a related system the manifold material of sensation, we must still deny the func- tion of generating that material. Yet we cannot ignore sen- sation. We cannot reduce the world of experience to a web of relations in which nothing is related, as it would be if everything were erased from it which we cannot refer to the action of a combining intelligence. After all our protests against Dualism, then, are we not at last left with an unac- countable residuum — an essential element of the real world of experience, which we cannot trace to what we regard as the organising principle of that world, but which is as neces- sary to make the world what it is as that principle itself? What do we gain by excluding other ways of accounting for CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 49 it, if it is finally irreducible to the only agency by which we can explain the order of the world? Does it not remain a thing-in-itself, alien and opposite to anything that we can explain as the construction of intelligence, just as much as if it were admitted to be the product of an unknowable power ? 43. The best hope of answering these questions lies in considering further how they arise. They are due to the abstraction of the ' matter ' from the ' form ' of experience. This abstraction we inevitably make in reflecting on the process by which we obtain such knowledge as we have, but it deceives us when we make it a ground for supposing a like separation of elements in the world of experience. It is true indeed, according to the doctrine previously stated, that the principle which enables us to know that there is a world, and to set about learning its nature, is identical with that which is the condition of there being a world ; but it is not therefore to be imagined that all the distinctions and relations, which we present to ourselves — and necessarily present to ourselves — in the process of learning to know, have counter- parts in the real world. Our presentation of them, as a part of our mental history, is a fact definitely related and con- ditioned in the reality of the world ; but the distinctions presented may exist only for us, in whom the intellectual principle realises itself under special conditions, not in the world as it is in itself or for a perfect intelligence. The distinction between the form and matter of experience is a distinction of this kind. In reflecting on the process by which we have come to know anything, we find that, at any stage we may recall, it consists in a further qualification of a given material by the consideration of the material under relations hitherto unconsidered. Thus as contrasted with, and abstracted from, the further formation which upon continued observation and attention it may acquire, any perception, any piece of knowledge, may be regarded as an unformed matter. On the other hand, when we look at what the given perception or piece of knowledge is in itself, we find that it is already formed, in more complex ways than £ 50 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I we can disentangle, by the synthesis of less determinate data. But there is a point at which the individual's retrospective analysis of the knowledge which he finds himself to possess necessarily stops. Antecedently to any of the formative intellectual processes which he can trace, it would seem that something must have been given for those processes to begin upon. This something is taken to be feeling, pure and simple. When all accretions of form, due to the intellectual establishment of relations, have been stripped off, there seem to remain the mere sensations without which the in- tellectual activity would have had nothing to deal with or operate upon. These then must be in an absolute sense the matter — the matter excluding all form — of experience. ' 44. Now it is evident that the ground on which we make this statement, that mere sensations form the matter of experience, warrants us in making it, if at all, only as a state- ment in regard to the mental history of the individual. Even in this reference it can scarcely be accepted. There is no positive basis for it but the fact that, so far as memory goes, we always find ourselves manipulating some data of consciousness, themselves independent of any intellectual manipulation which we can remember applying to them. But on the strength of this to assume that there are such - data in the history of our experience, consisting in mere sensations, antecedently to any action of the intellect, is not really an intelligible inference from the fact stated. It is an abstraction which may be put into words, but to which no real meaning can be attached. For a sensation can only form an object of experience in being determined by an intelligent subject which distinguishes it from itself and contemplates it in relation to other sensations ; so that to suppose a primary datum or matter of the individual's experience, wholly void of intellectual determination, is to suppose such experience to begin with what could not belong to or be an object of experience at all. 45. But the question we are here concerned with is not Tvhether any such thing as mere sensation, a matter wholly ca. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 51 unformed by intelligence, exists as a stage in the process by which the individual becomes acquainted with the world ; it is the question whether there is any such element in the world of knowable facts. Has nature — the system of con- nected phenomena, or facts related to consciousness, which forms the object of experience — a reality of that kind which Kant describes as ' natura materialiter spectata ; ' a reality consisting of mere sensations, or sensations of which the qualities, whatever they may be, are independent of such determination as arises from the action of a unifying and self-distinguishing subject? Or has it in any other sense a 'matter' which does not depend on a combining intelligence for being what it is, as much as does the relation between my experience of to-day and that of my previous life ? Phenomena are facts related to consciousness. Thus, when we enquire whether there is such a thing in the world of phenomena as sensation undetermined by thought, the question may be considered in relation either to the facts, as such, or to the consciousness for which the facts exist. It may be put either thus — Among the facts that form the object of possible experience, are there sensations which do not depend on thought for being what they are ? or thus — Is sensation, as unqualified by thought, an element in the consciousness which is necessary to there being such a thing as the world of phenomena ? 46. After what has been already said, the answer to these questions need not detain us long. If it is admitted that we know of no other medium but a thinking or self- distinguishing consciousness, in and through which that unification of the manifold can take place which is necessary to constitute relation, it follows that a sensation apart from thought — not determined or acted on by thought — would be an unrelated sensation ; and an unrelated sensation cannot amount to a fact. Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality. It is the result of a process of abstraction ; but having ^got the phrase we give a confused meaning to it, we fill up the shell which our abstraction has E 2 52 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I left, by reintroducing the qualification which we assumed ourselves to have got rid of. We present the mere sensations to ourselves as determined by relation in a way that would be impossible in the absence of that connecting action which we assume to be absent in designating them mere sensations. The minimum of qualification which we mentally ascribe to the sensation in thus speaking of it, is generally such as implies sequence and degree. A feeling not characterised either by its connexion with previous feeling or by its own intensity we must admit to be nothing at all, but at first sight we take it for granted that the character thus given to a feeling would belong to it just the same, though there were no such thing as thought in the world. It certainly does not depend on ourselves — on any power which we can suppose it rests with our will to exert or withhold — whether sensations shall occur to us in this or that order of succession, with this or that degree of intensity. But the question is whether the relation of time between one sensation and another, or that relation between a sensation and other possible modes of itself which is implied in its having p. degree, could exist if there were not a subject for which the several sensations, or modes of the same sensation, were equally present and equally distinguished from itself. If it is granted that these relations, which constitute the minimum determination of a sensible fact, only exist through the action of such a subject, it follows that thought is the necessary condition of the existence of sensible facts, and that mere sensation, in the sense supposed, is not a possible constituent in the realm of facts. 47. Or, if the consequence be disputed, the dispute can only turn on a secondary question as to the fitness of the term ' thought ' to represent a function of which the essential nature is admitted. If by thought is necessarily understood a faculty which is born and dies with each man; which is exhausted by labour and refreshed by repose ; which is exhibited in the construction of chains of reasoning, but not in the common ideas which make mankind and its CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 53 experience one ; on which the ' great thinker ' may plume himself as the athlete on the strength of his muscles ; then to say that the agency which makes sensible facts what they are can only be that of a thinking subject, is an absurd impropriety. But if it appears that a function in the way of self-consciousness is implied in the existence of relations, and therefore of determinate facts — a function identical in principle with that which enables the individual to look before and after, and which renders his experience a connected system — then it is more reasonable to modify some of our habitual notions of thought as exercised by ourselves than, on the strength of these notions, to refuse to recognise an essential identity between the subject which forms the unifying principle of the experienced world, and that which) as in us, qualifies us for an experience of it. It becomes time to consider whether the characteristics of thought, even as exercised by us, are not rather to be sought in the unity of its object as presented to all men, and in the continuity of all experience in regard to that object, than in the incidents of an individual life which is but for a day, or in abilities of which any man can boast that he has more than his neighbour. 48. Our question, then, in the first of the two forms sug- gested, must be answered in the negative. A fact consisting of mere feeling, in the sense supposed, is a contradiction, an impossibility. This does not of course mean that no being can feel which does not also think. We are not called on here to enquire whether there are really animals which feel but have not the capacity of thinking. All that the present argument would lead us to maintain would be that, so far as they feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts for them — for their consciousness. Their feelings are facts; but they are facts only so far as determined by relations, which exist only for a thinking consciousness and otherwise could not exist. And, in like manner, that large part of our own sensitive life which goes on without being affected by conceptions, is a series of facts with the determination of 54 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I which, indeed, thought, as ours or in us, has nothing to do, but which not the less depends for its existence as a series of facts on the action of the same subject which, in another mode of its action, enables us to know them. But in saying this, it may be objected, we have already admitted that there is such a thing as a merely feeling consciousness ; and, in the presence of this admission, what becomes of the denial to feeling of any separate or independent reality? The answer is that the distinction of the merely feeling consciousness is just this, that what it is really it is not consciously — that the relations by which it is really determined do not exist for it, but for the thinking consciousness on which it and they alike depend for being what they are. Its very characteristics as a merely feeling consciousness depend on conditions, in the universe of things, by which it would not be conditioned if it were really no more than it feels itself to be ; if it were not relative to, and had not its existence for, another form of consciousness which compre- hends it and its conditions. 49. In the second of the forms in which the question be- fore us admits of being presented — Can sensation exist as an independent element in a consciousness to which facts can appear ? — it has been virtually answered in being answered in the first. To that thinking subject, whose action is the universal bond of relation that renders facts what they are, their existence and their appearance must be one and the same. Their appearance, their presence to it, is their exis- tence. Feeling can no more be an independent element in that subject, as the subject to which they appear, than it can be an independent element in it, as the subject through whose action they exist. It is true on the one hand, as has just, been admitted, that in a great part of our lives we feel without thinking and without any qualification of our feelings by our thoughts ; while yet, on the other hand, we are sub- jects to whom facts can appear, who are capable of con- ceiving a world of phenomena. But just so far as we feel without thinking, no world of phenomena exists for us. The CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 55 suspension of thought in us means also the suspension of fact or reality for us. We do not cease to be facts, but facts cease to exist for our consciousness. However then we may explain the merely temporary and interrupted character of the action of thought upon feeling in us, that temporary character affords no reason why we should hesitate to deny that feeling unqualified by thought can be an element in the consciousness which is necessary to there being such a thing as a world of phenomena. 50. Mere feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience. Any obstacle which it seemed to present to a monistic view of that world may be allowed to disappear. We may give up the assumption that it needs to be accounted for as a product of things-in-themselves ; or that, if not accounted for in this way, it still remains an unaccountable opposite to thought and its work. Feeling and thought are inseparable and mutually dependent in the consciousness for which the world of experience exists, inseparable and mutually dependent in the constitution of the facts which form the object of that consciousness. Each in its full reality includes the other. It is one and the same living world of ex- perience which, considered as the manifold object presented by a self-distinguishing subject to itself, may be called feeling, and, considered as the subject presenting such an object to itself, may be called thought. Neither is the product of the other. It is only when by a process of abstraction we have reduced either to something which is not itself, that we can treat either as the product of anything, or apply the category of cause and effect to it at all. For that category is itself their product. Or rather, it represents one form of the activity of the consciousness which in inseparable union they constitute. The connexion between a phenomenon and its conditions is one that only obtains in and for that consciousness. No such connexion can obtain between that consciousness and anything elsej which means that the consciousness itself, whether considered as feeling or considered as thought, 56 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I being that by means of which everything is accounted for, does not in turn admit of being accounted for, in the sense that any ' whence ' or ' why ' can be assigned for it. Any constituent of the world of possible experience we can account for by exhibiting its relation to other consti- tuents of the same world ; but this is not to account for the world itself. We may and do explore the conditions under which a sentient organism is formed, and the various forms of molecular action by which particular sensations on the part of such an organism are elicited. We may ascertain uniformities in the sequence of one feeling upon another. In the life of the individual and the race we may trace regular histories of the manner in which a particular way of thinking has been affected by an earlier, and has in turn affected a later way ; of the determination of certain ideas by certain emotions, and of certain emotions by certain ideas. But in all this we are connecting phenomena with phenomena within a world, not connecting the world of phenomena with anything other than itself. We are doing nothing to account for the all-uniting consciousness which alone can render these sequences and connexions possible, for which alone they exist, and of which the action in us alone enables us to know them. We can indeed show the contradictions involved in supposing a world of phenomena to exist otherwise than in and for consciousness, and upon analysis can discern what must be the formal characteristic of a consciousness for which a system of related phenomena exists. So far we can give an account of what the world as a whole must be, and of what the spirit that constitutes it does. But just because all that we can experience is included in this one world, and all our inferences and explanations relate only to its details, neither it as a whole, nor the one consciousness which constitutes it, can be accounted for in the ordinary sense of the word. They cannot be accounted for by what they include, and being all- inclusive — at any rate so far as possible experience goes — there remains nothing else by which they can be accounted for. And this is equally true of consciousness as feeling and CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 57 of consciousness as thought, for each in its reality involves the other. 51. AVe are now in a position to reconsider the restriction which Kant puts on the interpretation of his own dictum that 'understanding makes nature.' This with him means that understanding, as the unifying principle which is the source of relations, acts formatively upon feelings as upon a material given to it from an opposite source called 'things- in-themselves/ rendering them into one system of phenomena called ' nature,' which is the sole object of experience, and to which all judgments as to matters of fact relate. We demur to the independent reality, or reality as determined by something else than thought, which is thus ascribed to feeling. It is not that we would claim any larger function for thought than Kant claims for understanding as separate from feeling, supposing that separation to be once admitted. It is the separation itself that is in question. We do not dispute the validity of Locke's challenge to a man by any amount ot thinking to produce a single ' simple idea ' to himself. We admit that mere thought can no more produce the facts of feeling, than mere feeling can generate thought. But we deny that there is really such a thing as ' mere feeling ' or 'mere thought.' We hold that these phrases represent abstractions to which no reality corresponds, either in the facts of the world or in the consciousness to which those facts are relative. We can attach no meaning to ' reality,' as applied to the world of phenomena, but that of existence under definite and unalterable relations ; and we find that it is only for a thinking consciousness that such relations can subsist. Reality of feeling, abstracted from thought, is abstracted from the condition of its being a reality. That great part of our sensitive life is not determined by our thought, that the sensitive life of innumerable beings is wholly undetermined by any thought of theirs or in them, is not in dispute : but this proves nothing as to what that sensi- tive life really is in nature or in the cosmos of possible ex- perience. It has no place in nature, except as determined by 58 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I relations which can only exist for a thinking consciousness. For the consciousness which constitutes reality and makes the world one it exists, not in that separateness which be- longs to it as an attribute of beings that think only at times or not at all, but as conditioned by a whole which thought in turn conditions. As to what that consciousness in itself or in its complete- ness is, we can only make negative statements. That there is such a consciousness is implied in the existence of the world ; but what it is we only know through its so far acting in us as to enable us, however partially and interruptedly, to have knowledge of a world or an intelligent experience. In such knowledge or experience there is no mere thought or mere feeling. No feeling enters into it except as quali- fying, and qualified by, an interrelated order of which a self- distinguishing subject forms the unifying bond. Thought has no function in it except as constantly co-ordinating ever new appearances in virtue of their presence to that one subject. And we are warranted in holding that, as a mutual independence of thought and feeling has no place in any consciousness on our part, which is capable of apprehending a world or for which a world exists, so it has none in the world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode. • 52. The purpose of this long discussion has been to arrive at some conclusion in regard to the relation between man and nature, a conclusion which must be arrived at before we can be sure that any theory of ethics, in the distinctive sense of the term, is other than wasted labour. If by nature we mean the object of possible experience, the connected order of knowable facts or phenomena — and this is what our men of science mean by it when they trace the natural genesis of human character — then nature implies something other than itself, as the condition of its being what it is. Of that something else we are entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness; because the function which it must fulfil in order to render CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 59 the relations of phenomena, and with them nature, possible, is one which, on however limited a scale, we ourselves exercise in the acquisition of experience, and exercise only by means of such a consciousness. We are further entitled to say of it, negatively, that the relations by which, through its action, phenomena are determined are not relations of it — not relations by which it is itself determined. They arise out of its presence to phenomena, or the presence of pheno- mena to itj but the very condition of their thus arising is that the unifying consciousness which constitutes them should not itself be one of the objects so related. The relation of events to each other as in time implies their equal presence to a subject which is not in time. There could be no such thing as time if there were not a self-consciousness which is not in time. As little could there be a relation of objects as outside each other, or in space, if they were not equally related to a subject which they are not outside ; a subject of which outsideness to anything is not a possible attribute j which by its synthetic action constitutes that relation, but is not itself determined by it. The same is true of those relations which we are apt to treat as independent entities under the names matter and motion. They are relations existing for a consciousness which they do not so condition as that it should itself either move or be material. 53. If objection is taken to the interpretation of matter as consisting in certain relations, if its character as substance is insisted on, it remains to ask what is meant by substance. It is not denied that there are material substances, but their qualification both as substances and as material will be found to depend on relations. By a substance we mean that which is persistent throughout certain appearances. It represents that identical element throughout the appearances, that permanent element throughout the times of their appear- ance, in virtue of which they are not merely so many differ- ent appearances, but connected changes. A piaterial sub- stance is that which remains the same with itself in respect of some of the qualities which we include in our definition 6o METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I of matter — qualities all consisting in some kind of relation — while in other respects it changes. Its character as a sub- stance depends on that relation of appearances to each other in a single order which renders them changes. It is not that first there is a substance, and that then certain changes of it ensue. The substance is the implication of the changes, and has no existence otherwise. Apart from the changes no substance, any more than apart from effects a cause. If we choose to say then that matter exists as a substance, we merely substitute for the designation of it. as consisting in re- lations, a designation of it as a certain correlatum of a certain kind of relation. Its existence as a substance depends on the action of the same self-consciousness upon which the con- nexion of phenomena by means of that relation depends. And the subject, of which the action is impUed in the connexion of phenomena in one system of nature by means of this correlatum of change, is one that can itself be as little identified with that correlatum — with any kind of sub- stance — as with the change to which substance is relative. It has already been pointed out that a consciousness, to which events are to appear as changes, cannot itself consist in those events. Its self-distinction from them all is necessary to its holding them all together as related to each other in the way of change. And, for the same reason, that connexion of all phenomena as changes of one world which is implied in the unity of intelligent experience, cannot be the work of any- thing which is the substance qualified by those changes. Its self-distinction from them, which is the condition of their appearance to it under this relation of change, is incompati- ble with its being so qualified. Even if we allow it to be possible that a subject, which connects certain appearances as changes, should itself be qualified by — should be the substance persistent in — certain other changes, it is plainly impossible that a subject which so connects all the appear- ances of nature should be related in the way of substance to any or all of them. 54. We may express the conclusion to which we are thus CH. l] THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NAIURE 6l brought by saying that nature in its reality, or in order to be what it is, implies a principle which is not natural . By calling the principle not natural we mean that it is neither included among the phenomena which through its presence to them form a nature, nor consists in their series, nor is itself determined by any of the relations which it constitutes among them. In saying more than this of it we must be careful not to fall into confusion. We are most safe in calling it spiritual, because, for reasons given, we are war- ranted in thinking of it as a self-distinguishing consciousness. In calling it supernatural we run the risk of misleading and being misled, for we suggest a relation between it and nature of a kind which has really no place except within nature, as a relation of phenomenon to phenomenon. We convey the notion that it is above or beyond or before nature, that it is a cause of which nature is the effect, a substance of which the changing modes constitute nature ; while in truth all the relations so expressed are relations which, indeed, but for the non-natural self-conscious subject would not exist, but which are not predicable of it. If we employ language about it in which, strictly taken, they are implied, it must only be on a clear understanding of its metaphorical character. On the other hand, there is no imperative reason why we should limit 'nature' to the restricted sense in which we have been supposing it to be used, if only the same sense can be covered by another term. If we like, we may employ the term 'nature' to represent the one whole which includes both the system of related phenomena and the principle, other than itself, which that system implies. But in that case, if we would avoid confusion, we must find some other term than nature to represent the system of phenomena as such, or as considered without inclusion of the spiritual principle which it implies, and some other term than 'natural' to represent that which this system contains. We are pretty sure, however, to fail in this, and ' nature ' in consequence becomes a term that is played fast and loose with in philo- sophical writing. It is spoken of as an independent agent ; 62 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE a certain completeness and self-containedness are ascribed to it; and to this there is no objection so long as we under- stand it to include the spiritual principle, neither in time nor in space, immaterial and immovable, eternally one with itself, which is necessary to the possibility of a world of phenomena. But it is otherwise if ' nature ' is at the same time thought of, as it almost inevitably is, under attributes only applicable to the world of phenomena, and thus as excluding the spiri- tual principle which that world indeed implies, but implies as other than itself. In that case, to ascribe independence or self-containedness to it — if for a moment the use of theological language may be allowed which it is generally desirable to avoid — is to deify nature while we cancel its title to deification. It is to speak of nature without God in a manner only appropriate to nature as it is in God. Or — to employ language less liable to misleading associations — it is to involve ourselves in perpetual confusion by seeking for a completeness in the world of phenomena, the world exist- ing under conditions of space and time, which, just because it exists under those conditions, is not to be found there. The result of the confusion will generally be that, being unable to discover any perfection or totality or independent agency among the matters of fact which we know, and having ignored the implication by those facts of a spiritual principle other than themselves, we come to assume that no perfect or self-determined being exists at all, or at any rate in any relation to us. CHAPTER II THE RELATION OF MAN, AS INTELLIGENCE, TO THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE IN NATURE 55. The conclusion of the preceding chapter has brought us to the question which lies at the root of ethical enquiry. In what relation do we ourselves stand to the one self- distinguishing subject, other than nature, which we find to be implied in nature ? To a certain extent an answer to this question has been involved in the considerations which have led to the conviction of there being such a subject. That if we were merely phenomena among phenomena we could not have knowledge of a world of phenomena, appears from analysis of the conditions of an intelligent experience. Our experience, we have seen, has two characteristics, of which neither admits of being reduced to or explained by the other. On the one hand it is an order of events in time, consisting in modifications of our sensibility. On the other hand it is a consciousness of those events — a consciousness of them as a related series, and as determined in their relations to each other by relation to something else, which is from the first conceived as other than the modifications of our sensibility, and which with growing knowledge comes to be conceived as involving relations between objects that are not events at all, and between events that preceded or lie beyond the range of sentient life. But, as has been further pointed out, a consciousness of related events, as related, cannot consist in those events. The modifications of our sensibility cannot, as successive events, rhake up our consciousness of them. Within the consciousness that they are related in the way of before and after there is no before and after. There is no such relation between components of the consciousness as there is between the events of which it is the consciousness. They form a process in time. If it were a process in time, 64 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I it would not be a consciousness of them as forming such a process. 58. Thus that man is not merely a phenomenon or succession of phenomena, that he does not consist in a series of natural events, is implied in the fact that pheno- mena appear to him as they do, that for him or for his consciousness there is such a thing as nature. There are certain current phrases of modern psychology, which no doubt have their warrant in facts to be considered presently, but which, as commonly used, are apt to blind us to this essential characteristic of the position in which we stand towards the world we know. We use the term ' phenomena of consciousness ' as if it covered the whole range of know- ledge and morality — all our thought about the world, all our perceptions and conceptions of objects, all the ideas which we seek to realise in action. We speak of consciousness universally, without qualification 9r distinction, as a suc- cession of states ; and the figure of the stream is the accepted one for expressing the nature of our spiritual life. Now it would be idle to deny that there is an appropriateness in a way of speaking which none of us can avoid, but it is important to call attention to that kind of activity undoubt- edly exercised by us, implied in all distinctively intelligent or moral experience, to which it is wholly inappropriate. If we reflect on what is contained in our knowledge, or in any conception or perception contributory to it, we shall see that the relation in which its constituents stand to each other is essentially different from the relation between stages of the process by which the knowledge or perception is arrived at. The figure of the stream may be applicable to the latter, though the more we think of it the less we shall find it so, but it is quite inapplicable to the former. Suc- cessive states of consciousness may be represented as waves of which one is for ever taking the place of the other, but such successive states cannot make a knowledge even of the most elementary sort. Knowledge is of related facts, and it is essential to every act of knowledge that the related CH.ll] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 65 facts should be present together in consciousness. Between the apprehensions of those facts, so far as they make up a certain piece of knowledge, there is no succession. I may have apprehended some of them, no doubt, before I appre- hend the rest ; or, after having apprehended the latter, my consciousness may lose its hold on some apprehended before. In this sense different states of knowledge succeed each other in the individual, but not so the manifold constituents of that which in any act of knowledge is present to his mind as the object known ; not so the determinations of conscious- ness in which those constituents are presented, and which make up the complex act of knowledge. For a known object, as known, is a related whole, of which, as of evesy such whole, the members are necessarily present together ; and the acts of consciousness in which the several members are appre- hended, as forming a knowledge, are a many in one. None is before or after another. This is equally the case whether the knowledge is of successive events or of the ' uniformities ' which are said to constitute a law of nature. For, as we have previously had occasion to point out, between the constituents of a knowledge of succession there can be no succession : so long as certain events are contemplated as successive, no one of them is an object to consciousness before or after another. 57. For this reason no knowledge, nor any mental act involved in knowledge, can properly be called a 'pheno- menon of consciousness.' It may be of phenomena ; if the knowledge is of events, it is so. The attainment of the knowledge, again, as an occurrence in the individual's history, a transition from one state of consciousness to another, may properly be called a phenomenon ; but not so the consciousness itself of relations or related facts — not so the relations and related facts present to consciousness— in which the knowledge consists. For a phenomenon is a sen- sible event, related in the way of antecedence and conse- quence to other sensible events; but the consciousness which constitutes a knowledge, or (if we may be allowed the use of a word which, though unfamiliar in this connexion, F 66 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I avoids some ambiguity) the content of such consciousness, is not an event so related nor made up of Such events. We cannot point to any other events, as we can in the case of a phenomenon proper, from antecedence or consequence to which it takes its character as an event. As an instance, let us take a man's knowledge of a propo- sition in Euclid. This means a relation in his consciousness between certain parts of a figure, determined by the relation of those parts to other parts. The knowledge is made up of those relations as in consciousness. Now it is obvious that there is no lapse of time, however minute, no antecedence or consequence, between the constituent relations of the con- sciousness S9. composed, or between the complex formed by them and anything else. To call such knowing conscious- ness a phenomenon, in the ordinary meaning of a sensible event, is a confusion between it and the process of arriving at or losing it. That in the learning or fftrgetting a proposi- tion of Euclid, as in the acquisition or loss of any other piece of knowledge, a series of events takes place, is plain enough j and such events may legitimately be called ' phenomena of consciousness.' But it must be noticed that when these events of the mental history come to be reviewed in intelli- gent memory or experience — when we know them as the connected facts of a history — their existence as in conscious- ness is no longer that of events. They do not succeed each other in time, but are present in the unity of relation, as much as are the parts of a geometrical figure which has been appre- hended by, or taken into, an intelligent consciousness. 58. The discrepancy here pointed out, between the reality of consciousness as exhibited in knowledge and anything that can properly be called phenomena or successive states of consciousness, would be more generally acknowledged but for two reasons. One of these is the ambiguity attending all our terms expressive of mental activity — knowledge, con- ception, perception, &c. — which may denote events in our mental history, the passing into certain states of conscious- ness, as well as that of which in those states we are conscious, CH.n] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 67 the content and object of consciousness. At the same time — and this is the second of the reasons referred to — this con- tent or object is looked upon as existing quite otherwise than in or for consciousness ; as independent of it, though from time to time affecting it in a certain way and producing a certain state of consciousness. Hence it is only the succes- sive changes in our apprehensive attitude towards the objects of our knowledge and experience that are commonly put to the account of consciousness. Its nature is not taken to be exhibited in the structure of those objects, any more than it would be if, instead of being objects known and experienced, they were ' things-in-themselves.' By perception is under- stood a modification of our sensibility in which some present external object is revealed to us. Conception we regard equally as an occurrence in consciousness ; and, though we suppose it to take place in the absence of any object at the time affecting the senses, we practically separate in our thoughts the conceived content or object from the con- ception, and imagine it vaguely as residing elsewhere than in consciousness. We thus avoid the necessity of facing the question how an object determined by relations can have its being in a consciousness which consists of a series of occur- rences. Even ' knowledge,' though we often mean by it a system of known facts or laws, is apt to lose this sense when we speak of it as a form of consciousness. It then becomes merely the mental event of arriving at an apprehension of related facts. It does not represent the relation of the facts in consciousness. That there must be such a relation of them in consciousness, and that a consciousness consisting of events cannot contain such a relation, is a conclusion which we avoid by eviscerating knowledge of its content, and trans- ferring this content from consciousness to ' external things.' 59. Even those who recognize the difficulty of extruding the object conceived or known, an object constituted by relations, from the consciousness which conceives or knows, and in consequence of describing conception and knowledge as mental events or phenomena, will be apt to ignore the F 3 68 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I same diflSculty in regard to Perception. The externality of the perceived object to consciousness seems to be taken for granted, even by those who would be quite ready to tell us that the ' things ' which we talk of conceiving are but ' nomi- nal essences.' This arises from the connexion of percep- tion with sensation, and from the real explicability of sen- sation by external impact. It is admitted on all hands that there can be no perception without (in Locke's phraseology) 'actual present sensation.' The difference between a per- ception of the moon and any mere conception of it is that, when it is perceived, although it is only in virtue of some conception of relations that it is perceived as a qualified ob- ject, there is necessarily some present sensation which those relations are conceived as determining. From this neces- sary presence of sensation in the act of perception, there easily arises a confusion between the perceived object and the exciting cause of sensation ; which again leads to an extrusion of the perceived object from the consciousness in which perception consists, and to the view of it as an exter- nal something to which perception is related as an occur- rence to its cause. 60. A little reflection, however, will show us that the exciting cause, the stimulant, of the sensation involved in a perception is never the object perceived in a perception. It is necessary to a perception of colour that there should be a sensation, arising out of a stimulus of the optic nerve by a particular vibration of ether. That vibration, however — the external exciting cause of the sensation — is not the object perceived in the perception of the colour. That ob- ject, indeed, will not be the same for every percipient. It will vary according to the extent of his knowledge and to the degree of attention aroused in him in the particular case. The perception may be no more than consciousness of the fact that a particular colour is presented to him — a fact to be aware of which is already to be aware of a certain rudi- mentary relation — or it may be a consciousness of various relations by which this fact is determined. And the rela- OH. II] PERCEPTION 69- tions thus apprehended in the perception may vary, again, iirom those by which the colour is connected with accom- panying appearances in superficial experience, to those less obvious ones which science has ascertained. It may thus come to include a knowledge that the sensation of light arises out of a certain relation between vibrations of ether and the optic nerve. If the perception is that of a man of science, observing light or colour for scientific purposes, it probably does so. Such knowledge is present to his mind in the perception. But it is a mere confusion to imagine that, in this or any other form of such a perception, the vibration of ether enters into the object perceived — into the content of the perception — in the same sense in which it acts as the exciting cause of the sensation ; or to suppose- that this ob- ject or content is external to the percipient consciousness, as the stimulant matter is to the sentient organism. The sentient organism to which the vibratory ether may be considered external is not consciousness, either as exer- cised in perception or in any other way, any more than the vibratory ether, as external, is the object perceived. Strictly speaking, it is not a vibratory ether but the fact consisting in the relation between this and the optic nerve— this fact as existing for consciousness — that enters into or determines the perceived object, as the scientific man perceives it. This fact, as forming part of the content of the perception, is wholly within consciousness ; or, to speak more accurately, the opposition of without and within has no sort of ap- plication to it. A within implies a without, and we are not entitled to say that anything is without or outside conscious- ness ; for externality, being a relation which, like any other relation, exists only in the medium of consciousness, only between certain objects as they are for consciousness, cannot be a relation between consciousness and anything else. An affection of the sentient organism by matter external to it is the condition of our experiencing the sort of conscious- ness called perception; a relation of externality between ob- jects is often part of that which is perceived ; but in no case 70 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I is there such a relation, any more than a relation of before and after, between the object perceived and the conscious- ness of it, or between constituents of that consciousness. 61. If, having got rid of the confusion between the stimulant of sensation and the perceived object, we examine the constituents of any perceived object — not as a ' thing-in- itself,' or as we may vainly try to imagine it to be apart from our perception, but as it actually is perceived — we shall find alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, and that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a series of phenomena or a succession of states. For a justification of this statement we may appeal to the account given of perception by the accepted representatives of empirical psychology. ' Our perception of an animal or a flower,' says Mr. Lewes, ' is the synthesis of all the sensa- tions we have had of the object in relation to our several senses ^.' This object itself, he tells us, is a ' group of sensibles ' ; which corresponds with Mill's account of it as a combination of ' permanent possibilities of sensation.' Such language is no doubt susceptible of a double interpre- tation, and it is only upon one of the two possible interpre- tations that it justifies the conclusion we shall draw from it. It is true also that this interpretation is not sanctioned by the writers mentioned, who seem not to distinguish the two interpretations, and avail themselves sometimes of the one, sometimes of the other. It is the only interpretation of the definition, however, that is really suitable to it as a definition of perception. 62. What exactly is it that is combined in the synthesis spoken of? Is it a synthesis of feelings as caused by the action of external irritants on the nervous system, or is it a synthesis of known and remembered facts that such feelings have occurred under certain conditions and rela- tions ? The two kinds of synthesis are perfectly distinct ; and, though the former may be presupposed in perception, it is the latter alone which constitutes it in the distinctive ' Problems of Life and Mind, I. 191. CH. n] PERCEPTION 71 sense. It is true, no doubt, that an excitement of sensation by some present irritant may revive, in a fainter degree, feelings that have been previously associated with this sensation. But such a revival does not constitute a per- ception. It cannot result in a synthesis of the feelings as feelings of an object, or in the apprehension of a sensible fact, recognized as a symbol of many other related facts of which there would be experience if certain conditions on the part of a sentient subject were fulfilled — in other words, as a symbol of possibilities of sensation. If past feelings were reinstated merely as feelings, they could not properly be said to be combined in an object or in consciousness of an object at all, nor would their reinstatement be in any sense an inference, such as Mr. Lewes rightly holds to be involved in all perception ^. They could only be combined, either in the way of producing and giving place to a further feeling, as httle a consciousness of fact or object as any of them, or in the sense that their effects are accumulated in the nervous organism so as to modify its reactions upon stimulus. Anything more than this — any combination of the data of feeling as qualities of an object, or as facts related to a certain sensation, which the recurrence of that sensation may recall to us — implies the action of a subject which thinks of its feelings, which distinguishes them from itself and can thus present them to itself as facts. Such action is as necessary to the original presentation of all that is recalled in perception, as to the incorporation of what is recalled in the total fact perceived. As we have seen, no feeling, as such or as merely felt, enters into the perceived object — not even the present sensation which is admitted to be a necessary condition of perception. It is not the sensa- tion, but the fact, presented by the self-distinguishing subject to itself, that such a sensation is here and now occurring, occurring under certain relations to other experience — it is this that is the nucleus on which the recalled experience gathers, suggesting other possibilities of sensation, not them- ' Problems .of Life and Mind, I. 257. t 72 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I selves 'actual present sensations,' b^t no less present, as facts, than the fact that the given sensation is here and now being felt. The knowledge of such possibilities of sensation is doubtless in every case founded on actual sensation experienced in the past, but on this as on an observed fact, determined by relation to other hke facts through the equal presence of all to a thinking subject. Except to an intelli- gence which has thus observed sensations as related facts, there can be no suggestion, upon the recurrence of one of them, that others are possible upon certain conditions being fulfilled. The revival of the past sensations themselves, with what- ever intensity, is no such suggestion. It may be that the excitement of sensation by an external stimulant, which is the occasion of perception, is always followed by a revival, with some less intensity, of the sensations known to be possible as accompaniments of the given sensation ; but the knowledge of their possibility — the apprehension of the relation between their several possibilities, as facts, and the fact of the given sensation occurring — this, the essential thing in perception, is as different from the revival of the sensations themselves or their images as is the given sensa- tion from the presentation of its occurrence as a fact. And on this difference depends the susceptibility of combination in a perceived object, of presentation as a many in one, which belongs to known possibilities of sensation, to known facts that certain feelings would occur under certain con- ditions, in distinction from feelings as felt. Manifold feel- ings may combine, as we have seen, in one result, but in that one result their multiplicity as feelings is lost. The constituents of a perceived object, on the contrary, whether we consider them qualities or related facts, survive in their multiplicity at the same time that they constitute a single object. The condition of their doing so is the self-distinction of the thinking subject from the data of sensation, which it at once presents to itself in their severalty as facts, and unites as related facts in virtue of its equal presence to them all. CH. Il] PERCEPTION 73 63. It thus appears that the common objects of experi- ence — not those 'things in general' which are sometimes supposed to be the object of conception, but the particular things we perceive, this flower, this apple, this dog — in the only sense in which they are objects to us or are perceived at all, have their being only for, and result from the action of, a self-distinguishing consciousness. As perceived, they con- sist in certain groups of facts, which again consist in possi- bilities of sensation, known to be related in certain ways to each ether and to some given fact of sensation. The extent of the group in the case of each perception, and the particu- lar mode in which the constituent facts are related, depend on the experience and training of the percipient, as well as on the direction of his mind at the time of the perception. In every case the relations by which the given sensation is determined in the apprehension of the percipient, are but a minute part of those by which it is really determined. The object which the most practised botanist perceives in his observation of a flower, is by no means adequate to the real nature of the flower. That real nature, indeed, if our previous conclusions have been true, must consist in relations of which consciousness is the medium or sustainer, though not con- sciousness as it is in the botanist. It is not, however, with the real nature of the flower, but with its nature as perceived — a fragment of the real nature — that we are here concerned j and it is relations of which the percipient consciousness is the sustainer, which exist only through its action, that make the object, as in each case the percipient perceives it, what it is to him. Facts related to those of which the percipient is aware in the object, but not yet knovvn to him, can only be held to belong to the perceived object potentially or in some anticipatory sense ', in so far as upon a certain develop- ment of intelligence, in a direction which it does not rest with the will of the individual to follow or no, they will be- come incorporated with it. But they become so incorpo- rated with it only through the same continued action of a ' [See, however, § 69.] 74 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I combining self-consciousness upon data of sensation, through which this object, as the percipient already perceives it, has come to be there for him. 64. Common sense is apt to repel such statements as these, because they are taken to imply that we can perceive what we like; that the things we see are fictions of our own, not determined by any natural or necessary order. But in truth it implies nothing of the sort, unless it is supposed that our whole consciousness is a fiction of our .own, of which it rests with ourselves to make what we please. Objects do not cease to be ' objective,' facts do not cease to- be unalterable, because we find that a consciousness which we cannot alter or escape from, beyond which we cannot place ourselves, for which many things indeed are external to each other but io which nothing Can be external, is the medium through which they exist for us, or because we can analyse in some elementary way what it must have done in order to their thus being there for us. It is not the concep- tion of fact, but the conception of the consciousness for \ which facts exist, that is affected by such analysis. So long as consciousness is thought to have nothing to do with the constitution of the facts of which we are con- scious, it is possible to look upon it merely as a succession of events or phenomena ' of the inner sense.' The question how these inner events or successive phenomena come to perform a synthesis of themselves into objects is not raised, because no such work of synthesis is thought to be required of consciousness at all. The objects we perceive are sup- posed to be there for us independently of any action of our minds; we have but passively to let their appearances follow each other over the mental mirror. While this view is retained, the succession of such appearances and of the mental reactions upon them — reactions gradually modified through accumulated effects of the appearances — may fairly be taken to constitute our spiritual being. But it is otherwise when we have recognised the truth, that a sensation excited by an external irritant is not a perception of the irritant or CH. n] PERCEPTION 75 (by itself) of anything at all ; that every object we perceive is a congeries of related facts, of which the simplest component, no less than the composite whole, requires in order to its presentation the action of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appear- ances, such action as may hold the appearances together, without fusion, in an apprehended fact. It then becomes clear that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most rudimentary experience, in the simplest per- ception of sensible things or of the appearances of objects,- which is incompatible with the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession of any sort of phenomena. Some- thing else than a succession of phenomena is seen to be as necessary in the consciousness that perceives facts, as it is necessary to the possibility of the world of facts itself. 65. We have dwelt at length on this implication in ordinary perception of a spiritual action irreducible to phenomena, because the question whether and how far man is a part of nature, is apt to be debated exclusively on what is considered higher ground and, in consequence, without an admitted issue being raised. The transcendence of^ man is main- tained on the ground of his exercising powers, which it may plausibly be disputed whether he exercises at all. The notion that thought can originate, or that we can freely will, is at once set down as a transcendental illusion. There is more hope of result if the controversy is begun lower down, with the analysis of an act which it is not doubted that we perform. Now, if the foregoing analysis be correct, the ordinary perception of sensible things or matters of fact involves the determination of a sensible process, which is in time, by an agency that is not in time, — in Kant's language, a combina- tion of 'empirical and intelligible characters,' — as essentially as do any of those ' higher ' mental operations, of which the performance may be disputed. The sensation, of which the presentation as a fact is the nucleus of every perception, is an event in time. Its conditions again have all of them a history in time. It is true, indeed, that the relation between it and ^6 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I its cause, if its cause is understood strictly as the sum of its conditions, is not one of time. The assemblage of con- ditions, ' external ' and ' internal,' constitutes the sensation. There is no sequence in time of the sensation upon the assem- bled conditions. But the assemblage itself is an event that has had a determinate history ; and each of the constituent conditions has come to be what it is through a process in time. So much for the sensation proper. The presentation of the sensation, again, as of a fact related to other ex- perience, is in like manner an event. A moment ago I had not so presented it : after a brief interval the perception will have given place to another. Yet the content of the pre- sentation, the perception of this or that object, depends on the presence of that which in occurrence is past, as a fact united in one consciousness with the fact of the sensation now occurring ; or rather, if the perception is one of what we call a developed mind, on numberless connected acts of such uniting consciousness, to which limits can no more be set than they can to the range of experience, and which yield the conception of a world revealed in the sensation. The agent of this neutralization of time can as little, it would seem, be itself subject to conditions in time as the con- stituents of the resulting whole, the facts united in conscious- ness into the nature of the perceived object, are before or after each other. ee. We are not, however, fully stating the seemingly para- doxical character of everyday perception, in merely saying that it is a determination of events in time by a principle that is not in time. That is a description equally applicable to fact and to the perception of fact. For fact always implies relation determined by other relations in a universe of facts ; and such relations, again, though they be relations of events to each other in time, imply, as has been previously pointed out, something out of time, for which all the terms of the several relations are equally present, as the principle of the synthesis which unites them in a single universe. But, in CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 77 thus explaining the ultimate conditions of the possibility ol fact, we need not assign the events themselves, and the determination of them by that which is not an event — the process of becoming, and the regulation of it as an orderly process, — to one and the same subject; as if the events happened to and altered the subject that unites them, or as if the source of order in becoming itself became. We can- not indeed suppose any real separation between the deter- minant and the determined. The order of becoming is only an order of becoming through the action of that which is not in becoming ; nor can we think of this order as preceded by anything that was not an order of becoming. We con- tradict ourselves, if we say that there was first a chaos and then came to be an order ; for the ' first ' and ' then ' imply already an order of time, which is only possible through an action not in time. As little, on the other hand, can we suppose that which we only know as a principle of unity in relation, to exist apart from a manifold through which it is related. But we may avoid considering this principle, or the subject of which the presence and action renders possible the relations of the world of becoming, as itself in becoming, or as the result of a process of becoming. It seems to be otherwise with our perceiving consciousness. The very con- sciousness, which holds together successive events as equally present, has itself apparently a history in time. It seems to vary from moment to moment. It apprehends processes of becoming in a manner which implies that past stages of the becoming are present to it as known facts ; yet is it not itself coming to be what it has not been ? 67. It will be found, we believe, that this apparent state of the case can only be explained by supposing that in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally com- plete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal 78 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I organism becomes its vehicle. ' Our consciousness ' may mean either of two things ; either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interrup- tions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness ; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. The consciousness which varies from moment to moment, which is in succession, and of which each suc- cessive state depends on a series of ' external and internal ' events, is consciousness in the former sense. It consists in what may properly be called phenomena; in successive modifications of the animal organism, which would not, it is true, be what they are if they were not media for the realisation of an eternal consciousness, but which are not this consciousness. On the other hand, it is this latter consciousness, as so far realised in or communicated to us through modification of the animal organism, that constitutes our knowledge, with the relations, characteristic of know- ledge, into which time does not enter, which are not in be- coming but are once for all what they are. It is this again that enables us, by incorporation of any sensation to which attention is given into a system of known facts, to extend that system, and by means of fresh perceptions to arrive at further knowledge. 68. For convenience sake, we state this doctrine, to beigin with, in a bald dogmatic way, though well aware how un- warrantable or unmeaning, until explained and justified, it is likely to appear. Does it not, the reader may ask, involve the impossible supposition that there is a double conscious- ness in man ? No, we reply, not that there is a double con- sciousness, but that the one indivisible reality of our conscious- ness cannot be comprehended in a single conception. In seeking to understand its reality we have to look at it from two different points of view ; and the different conceptions that we form of it, as looked at from these different points, CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 79 do not admit of being united, any more than do our im- pressions of opposite sides of the same shield ; and as we apply the same term ' consciousness ' to it, from whichever point of view we contemplate it, the ambiguity noticed necesr sarily attends that term. In any case of an end gradually realising itself through a certain organism a like difficulty arises. If we would state the truth about a living and growing body, we can only do it by the help of two conceptions, which we shall try in vain to reduce to a third. One will be the conception of the end, the particular form of life realised in the body — an end real and present, because operative, throughout the develop- ment of the body, but which we cannot identify with any stage of that development. The other will be that of the particular body, or complex of material conditions, organic to this end, as on the one hand dependent on an inexhaus- tible series of other material conditions, on the other pro- gressively modified by results of the action, the life, to which it is organic. The particular living being is not less one and indivisible because we cannot dispense with either of these conceptions, if we would understand it aright, or because it is sometimes one, sometimes the other, of them that is pre- dominant in our usage of the term ' living being.' In like manner, so far as we can understand at all the reality of con- sciousness, one and indivisible as it is in each of us, it must be by conceiving both the end, in the shape of a completed knowledge that gradually realises itself in the organic process of sentient life, and that organic process itself with its history and conditions. We have not two minds, but one mind; but we can know that one mind in its reality only by taking account, on the one hand, of the process in time by which effects of sentient experience are accumulated in the organism, yielding new modes of reaction upon stimulus and fresh as- sociations of feeUng with feeling; on the other, of the system of thought and knowledge which realises or reproduces itself in the individual through that process, a system into the inner constitution of which no relations of time enter. 8o METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I 69. If we examine the notion of intellectual progress common to all educated men, we find that it virtually involves this twofold conception of the mind. We regard it as a progress towards the attainment of knowledge or true ideas. But we cannot suppose that those relations of facts or objects in consciousness, which constitute any piece of knowledge of which a man becomes master, first come into being when he attains that knowledge ; that they pass through the process by which he laboriously learns, or gradually cease to be as he forgets or becomes confused. They must exist as part of an eternal universe — and that a spiritual universe or universe of consciousness — during all the changes of the individual's attitude towards them, whether he is asleep or awake, distracted or attentive, ignorant or informed. It is a common-place indeed to assert that the order of the universe remains the same, however our impressions may change in regard to it; but as the common-place is apt to be understood, the universe is conceived in abstraction from consciousness, while con- sciousness is identified simply with the changing impressions, of which the unchanging order is independent. But the unchanging order is an order of relations ; and, even if relations of any kind could be independent of consciousness, certainly those that form the content of knowledge are not so. As known they exist only for consciousness ; and, if in themselves they were external to it, we shall try in vain to conceive any process by which they could find their way from without to within it. They are relations of facts, which require a consciousness alike to present them as facts and to unite them in relation. We must hold then that there is a consciousness for which the relations of fact, that form the object of our gradually attained knowledge, already and eternally exist ; and that the growing knowledge of the individual is a progress towards this consciousness. 70. It is a consciousness, further, which is itself operative in the progress towards its attainment, just as elsewhere the end realised through a certain process itself determines that CH. ll] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 8i process; as a particular kind of life, for instance, informs the processes organic to it. Every effort fails to trace a genesis of knowledge out of anything which is not, in form and principle, knowledge itself. The most primitive germ from which knowledge can be developed is already a per- ception of fact, which implies the action upon successive sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation, and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them, or exist as a succession at all. ' And every step forward in real intelligence, whether in the way of addition to what we call the stock of human knowledge, or of an appropriation by the individual of some part of that stock, is only explicable on supposition that successive reports of the senses, succes- sive efforts of attention, successive processes of observation and experiment, are determined by the consciousness that all things form a related whole — a consciousness which is operative throughout their succession and which at the same time realises itself through them. 71. A familiar illustration may help to bring home that view of what is involved in the attainment of knowledge for which we are here contending. We often talk of reading the book of nature ; and there is a real analogy between the process in which we apprehend the import of a sentence, and that by which we arrive at any piece of knowledge. In reading .the sentence we see the words successively, we attend to them successively, we recall their meaning succes- sively. But throughout that succession there must be. present continuously the consciousness that the sentence has a mean- ing as a whole; otherwise the successive vision, attention and recollection would not end in a comprehension of what the meaning is. This consciousness operates in them, rendering them what they are as organic to the intelligent reading of the sentence. And when the reading is over, the con- sciousness that the sentence has a meaning has become a consciousness of what in particular the meaning is, — a consciousness in which the successive results of the mental operations involved in the reading are held together, without G 82 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bK. I succession, as a connected whole. The reader has then, so far as that sentence is concerned, made the mind of the writer his own. The thought which was the writer's when he composed the sentence, has so determined, has so used as organs, the successive operations of sense and soul on the part of the reader, as to reproduce itself in him through them; and the first stage in this reproduction, the condition under which alone the processes mentioned contribute to it, is the conviction on the reader's part that the sentence is a connected whole, that it has a meaning which may be under- stood. This conviction, it is true, is not wrought in him by the thought of the writer expressed in that particular sen- tence. He has learnt that sentences have a meaning before applying himself to that particular one. Before any one can read at all, he must have been accustomed to have the thought of another reproduced in him through signs of one kind or another. But the first germ of this reproduction, the first possibility or receptivity of it, must have consisted in so much communication of some one else's meaning as is implied in the apprehension that he has a meaning to convey. It is through this elementary apprehension that certain func- tions of one man's soul, the soul of a listener or reader, become so organic to the thought of another, as that this thought gradually realises itself anew in the soul of the listener. May we not take it to be in a similar way that the system of related facts, which forms the objective world, reproduces itself, partially and gradually, in the soul of the individual who in part knows it ? That this system implies a mind or consciousness for which it exists, as the condition of the union in relation of the related facts, is not an arbitrary guess. We have seen that it is the only answer which we have any ground for giving to the question, how such a union of the manifold is possible. On the other side, our knowledge of any part of the system implies a like union of the manifold in relation; such a presentation of feelings as facts, and such a determination of the facts by mutual relation, as is only CH. Il] MAN AND THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 83 possible through the action upon feelings of a subject dis- tinguishing itself from them. This being so, it would seem that the attainment of the knowledge is only explicable as a reproduction of itself, in the human soul, by the conscious- ness for which the cosmos of related facts exists — a repro- duction of itself, in which it uses the sentient life of the soul as its organ. 72. Because the reproduction has thus a process in time for its organ, it is at once progressive and incapable of com- pletion. It is ' never ending, still beginning,' because of the constant succession of phenomena in the sentient life, which the eternal consciousness, acting on that life, has perpetually to gather anew into the timeless unity of knowledge. There never can be that actual wholeness of the world for us, which there must be for the mind that renders the world one. But though the conditions under which the eternal consciousness reproduces itself in our knowledge are thus incompatible with finality in that knowledge, there is that element of identity between the first stage of intelligent experience — between the simplest beginning of knowledge— and the eternal consciousness reproducing itself in it, which consists in the presentation of a many in one, in the apprehension of facts as related in a single system, in the conception of there being an order of things, whatever that order may turn out to be. Just as the conviction that a speaker or writer has a meaning is at once the first step in the communication of his thought to a listener or reader, and the condition determining all the organic processes of reading and listen- ing which end in the reproduction of the thought, so the conception described is at once the primary form in which that mind to which the world is relative communicates itself to us, and the influence which renders the processes of sensuous experience into organs of its communication. It is only as governed by the forecast of there being a related whole that these processes can yield a growing, though for ever incomplete, knowledge of what in detail the whole is. 73. There should by this time be no need of the reminder, G 2 84 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE that the evidence of the action of this fore-casting idea, in the several stages of our learning to know, does not depend on any account of it which the learner may be able to give. Whether he is able to give such an account or no, depends on the development of his powers of reflection ; and the idea is at work before it is reflected on. The evidence of its action lies in results inexplicable without it. Nor must we imagine it, as the doctrine of innate ideas might lead us to do, antecedent in' time to the processes of learning through which it realises itself, and which, in so doing, it makes what they are. This would be the same mistake as to suppose the life of a living body antecedent in time to the functions of the living body. It is inconsistent with the essential notion that the consciousness of a related whole, so far as it is ours, is an end realising itself in and deter mining the growth of intelligence. Thus when the question is raised, whether the conception of the uniformity of nature precedes or follows upon the inartiiicial or unmethodised exercise of induction, the answer must be either that it does both or that it does neither ; or, better, that the question, being improperly put, does not admit of an answer. The conception of the uniformity of nature is one form of the consciousness on which we have been dwelling; and the processes of experience are related to it as respiration or the circulation of the blood is related to life. It is the end to which they are organic ; but, at the same time, it is so operative in them that without it they would not be what they are. It is no more derivable from processes of sense, as these would be without it — from excitements and reactions of the nervous system — than life is derivable from mechanical and chemical functions of that which does not live. Under various expressions, it is the primary form of the intellectual life in which the eternal consciousness, the spirit for which the relations of the universe exist, reproduces itself in us. All particular knowledge of these relations is a filling up of this form, which the continued action of the eternal con- sciousness in and upon the sentient life renders possible. CHAPTER III THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 74. Throughout the foregoing discussion of the condi- tions of knowledge our object, it will be remembered, has been to arrive at some conclusion in regard to the position in which man himself stands to the system of related pheno- mena called nature — in other words, in regard to the freedom of man ; a conclusion on which the question of the possibility of Ethics, as other than a branch of physics, depends. Arguing, first, from the characteristics of his knowledge, postponing for the present the consideration of his moral achievement, our conclusion is that, while on the one hand his consciousness is throughout empirically conditioned, — in the sense that it would not be what at any time it is but for a series of events, sensible or related to sensibility, some of them events in the past history of consciousness, others of them events affecting the animal system organic to con- sciousness,— on the other hand his consciousness would not be what it is, as knowing, or as a subject of intelligent expe- rience, but for the self-realisation or reproduction in it, through processes thus empirically conditioned, of an eternal consciousness, not existing in time but the condition of there being an order in time, not an object of experience but the condition of there being an intelligent experience, and in this sense not ' empirical ' but ' intelligible.' In virtue of his character as knowing, therefore, we are entitled to say that man is, according to a certain well-defined meaning of the term, a 'free cause.' Let us reconsider shortly what that meaningTsI " 75. By the relation of effect to cause, unless the 'cause' is qualified by some such distinguishing adjective as that just employed, we understand the relation of a given event, either to another event invariably antecedent to it and upon 86 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I which it is invariably sequent, or to an assemblage of con- ditions which together constitute the event — into which it may be analysed. Such a cause is not d. ' free ' cause. The uniformly antecedent event is in turn dependent on other events ; any particular sum of conditions is determined by a larger complex, which we at least cannot exhaust. But the condition of the possibility of this relation in either of its forms — the condition of events being connected in one order of becoming, the condition of facts being united in a single system of mutual determination — is the action of a single principle, to which all events and facts are equally present and relative, but which distinguishes itself from them all and can thus unite them in their severalty. In speaking of this principle we can only use the terms we have got; and these, being all strictly appropriate to the relations, or objects determined by the relations, which this principle renders possible but under which it does not itself subsist, are strictly inappropriate to it. Such is the term 'cause.' So far indeed as it indicates the action of something which makes something else what it is, it might seem applicable to the unifying principle which makes the world what it is. But we have no sooner so applied it than we have to qualify our statement by the reminder, that to the unifying principle the world, which it renders one, cannot be something else than itself m the same way as, to ordinary apprehension, a determined fact is something else than the conditions determining it, or an event caused something else than the antecedent events causing it. That the unifying principle should distinguish itself from the manifold which it unifies, is indeed the condition of the unification ; but it must not be supposed that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from the unifying principle, or this principle another nature of its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold world. Apart from the unifying principle the manifold world would be nothing at all, and in its self-distinction from that world the unifying principle takes its character CH.ni] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 87 from it; or, rather, it is in distinguishing itself from the world that it gives itself its character, which therefore but ■for the world it would not have. 76. It is true indeed of anything related as a cause to anything else on which it produces effects, that its efficiency in the production of those effects is an essential part of its nature, just as susceptibiUty to those effects is an essential part of the nature of that in which they take place. No group of conditions would be what they are but for the effect which it lies in them to produce, no events what they are but for the other events that arise out of them ; any more than, conversely, the conditioned phenomenon, or necessarily sequent event, has a nature independent of its conditions or antecedents. • Still every particular cause, whether agent or assemblage of conditions or antecedent event, has a nature, made for it by other agents, conditions, or antecedent events, which appears but partially in any particular effect; and again the patient or conditioned phenomenon or sequent event, in which that effect appears, has a nature other than that which it derives from the particular cause. Therefore in the determined world there is a sense in saying that a cause is something on which something else depends for being what it is, which no longer holds when the effect is the whole determined world itself, and the cause the unify- ing principle implied in its determinateness. There is nothing to qualify the determined world as a whole but that inner determination of all contained in it by mutual relation, which is due to the action of the unifying principle ; nor anything to qualify the unifying principle but this very action, with the self-distinction necessary to it. When we transfer the term ' cause,' then, from a relation between one thing and another within the determined world to the relation between that world and the agent implied in its existence, we must understand that there is no separate particularity ifi the agent, on the one side, and the determined world as a whole, on the other, such as characterises any agent and patient, any cause and effect, 88 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I within the determined world. The agent must act abso- lutely from itself in the action through which that world is — not, as does everything within the world, under determi- nation by something else. The world has no character but that given it by this action ; the agent no character but that which it gives itself in this action. 77. This is what we mean by calling the agent a 'free cause.' But the question at once arises whether, when we have thus qualified the term 'cause' by an epithet which effectually distinguishes it from any cause cognisable within the world of phenomena, it still has a meaning for us. The answer is that but for our own exercise of such causality it would have none. But, in fact, our action in knowledge — the action by which we connect successive phenomena in the unity of a related whole — is an action as absolutely from itself, as little to be accounted for by the phenomena which through it become an intelligent experience, or by anything alien to itself, as is that which we have found to be impUed in the existence of the universal order. This action of our own 'mind' in knowledge — to say nothing of any other achievement of the human spirit — becomes to us, when reflected on, a causa cognoscendi in relation to the action of a self-originating ' mind ' in the universe j which we then learn to regard as the causa essendi to the same action, exercised under whatever limiting conditions, by ourselves. We find that, quite apart from the sense in which all facts and events, including those of our natural life, are determined by that mind without which nature would not be, there is another sense in which we ourselves are not so much determined by it as identified by it with itself, or made the subjects of its self-communication. All things in nature are determined by it, in the. sense that they are determined by each other in a manner that would be impossible but for its equal, self-distinguishing presence to them all. It is thus that the events of our natural life are determined by it ; not merely the mechanical and chemical processes presup- posed by that life, but the life itself, including all that can CH.m] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 89 properly be called the successive phenomena of our mental history. But to say that it is thus determined, though it is true of our natural life, is not the full account of it ; for this life, with its constituent events or phenomena, is organic to a form of consciousness of which knowledge is the develop- ment, and which, if for no other reason than that it conceives time, cannot itself be in time. While the processes organic to this consciousness are determined by the mind to which all things are relative, in the sense that they are part of a universe which it renders possible, this consciousness itself is a reproduction of that mind, in respect, at least, of its attri- butes of self-origination and unification of the manifold. 78. It may be asked here, what after all is the conclusion as to the freedom of man himself to be drawn from these considerations in regard to knowledge. 'Granted,' it may be said, 'that the knowledge of nature is irreducible to a natural process, that it implies the action of a principle not in time, which you may call, if you please, an eternal mind ; still you admit that man's attainment of knowledge is conditional on processes in time and on the fulfilment of strictly natural functions. These processes and functions are as essential to man, as much a part of his being, as his knowledge is. How then can it be said that the being itself, thus conditioned, is not a part of nature but is free ? Or, if this statement is made and can be justified, must it not be left alongside of an exactly contrary statement ? Do you not after all leave man still " in doubt to deem himself a God or beast ; " still perplexed with the " partly this, partly that " conclusion, for which philosophy, if good for anything, should substitute one more satisfactory, but which, on the contrary, it seems merely to restate in a more prolix form ? ' 79. We answer that, if the foregoing considerations have any truth in them, we are not shut up in this ambiguity. To say that man in himself is in part an animal or product of nature, on the ground that the consciousness which distinguishes him is realised through natural processes, is not more true than to say that an animal is in part a machine, 90 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. I because the life which distinguishes it has mechanical structures for its organs. If that activity of knowledge on the part of man, to which functions provisionally called natural are organic, is as absolutely different from any process of change or becoming as we have endeavoured to show that it is, then even the functions organic to it are not described with full truth when they are said to be natural. For the constituent elements of an organism can only be truly and adequately conceived as rendered what they are by the end realised through the organism. The mechanical structure organic to life is not adequately conceived as a machine, though, for the purpose of more accurate examina- tion of the structure in detail, it may be convenient to treat it as such. And, for a like reason, the state of the case in regard to a man is not fairly represented by saying that, though not merely an animal or natural, he is so in respect of the processes of physical change through which an intelligent consciousness is realised in him. In strict truth the man who knows, so far from being an animal altogether, is not an animal at all or even in part. The functions, which would be those of a natural or animal life if they were not organic to the end consisting in knowledge, just because they are so organic, are not in their full reality natural functions, though the purposes of detailed investigation of them^perhaps the purpose of improving man's estate — may be best served by so treating them. For one who could comprehend the whole state of the case, even a digestion that served to nourish a brain, which was in turn organic to knowledge, would be essentially different from digestion in an animal incapable of knowledge, even if it were not the case that the digestive, process is itself affected by the end to which it is mediately relative. And, if this is true of those processes which are directly or indirectly organic to knowledge but do not constitute or enter into it, much more is it true of the man capable of knowledge, that in himself he is not an animal, not a link in the chain of natural becoming, in part any more than at all. CH.II1] THE FREEDOM OF MAN AS INTELLIGENCE 91 80. The question whether a man himself, or in himself, is a natural or animal being, can only mean whether he is so in respect of that which renders him conscious of himself. There is no sense in asking what anything in itself is, if it has no self at all. That which is made what it is wholly by relations to other things, neither being anything but their joint result nor distinguishing itself from them, has no self to be enquired about. Such is the case with all things in inorganic nature. Of them at any rate the saying ' Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale ' is true without qualification. The distinction between inner and outer, between what they are in themselves and what they are in relation to other things, has no application to them. In an organism, on the other hand, the distinction between its relations and itself does appear. The life of a living body is not, like the motion of a moving body, simply the joint result of its relations to other things. It modifies those relations, and modifies them through a nature not reducible to them, not constituted by their combination. Their bearing on it is different from what it would be if it did not live ; and there is so far a meaning in saying that the organism is something in itself other than what its relations make it — that, while it is related to other things according to mechanical and chemical laws, it has itself a nature which is not mechanical or chemical. There is a significance, accordingly, in the enquiry what this nature in itself is, which there is not in the same enquiry as applied to anything that does not live. But the living body does not, as such, present its nature to itself in consciousness. It does not consciously distinguish itself from its relations. Man, on the other hand, does so distinguish himself, and his doing so is his special distinction. The enquiry, therefore, what he in himself is, must refer not merely to a character which he has as more, and other, than a joint result of relations to other things — such a character he has as simply living, — but to the character which he has as consciously distinguishing himself from all that happens to him. 92 METAPHYSICS OF KNOWLEDGE [bk. 1 81. Now this distinction by man of himself from events is no less essentially different from any process in time or any natural becoming than is the activity of knowledge, which indeed depends upon it. It is through it that he is conscious of time, of becoming, of a personal history ; and the active principle of this consciousness cannot itself be determined by these relations in the way of time or becom- ing, which arise for consciousness through its action. The ' punctum stans,' to which an order of time must be relative that it may be an order of time, cannot itself be a moment or a series of moments in that order ; nor can the ' punctum stans' in consciousness, necessary to the presentation of time, be itself a succession in consciousness. And that which is true in regard to the mere presentation of time is true also of everything presented in time, of all becoming, of every history. To be conscious of it we must unite its several stages as related to each other in the way of succession ; and to do that we must ourselves be, and distinguish our- selves as being, out of the succession. 'hvayKq Spa afuy^ nvm TOP vovv, & qualified and limited by the nature of those processes, but which is so far essentially a reproduction of the one supreme- subject, implied in the existence of the world, that the pro- duct carries with it under all its limitations and qualifications the characteristic of being an object to itself. It is the particular human self or person, we hold, thus constituted, that in every moral action, virtuous or vicious, presents to itself some possible state or achievement of its own as for. the time its' greatest good, and acts for the sake of that good. The kind of good which at any point in his life the person presents to himself as greatest depends, we admit, on his past experience — his past passion and action — and on cir- cumstances. But throughout the past experience he has beea CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL iii an object to himself, and thus the author of his acts in the sense just stated. And as for the circumstances, in the first place they only affect his action through the medium of that idea of his own good upon which he makes them converge ; and, secondly, in respect of that part of them which is most important in its bearing on conduct, they themselves presup- pose personal, self-seeking ' agency of the kind described. 100. It will probably be objected that it makes no practical difference to the moral freedom of the individual, whether or no the circumstances by which he is influenced are of strictly natural or of specially human origin, so long as it is not to the individual's own action that they are due. That there is a sense of 'freedom,' indeed, in which it is very differently affected by such a ' circumstance ' as hunger or imminent death, and by such another ' circumstance ' as the customs and expectations of a society to which the individual belongs, will hardly be disputed. The freedom of an action must be taken to mean simply its imputability in the juristic sense, if it is alleged that it makes no difference to its freedom whether the agent is influenced in doing it by the circumstance of pressing physical need, or by the circumstance that his honour is appealed to by his family or his state. Before taking further notice, however, of the very various senses in which freedom is asserted of man, and of the relation in which our doctrine stands to them, it will be well to guard against further liability to misapprehension in respect of the doctrine itself ^ ' Do you mean,' it may be asked, ' to assert the existence of a mysterious abstract entity which you call the self of ' The distinction between that sort of self-seeking which is the characteristic of all action susceptible of moral attributes, and that which is specially characteristic of bad moral action, will be considered in the sequel, " [The author must have determined, after this paragraph was written, to omit the fuller account of the diiferent senses of ' freedom ' which was sometimes given in his lectures and is promised here. It is now printed in the second volume of Green's Works, edited by, R. L. Nettleship.] 112 THE WILL [bk. 11 a man, apart from all his particular feelings, desires, and thoughts — all the experience of his inner life?' To such a question we should reply, to begin with, that of ' entities ' we know nothing, except as a dyslogistic term denoting something in which certain English psychological writers seem to suppose that certain other writers believe, but in which, so far as known, no one has stated his own belief. That the self, as we conceive it, is in a certain sense 'mysterious' we admit. It is in a sense mysterious that there should be such a thing as a world at all. The old question, why God made the world, has never been answered, nor will be. We know not why the world should be ; we only know that there it is. In like manner we know not why the eternal subject of that world should reproduce itself, through certain processes of the world, as the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self of this or that man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. We can only say that, upon the. best analysis we can make of our experi- ence, it seems that so it does. That in thus reproducing itself, however, it remains an. ' abstract ' self, apart from the desires, feelings, and thoughts of the individual man, is just the notion we seek to set aside. Just as we hold that our desires, feelings, and thoughts would not be what they are — would not be those of a man — if not related to a subject which distinguishes itself from each and all of them ; so we hold that this subject would not be what it is, if it were not related to the particular feelings, desires, and thoughts, which it thus distinguishes from and presents to itself. If we are told that the Ego or self is an abstraction from the facts of our inner experience— something which we 'accustom ourselves to suppose ' as a basis or substratum for these, but which exists only logically, not really, — it is a fair rejoinder, that these so-called facts, our particular feelings, desires, and thoughts, are abstractions, if considered other- wise than as united in the character of an agent who is an object to himself. The difficulty of saying what this all- uniting, self-seeking, self-realising subject is — the ' mystery ' CH.l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 113 that belongs to it — arises from its being the only thing, or a form of the only thing, that is real (so to speak) in its own right ; the only thing of which the reality is not relative and derived. For this reason it can neither be defined by contrast with any co-ordinate reality, as the several forms of inner experience which it determines may be defined by contrast with each other j nor as a modification or determina- tion of anything else. We can only know it by a reflection on it which is its own action ; by analysis of the expression it has given to itself in language, literature, and the institu- tions of human life ; and by consideration of what that must be which has thus expressed itself. 101. Having said that the self, as here understood, is not something. apart from feelings, desires and thoughts, but that which unites them, or which they become as united, in the character of an agent who is an object to himself, we have implied that there is a sense in which the self has a history, though there is another in which it has none. As has already often enough been pointed out, the eternal subject, which is the condition of there being a succession in time, cannot itself exist as a succession. And its reproduction of itself in man carries with it the same characteristic, in so far as the man presents himself to himself as the subject to which the experiences of a life-time and, mediately through them, the events of the world's history are relative. Such presentation is a timeless act, through which alone man can become aware of an order of time or becoming, or can be capable of such development as can rightly be called moral ; of which it is an essential condition that it be united by a single con- sciousness. On the other hand, just as there is a growth of knowledge in man, though knowledge is only possible through the action in him of the eternal subject, so is there a growth of character, though the possibility of there being a character in the moral sense is similarly conditioned. It grows with the ever-new adoption of desired objects by a self-presenting and, in that sense, eternal subject as its personal good. The act of adoption is the act of a subject which has not come I 114 THE WILL [bk. II to be ; the act itself is not in time, in the sense of being an event determined by previous events; but its product is a further step in that order of becoming which we call the formation of a character, in the growth of some habit of wUL 102. We can only express this state of the case by saying that the form in which the self or Ego at any time presents a highest good to itself — and it is on this presentation that conduct depends — is due to the past history of its inner life; but that, throughout, to make this history there has been necessary an action of the Ego, which has no history, has not come to be, but which is the condition of our being conscious of any history or becoming. The particular modes in which I now feel, desire and think, arise out of the modes in which I have previously done so ; but the common characteristic of all these has been that in them a subject was conscious of itself as its own object, and thus self- determined. Whatever influences have determined it have done so through, or as taken into, its self-consciousness. It is to the Ego thus constituted, conscious of its nature — of all that makes it what it is, temper, character, ability — as its own, that new feelings and desires occur from moment to moment, upon the suggestion (to use the most general term) of circumstances. Just as feelings may, and constantly do, come and go without being attended to, so desires con- stantly arise and pass without exciting any reaction on the part of the Ego, without its placing itself in an attitude of acceptance or rejection towards them. In that case no action, in the moral sense, takes place, and the character, in that sense in which it is the basis of moral goodness 'or badness, is not affected ; though probably even from such ' unconscious ' ^ experiences there remain consequences affecting the conditions with which the character afterwards ' I use the word ' unconscious ' here advisedly, in order to call attention to an ambiguity in the use of the term ; which is sometimes applied in a strict sense to a process which is not one of conscious- ness at all, but merely nervous or automatic, sometimes in a less strict s ense to a process of consciousness not attended to or reflected upon. CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 115 has to deal. In other cases the Ego does react upon the experience of the moment. Through this reaction, in the region of knowledge as distinct from practice^ an image recurring becomes an object to be thought about, a feeling becomes a fact to be known ; other facts and objects are recalled from past experience, to be brought into relation with the given fact or given object, and there is thus con- stituted an act of speculative thought or knowledge, an act in which the man sets himself to understand something. Or, through another form of the same reaction, the Ego identifies itself with some desire, and sets itself to bring into real existence the ideal object, of which the consciousness is involved in the desire. This constitutes an act of will; which is thus always free, not in the sense of being undetermined by a motive, but in the sense that the motive lies in the man himself, that he makes it and is aware of doing so, and hence, however he may excuse himself, imputes to himself the act which is nothing else than the expression of the motive. 103. An ambiguity in the use of this term motive has caused much ambiguity in the controversy that has raged over 'free-will.' The champions of free-will commonly suppose that, before the act, a man is affected by various motives, none of which necessarily determines his act ; and that between these he makes a choice which is not itself determined by any motive. Their opponents, on the other hand, argue that there is no such thing as this unmotived choice, but that the motive which, possibly after a period of conflict with other motives, ultimately proves the strongest, necessarily determines the act. They have to admit, indeed, that the prevalence of this or that motive depends on the man's character ; but the character, they say, itself results from the previous operatiori of motives, by which they understand simply desires and aversions. As against the former view it must be urged that, how- ever we may try to give meaning to the assertion that an act of will is a choice without a motive, we cannot do so. Unless there is an object which a man seeks or avoids in Il6 THE WILL [bk.II doing an act, there is no act of will. Thus a motive is necessary to make such an act. It is involved in it, is part of it ; or rather it is the act of will, in its relation to the agent as distinct from its relation to external consequences. On the other hand, the motive which is thus necessarily involved in the act of will, is. not a motive in the same sense in which each of the parties to the controversy con- stantly uses the term. It is not one of the mere desires or aversions, between which the advocate of 'free-will' supposes a man to exercise an arbitrary choice, and of which the strongest, according to the opposite view, necessarily pre- vails. It is constituted by the reaction of the man's self upon these, and its identification of itself with one of them, as that of which the satisfaction forms for the time its object. 104. We may say, for instance, that there are various 'motives,' i.e. desires and aversions, which tend to make A. B. pay a debt, others which tend to prevent him from paying it. He wishes for the good opinion of others, for the approval of his conscience, for the sense of relief which he would obtain by paying it. On the other hand, he wishes for sundry pleasures which he would have to forego in paying it. Let us suppose that finally the debt is paid. The act of payment represents, expresses, is made what it is by a motive ; by the consciousness of an object which the man seeks in doing the act. This object, however, as an object of will, is not merely one of the objects of desire or aversion, of which the man was conscious before he willed. It is a particular self-satisfaction to be gained in attaining one of these objects or a combination of them. The ' motive ' which the act of will expresses is the desire for this self-satisfaction. It is not one of the ' motives,' the desires or aversions, of which the man was conscious previously to the act, as disposing him to it ; at any rate, not one of these or a combination of them, as they were before the deter- mination of the will, before the man 'made up his mind.' It is only as they become through the reaction of the self- CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 117 seeking self upon them, and through its formation to itself of an object out of them — only as they merge in an effort after a self-satisfaction to be found in this object,— that they yield the motive of the act of will, properly so called. 105. This motive does indeed necessarily determine the act ; it is the act on its inner side. But it is misleading to call it the strongest motive ; for this implies a certain parity between it and the impulses which have been previously soliciting the will. The distinction of greater or less strength properly apphes only to 'motives' in that sense in which they do not determine the will — to desires and aversions, as they are without that reaction of the self upon them which yields the final motive expressed by the action. It may very well happen that the desire which affects a man most strongly is one which he decides on resisting. In spite of its strength, he cannot make its object his object, the object with which he seeks to satisfy himself. His character prevents this. In other words, it is incompatible with his steady direction of himself towards certain objects in which he habitually seeks satisfaction. If we like, we may express the state of the case by saying that his strength of character overcomes the strength of the desire. There is no intrinsic objection to this metaphorical application of the term ' strength ' ; all our terms for what is spiritual being metaphors from what is physical. But, if we would save ourselves from being misled by our metaphor, we must bear two things in mind. In the first place the power by which the ' strong ' desire or motive is overcome, is not that of a co-ordinate desire or motive — not that of a desire or motive in the same sense of the words — but the power of a desire with the satisfaction of which (as explained) the man has identified his good, as he had not identified it with the satisfaction of the desire overcome. In the second place, the term ' strength ' is not applied in the same sense to the desire which affects a man, and to the character which is the man. A ' strong ' desire means gener- ally a desire which causes much disturbance in the tenour 1 18 THE WILL [bK. II of a man's conscious life : a strong character means that habitual concentration of a man's faculties towards the fulfil- ment of certain purposes, good or bad, which commonly pre- vents the disturbance caused by strong desire from making its outward sign, from appearing in the man's behaviour. If we are sometimes tempted to say that the weakest men have the strongest desires, the plausibility of such a statement is due to the fact that the strength of the stronger man's character makes us ignore the strength of his desires. What we call a strong character we also call a strong ' will.' This is not to be regarded as a particular endowment or faculty, like a retentive memory, or a lively imagination, or an even temper, or a great passion for society. A strong will means a strong man. It expresses a certain quality of the man himself, as distinguishable from all his faculties and tendencies, a quality which he has in relation to all of them alike. It means that it is the man's habit to set clearly be- fore himself certain objects in which he seeks self-satisfaction, and that he does not allow himself to be drawn aside from these by the suggestions of chance desires. He need not therefore be a good man ; for the objects upon which he con- centrates himself may be morally bad, according to the criteria of badness which we have yet to consider. But, on the other hand, the weak man, taking his object at any time from the desire which happens to affect him most strongly, cannot be a good man. Concentration of will does not necessarily mean goodness, but it is a necessary condition of goodness. 106. According to what has been said, the proposition, current among ' determinists,' that a man's action is the joint result of his character and circumstances, is true enough in a certain sense, and, in that sense, is quite compatible with an assertion of human freedom. It is not so compatible, if character and circumstances are considered reducible, directly or indirectly, to combinations and sequences of natural events. \X.is so compatible, if a 'free cause,' consisting in a subject which is its own object, a self-distinguishing and CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 119 self-seeking subject, is recognised as making both character and circumstances what they are. It is not necessary to moral freedom that, on the part of the person to whom it belongs, there should be an indeterminate possibility of becoming and doing anything and everything. A man's possibilities of doing and becoming at any moment of his life are as thoroughly conditioned as those of an animal or a plant ; but the conditions are different. The conditions that determine what a plant or animal or any natural agent shall do or become, are not objects that it presents to itself; not objects in which it seeks self-satisfaction. On the other hand, whatever conditions the man's possibilities does so through his self-consciousness. The climate in which he lives, the food and drink accessible to him, and other strictly physical circumstances, no doubt make a difference to him ; but it is only through the medium of a conception of personal good, only so far as the man out of his relations to them makes to himself certain objects in which he seeks self- satisfaction, that they make a difference to him as a man or moral being. It is only thus that they affect his character and those moral actions which are properly so called as representing a character. Any difference which circum- stances make to a man, except as affecting the nature of the personal good for which he lives, of the objects which he makes his own, is of a kind with the difference they make to the colour of his skin or the quality of his secretions. He is concerned with it, he cannot live as if it were not, but it is still not part of himself It is still so far aloof from him that it rests with him, with his character, to determine what its moral bearing on him shall be. For that moral bearing de- pends not directly on the physical circumstances, but on the object which, upon occasion or in view of the circumstances, he presents to himself The imminence of the same dangers will make a hero of one man, a rake of another, a miser of a third. The character which makes circumstances, physically the same, so diverse in their moral influence, has doubtless had its history ; but the history which thus determines moral I20 THE WILL [bk. II action has been a history o/" moral action, i.e. of action in which the agent has been an object to himself, seeking to realise an idea of his own good which he is conscious of presenting to himself. 107. The less patient reader may here be inclined to object that, in professing to oppose the naturalistic view of human action, we have given up the only position that was worth defending. ' Does not this account of moral action,' he will ask, ' though you call it a vindication of freedom, lead to all the practical ill consequences to which the strictly physical theory of the matter is said to lead? If a man's character and circumstances together necessarily determine his action, is he not entitled to say, " I have got my charac- ter, it matters not how ; my circumstances are given ; there- fore I cannot help acting as I do " ? And when once he has learnt to use this language, will there not be an end to shame and remorse, and to all effort after self-reformation ? ' Such an objection implies a misconception of the real meaning of the doctrine objected to, which may be partly due to the form in which it is commonly stated. That moral action is a joint result of character and circumstances is not altoge- ther an appropriate statement of it. It would be better to say that moral action is the expression of a man's character, as it reacts upon and responds to given circumstances. We might thus prevent the impression which the ordinary statement, in default of due consideration, is apt to convey, the impression that a man's character is something other than himself; that it is an alien force, which, together with the other force called circumstances, converges upon him, moving him in a direction which is the resultant of the two forces combined, and in which accordingly he cannot help being carried. 108. It can only be by some such impression as this that the objection, just stated, is to be accounted for. It disap- pears upon a due consideration of what is meant by character. An action which expresses character has no must, in the CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL I2l physical sense, about it. The ' can't help it ' has no appli- cation to it. Where it has any true application the action is not determined by character, any more than is a sneeze, or a twitching produced by a galvanic battery. A character is only formed through a man's conscious presentation to himself of objects as his good, as that in which his self- satisfaction is to be found. Just so far as an action is deter- mined by character, it is determined by an object which the agent has thus consciously made his own, and has come to make his own in consequence of actions similarly determined. He is thus conscious of being the author of the act; he imputes it to himself. The very excuses that he makes for it— not less when they take the form of an appeal to some fatalistic or 'necessarian' doctrine than in a more vulgar guise^are evidence that he does so. And in such a case the evidence of consciousness, fairly interpreted, is final. The suggestion that consciousness may not correspond with reality is, here at least, unmeaning. The whole question is one of consciousness, a question of the relation in which a man consciously stands to objects (those of desire) which exist only in and for consciousness. If the man is consci- ously determined by himself in being determined by those objects, he is so really : or rather this statement is a mere pleonasm, for the only reality in question is consciousness. 109. It is strictly a contradiction, then, to say that an action which a man's character determines, or which ex- presses his character, is one that he cannot help doing. It represents him as standing in a relation to external agency, while doing the act, in which he does not stand if his character determines it. We may say, if we like, without any greater error than that of inappropriate phraseology, that, given the agent's character and circumstances as they at any time are, the action ' cannot help being done,' if by that we merely mean that the action is as necessarily related to the character and circumstances as any event to the sum of its conditions. The meaning in that case is not untrue; but the expression is inappropriate, for it implies a kind of 122 THE WILL [bK. II personification of the action. It speaks of the action, as abstracted from the agent, in terms only appropriate to an agent whose powers are directed by a force not his own. It is probably a sort of confusion between the improper sense in which it may be said that a moral action cannot help being done, because the outcome of character in con- tact with certain circumstances, and the proper sense in which it is said that a man under compulsion cannot help doing something, which generates the notion that, if an action is the result of character and circumstances, the agent cannot help doing it and is a necessary agent. All results are necessary results. If a man's action is the result of his character and circumstances, we in effect add nothing by saying that it is their necessary result. If it is not the result of character or circumstances, or (as we prefer to say) if it is not the expression of a character in contact with certain circumstances, there must be some further element that contributes to its determination. What is that further element ? ' Free-will,' some one may say. Yery well ; but ' free-will ' is either a name for you know not what, or it is included, is the essential factor, in character. Rightly un- derstood, the ascription of an action to character as, in respect to circumstances, its cause, is just that which effec- tually distinguishes it as free or moral from any compulsory or merely natural action. It is simply a confusion to sup- pose that, because an action is a result — and if a result, a necessary result — of character and circumstance, the agent is therefore a ' necessary ' agent, in the sense of being an in- strument of external force or a result of natural events and agencies ; in other words, that ' he cannot help ' acting as he does. Nay, it is more than a confusion : it is an infer- ence positively forbidden by the proposition from which it is inferred. For to say that character is a determinant of the act, is, as we have seen, to deny that it proceeds from an agent in this sense ' necessary.' 110. The view, then, that action is the joint result of character and circumstances, if we know what we are about CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 123 when we speak of character, does not render shame and remorse unaccountable and unjustifiable, any more than, in those by whom it is most thoroughly accepted, it actually gets rid of them. On the contrary, rightly understood, it alone justifies them. If a man's action did not represent his character but an arbitrary freak of some unaccountable power of unmotived willing, why should he be ashamed of it or reproach himself with it ? As little does such a view render the impulse after self-reform unaccountable, or, with those who accept it bona fide and not as an excuse for the 'sins they have a' mind to,' actually tend to weaken the impulse. There is nothing in the fact that what a man now is and does is the result (to speak pleonastically, the neces- sary result) of what he has been and has done, to prevent him from seeking to become, or from being able to become, in the future other and better than he now is, unless the capacity for conceiving a better state of himself has been lacking to him in the past or has become lost to him at present : and that this is not so is shown by the fact that he does ask the question whether and how he can become better, even though he answer the question in the negative. The dependence of a man's present and future on his past would indeed be fatal to the possibility of that self-reform which is conditional upon the wish for it, if his past had not been one in which his conduct was determined by a con- ception of personal good. But because his past has been of such a kind, there has been in it, and has been continued out of it into his present, a perpetual potentiality of self- reform, consisting in the perpetual discovery by the man that he is not satisfied ; that he has not found the personal good which he sought ; that, however many pleasures he has enjoyed, he is none the better off in himself, none the nearer to that which he would wish to be. The capacity for the conception of being better, which such an experience at once evinces and maintains, forms in itself both the inchoate impulse to realise the conception, and the possibility of its realisation. The possibility is no 124 ^^^ WILL [BK.ir doubt very different from the realisation. The inchoate im- pulse may be constantly overborne by other impulses, with the gratification of which the man for the time, from habit or strength of passion, identifies his personal good. Its actuaUsation, however, depends simply on its own relative strength, not on any accessories or command of means. The prevalent wish to be better constitutes the being better. Whether or no in any individual case it shall obtain that prevalence, depends (to use the most general expression) on the social influences brought to bear on the man ; but the influences effective for the purpose all have their origin, ulti- mately, in the desire to be better on the part of other men, as carrying with it a desire for the bettering of those in whom they are interested. The ' Grace of God ' works through no other channels but such as fall under this general descrip- tion. If, and so far as, in the past and present of individual men and of the society which is at once constituted by them and makes them what they are, this desire is operative, the dependence of the individual's present on his past, so far from being incompatible with his seeking or being able to become better than he is, is just what constitutes the defi- nite possibility of this self-improvement being sought and attained. If there were no such dependence, if I could be something to-day irrespectively of what I was yesterday, or something to-morrow irrespectively of what I am to-day, the motive to the self-reforming effort furnished by regrets for a past of which I reap the fruit, that growing success of the effort that comes with habituation, and the assurance of a better future which animates it, would alike be impossible. 111. That denial, then, of the possibility of a moral new birth, which is sometimes supposed to follow logically from the admission of a necessary connexion between present and past in human conduct, is in truth no consequence of this admission, but of the view which ignores the action of the self-presenting Ego in present and past alike. Once recognise this action, and it is seen that the necessary relation in which a man stands to his own past may be one of such conscious CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 125 revulsion from it, on account of its failure to yield the self- satisfaction which he seeks, as amounts to what is called a conversion. But, though there is no valid reason why the acceptance of ' determinism,' in the sense explained, should debar us from looking for 'changes of heart and life' in the individual, it may yet be that a misunderstanding of the doc- trine does sometimes in some degree tend to paralyse the moral initiative and weaken the power of self-reform. It is probably never fair to lay the blame of a moral deterioration or enfeeblement primarily on intellectual misapprehension ; but in a speculative age even misapprehension may tend to promote vicious tendencies, by interfering with the convic- tion which would otherwise be the beginning of their cure. The form of misunderstanding on the subject now before us, most likely to be practically mischievous, will be the con- fusion, already noticed, between the true proposition that there is a necessary connexion between character and motive, and between motive and act, and the false proposition that man is a necessary agent, in the sense of not being his own master but an instrument of natural forces. Men may be found to argue, more or less explicitly, that, if that which he is depends on what he has been and has done, and if, further, whatever he may become in the future will depend on what he now is — that if this is so, as it cannot be denied that it is, there is no good in his trying painfully to become better ; that he may as well live for the pleasure of the hour as it comes. How may such self-sophistication most compen- diously be met ? 112. In the first place, it should be pointed out that such language implies in the highest degree, on the part of any one who uses it, a self-distinguishing and self-seeking con- sciousness. But for this he could not thus present to him- self his own condition, as determined by what he has been in the past and determining what he will be in the future. Nor unless there were something which he sought to become, a good of himself as himself Ythich. he sought to attain — unless he were thus determined by himself as an object to 126 THE WILL [bK. II himself — could the question, whether there was any use in trying to improve himself instead of letting things take their course, have any meaning for him. It should be shown, secondly, that this self-distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness, with the yearning for a better state of himself, as yet unattained, which it carries with it, in a special sense makes him what he is, and has made that past history of himself, on which his present state depends, what it has been ; that therefore, just so far as his future depends on his present and his past, it depends on this consciousness, depends on a direction of his inner life in which he is self-determined and his own master, because his own object. Further, it should be shown that, so far from the depen- dence of his future upon what he now is and does being a reason for passivity, for letting things take their course (which means, practically, for following the desire or aversion of which the indulgence gives him most present pleasure or saves him most present pain), it would only be the absence of this dependence that could afford a reason for such passivity. If I could ' trammel up the consequence ' of that which at any time I am and do ; if there could be any break of continuity between what I shall be and what I am j then indeed I might be reckless of what I do, so long as it is pleasant, and, in what I allow myself to be, might take no thought of what it is desirable that I should become. It is the unthinkableness of any such break of continuity which, in the presence of the self-distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness of man, makes it impossible for the most reckless sensualist to live absolutely for the moment, and forms the standing possibility of self-improvement even in him. So long as a man presents himself to himself as possibly existing in some better state than that in which he actually is — and that he does so is implied even in his denial that the possibility can be realised — there is some- thing in him to respond to whatever moralising influences society in any of its forms or institutions, themselves the OH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 127 gradual outcome through the ages of man's free effort to better himself, may bring to bear on him. The claims of the family, the call of country, the pleading of the preacher, the appeal of the Church through eye and ear, may at any time awaken in him that which we call (in one sense, truly) a new life, but which is yet the continued working of the spirit which has never ceased to work in, upon, and about him. 113. ' But what becomes of this theory,' the enhghtened man of pleasure may reply, ' if it can be shown that the human agent, in that earliest stage of conscious personal being between which and all the following stages you admit that there is a necessary connexion, is a result of strictly physical forces and processes ? Will it not then follow that the man's life is throughout determined in the same strictly physical way as is its earliest stage of personal consciousness; and, this being so, that it is as much a delusion for him to suppose that he can alter himself for better or for worse, as it would be for a plant or an animal to suppose so ? Neither plant nor animal, indeed, is unimprovable. The produce of the plant can be modified by grafting, and improved by tillage. Animals can be trained to behave in a way in which, to begin with, they are incapable of behaving. So man, the highest of animals, is capable of improvement ; but it must be by circumstance, it must be initiated from without. The im- provement, the development, will not come for the wishing. It will come, for some, in the struggle for existence. To those for -whom it does not so come it will not come at all, and they might as well not bother themselves about it.' 114. We answer that the improvement determined by the wish to be better on the part of the improving subject — more properly, the improvement which that wish, so far as prevalent, itself constitutes — has nothing in common with an improvement of plants or animals such as that referred to, which is related to no such wish, and, if related to any wish at all, not to one on the part of the animal or plant improved. That there is such a wish, at any rate in the developed man, cannot be denied even by those who may 128 THE WILL [bk. II profess to regard it as ineffectual. We meet them, then, by saying that the child which is to be father of the man capable of such a wish, cannot be the mere child of nature ; or, conversely, that the mere child of nature cannot be father of the man, as in our own persons we know the man to be. More fully : when we say that the character of a man, and his consequent action, as it at any time stands, is the result of what his character has previously been, as gradually modified through the varying response of the character to varying circumstances, and the registration in the character of residua from these responses, we must assume, as the basis of the character throughout, a self- distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness. Unless we do so, the proposition stated will not hold good. No response to circumstances of a being which has not, or is not, this consciousness, will account for its coming to have or to be it. Such a being could not be father of the moral man affiliated to it. It will have to be admitted that the consciousness necessary to a character and exhibited in moral action has supervened from without upon the supposed primitive being. No true development will be possible of the moral man from the state of being from which he is said to have been developed, because no true thread of identity can be traced between the two states. If, recognising this, we ascribe to the man or child of the past, whose character and action we suppose to have made the man of the present what he is, that self-determining consciousness which dis- tinguishes the man as he is, the same impossibility meets us again as soon as we try to affiliate this man or child of the past to mere nature — to treat him as the outcome of natural forces and processes. It is difficult, no doubt, to understand the relation to man's self-determining consciousness of that in him which is merely natural (or, to speak more properly, of that in him which would be merely natural, if it were not related to such a consciousness) ; but we do not overcome the difficulty by ignoring the absolute difference between such a consciousness and everything else in the world, a CH. l] THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL 129 difference which remains the same, whether we do or do not extend the meaning of ' nature ' so as to include modes of being thus absolutely different. In its primitive, no less than in its most developed form, the self-determining' conscious- ness as little admits of derivation from that which has or is it not, as life from that which has or is it not. The statement then, that the human being, in the earliest stage of his conscious existence, between which and all the following stages there is a necessary connexion, is a result of forces and processes which exclude a self-determining con- sciousness, — though if it were admitted, it would be fatal to any doctrine of human freedom ,^ — cannot be admitted with- out self-contradiction. The earlier stage will not, under any modification by circumstances, account for the latter, if it is the result of the processes described, or unless it already involves the self-determining consciousness which carries freedom with it in all modes of its existence. Should the question be asked, If this self-consciousness is not derived from nature, what then is its origin ? the answer is that it has no origin. It never began, because it never was not. It is the condition of there being such a thing as beginning or end. Whatever begins or ends does so for it or in relation to it. K. CHAPTER II DESIRE, INTELLECT, AND WILL 115. The ground upon which, rightly or wrongly, the reducibility of moral conduct to a series of natural pheno- mena, and with it the possibility of a physical science of ethics, is here denied, should by this time be sufficiently plain. It lies in the view that in all conduct to which moral predicates are applicable a man is an object to himself; that such conduct, equally whether virtuous or vicious, expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal good, which the man seeks to realise by action; and that thd presentation of such an idea is not explicable by any series of events in time, but imphes the action of an eternal consciousness which makes the processes of animal life organic to a particular reproduction of itself in man. The first impression of any one reading this statement may probably be that in our zeal to maintain a distinction of ethics from natural science we have adopted a view which, if significant and true, would take away the only intelligible foundation of ethics by reducing virtuous and vicious action to the same motive ; a motive the rejection of which by the will we virtually declare to be impossible, by treating it as itself the act or expression of will. In order to avoid mis- apprehension on this point, and to explain how we under- stand that distinction between the good and the bad will which undoubtedly forms the true basis of ethics, it will be necessary to enter on a fuller discussion of the nature of Will, in its relation to Desire and Reason. lie. We are all familiar with the quasi-personifications of Desire, Reason, and Will, which in one form or another have governed the language of moral philosophy in all ages in which such philosophy has existed. Sometimes desire and reason have been represented as inviting the man in DESIRE, INTELLECT, AND WILL 131 different directions, while the will has been supposed to decide which of the two directions shall be followed. Sometimes the opposition has been represented as lying rather between different desires, of which reason however (according to the supposition) supplies the object to the one, while some irrational appetite is the source of the other; the will being the arbiter which determines the action according to the rational or irrational desire. Mean- while criticism has been always ready to suggest that the only possible conflict is between desires, to which reason is related only as the minister who counts the cost and calculates means, without having anything to do with their initiation or their direction to an end ; that the only tenable distinction between irrational and rational desires is really one between desire for the nearer pleasure "and desire for the more remote, or between desire for a pleasure which a just calculation would pronounce to be overWanced by the pains incidental to or consequent upon its ahdnment, and desire for one not liable to be thus cancelleaiQ the total result'. When this view is accepted, the will is naturally taken to " be merely a designation for any desire that happens for the time to be strong enough to determine action. ' No doubt,' it will be said, ' there is a particular class of the phenomena observable by the inner sense — a class called acts of will — which are distinguished from other events that take place in nature as being directed by our feeling. But we are not entitled to suppose that in the case of each man there is really a single agent or power exerted in his acts of willing, a single basis of these phenomena. To do so would be of a piece with the logical fiction of "things" underlying the several groups of phenomena which we connect by a common name. Any act of willing is the result of the manifold conditions which go to constitute the feeling by which it is directed — conditions most various in the various cases of willing.' ' Cf. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Book II. Part III. §§ 3, 4. K 2 133 THE WILL [bk. II The same criticism may be applied to our usual assump, tions in regard to 'desire,' and 'intelligence' or 'reason,' which we are apt to distinguish from will, as faculties having something in common with it and yet different from it. ' No doubt,' it may be said, ' there are certain inner acts or phenomena which in virtue of certain resemblances we describe by the common name " desire ; " others which on a similar ground we designate "perceptions," "conceptions" and "inferences," and afterwards reduce to the higher genus of intellectual acts. But we are deceived by a process of language if, having arrived at an abstract term to indicate the elements of likeness in these several groups of pheno- mena, we allow ourselves to believe in the existence of a single agent or faculty — desire as such — underlying the manifold desires of this or that man, and of another such faculty ^-intelligence or reason as such — underlying his manifold perceptions, conceptions and inferences.' 117. We have then first to enquire whether there is any real unity corresponding to the several terms, desire, intelli- gence, will, on the part of spiritual principles to which these terms are appropriate. Do they merely indicate each certain resemblances between certain sets of inner phenomena, a single point of view from which these several sets of phenomena may be regarded, and thus a unity not in the phenomena themselves but on the part of the person con- templating them ? Or is there, on the other hand, a single principle which manifests itself under endless diversity of circumstance and relation in all the particular desires of a man, and is thus in virtue of its own nature designated by a single name? And, in like manner, are our acts of intelligence and will severally the expression of a single principle, which renders each group of acts possible and is entitled in its own right to the single name it bears ? We shall find reason to adopt this latter view, The meaning we attach to it, however, is not that in one man there are three separate or separable principles or agents severally underlying his acts of desire, understanding, and will. We CH. ll] DESIRE 133 adopt it in the sense that there is one subject or spirit, which desires in all a man's experiences of desire, under- stands in all operations of his intelligence, wills in all his acts of willing; and that the essential character of his desires depends on their all being desires of one and the same subject which also understands, the essential character of his intelligence on its being an activity of one and the same subject which also desires, the essential character of his acts of will on their proceeding from one and the same subject which also desires and understands. 118. Let us begin with the further consideration of desire. The distinction has already been pointed out between instinctive impulse and desire of that kind which is a factor in our human experience. The latter involves a conscious- ness of its object, which in turn implies a consciousness of self. In this consciousness of objects which is also that of self, or of self which is also a consciousness of objects, we have the distinguishing characteristic of desire (as we know it), of understanding and of will, as compared with those processes of the animal soul with which they are apt to be confused. And this consciousness is also the common basis which unites desire, understanding, and will with each other. Our habitual language for expressing the life of the soul naturally lends itself to obscure the distinction upon which it is important here to insist. We constantly speak of sensation as if it were in itself a consciousness of an object by which it is excited. We speak of feeling this thing and that, which we no doubt do feel, but which we only feel because we are self-conscious ; because in feeling we distinguish ourselves from the feelings as their subject. The confusion is complicated by the common usage of feeling and consciousness as equivalent terms ; which makes it difficult to mark the difference between the fee/ing of self, implied in all pleasure and pain, and that distinguishing presentation of self, as at once the subject of feelings and other than them, which properly constitutes self-conscious- ness. Nor when we have recognised the distinction between 134 THE WILL [bk. II -mere feeling and feeling as it is in the self-conscious man, is it easy to express it. If we use one set of terms, we fail to convey the difference between sensation, as the affection of a soul or of an individual subject properly so called, and any affection of one material thing by another. Adopting another set of terms, we seem to fall into the error just noticed, of identifying mere sensation with the consciousness of self and object. 119. The unity of an individual soul is implied in all feel- ing ; or perhaps we should rather say that feeling constitutes the unity of the individual soul. The individual animal is not merely one for us, who contemplate the connexion be- tween the members organic to its life. It is one in itself, as no material atom or material compound is, in virtue of the common feeling through which, if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. It is not one, as the atom is supposed to be, in the sense of being absolutely simple and excluding everything else from itself. Nor is it one, like the material universe, merely in respect of unity of relation between manifold elements. It is one in the sense that upon certain occurrences in the parts of a peculiarly consti- tuted body there supervenes feeling, which is not any one or number of the occurrences, nor a result of their combi- nation, in the sense of being analysable into them ; which does not admit of being analysed into or explained by any- thing else, and would therefore be unknown but for our im- mediate experience of it ; which, while it is not the attribute of any or all of the elements organic to it, is incommunica- bly private to a subject experiencing it, affected by the past and affecting the future of that particular subject, his own and not another's. The question of the distinction between animals and plants, the question whether all ' animals ' feel, whether any ' plants ' do, is one of classification with which we are not here concerned. However such a question may be answered, it does not affect the importance of noticing the distinctive nature of the individuality which feeling constitutes. It is CH. Il] DESIRE 135 only indeed from experience of ourselves, not from observa- tion of the animals, that we know what this individuality is ; but according to all indications we are justified in ascribing it at any rate to all vertebrate animals. To say that they feel as men do, or that they are individual in the same sense as men, is misleading, because it is to ignore the distinctive character given to human feeling and human individuality by a self-consciousness which we have no reason to ascribe to the animals. But the assertion that they feel no less, and are no less individual, than ourselves seems to be within the mark. And if by desire we mean no more than that felt impulse after riddance from pain which pain carries with it to the individual, or that felt want which survives a feeling of pleasure ; if by will we mean no more than ' activity de- termined by feeling;' then we cannot do otherwise than ascribe desire and will to the animals. 120. But though feeling, in the sense explained, consti- tutes individuality, it does not in that sense amount to the full individuality of man. It does not make the human self what it is. Each of us is one or individual, not merely in the sense that he feels and is so far conscious, but in the sense that he presents his feelings to himself, that he dis- tinguishes himself from them, and is conscious of them as manifold relations in which he, the single self, stands to the world, — in short, as manifold facts. It is thus only as self- conscious that we are capable of knowledge, because only as self-conscious that we are aware of being in the presence of facts. Only in virtue of self-consciousness is there for us a world to be known. In that sense man's self-consciousness is his understanding. This does not of course mean that the abstract form of self-consciousness is an intelligence of facts. We know nothing of self-consciousness apart from feeling, and are probably entitled to assume that there is no such thing. The self-consciousness therefore of which we speak includes feeling; not indeed feeling as it is before the stage of self-consciousness is reached, but feeling as it is for the self-conscious soul, or feeling as manifold recog- 136 THE WILL [bk. n nised relation to an objective world. In this reality of its existence, in this actual co-operation with the senses, self- consciousness is the faculty of understanding, which in its full activity, with the progressive analysis of that which the Senses contain or reveal, becomes knowledge, or the actual understanding of a world. In the same way self-conscious- ness is the faculty or possibility of desire, in so far as it is the characteristic of desire to be directed to objects pre- sent to the mind of the person desiring them. If this statement seems strange, it is because we are misled by our habit of abstraction. Regarding self-con- sciousness in unreal detachment from the sensations which to the self-conscious soul become intelligible facts, we find a paradox in the statement that it is the basis of under- standing. For a like reason, because we are habituated to abstract self-consciousness from the wants and impulses which are the sequela of sensation, we stumble at the notion of our desires being founded on self-consciousness. We suppose self-consciousness, in short, apart from a soul and from the activities of sense and appetite which belong to a soul before self-consciousness supervenes. We then oppose it to those very faculties and acts of desire and understanding which are really its expression, in the sense that it is only as self-conscious that the soul exhibits them. No doubt, if self-consciousness were not the self-conscious- ness of a soul, if it did not supervene upon a sentient and appetitive life, it would not exhibit itself as understanding and desire; but neither would it be what it is at all. The forms of psychical activity on which it supervenes are carried on into it, though with a character altered by its supervention. They form its content, its filling; not one, however, which remains what it was upon the first mani- festation of self-consciousness in the soul, but one which is constantly taking new determinations to itself through the activity of which self-consciousness is the distinguishing form. 121. Just as the action of self-consciousness in under- standing becomes apparent as soon as we ask ourselves CH. Il] DESIRE 137 how the facts with which our intelligence deals come to be there for us — how occurrences of sensation come to be apprehended by us as facts — so its action in desire becomes apparent as soon as we ask ourselves how the objects to which our desires are directed, and which make them what they are, come to arise in our minds. To take an elemen- tary instance, how do we come to desire food? Because we are hungry, is the answer that first suggests itself. But, before we accept the answer, we must enquire more care- fully what we mean by the desire. Do we mean by it (i) hunger itself, as a particular sort of painful feeling ; or (2) an instinctive impulse to obtain food, excited by this painful feeling but without consciousness of an object to which the impulse is directed ; or (3) an impulse excited by the image of a pleasure previously experienced in eating, such as we seem to notice in a well-fed dog or cat when the dinner-bell rings ; or {4) desire for an object in the proper sense ; /. e. for something which the desiring subject presents to itself as distinct at once from itself, the subject that desires, and from other objects which might be desired but for the time are not ? It is only if we understand ' desire for food ' in the second of these senses that any one can be said to desire food merely because he is hungry. In the first sense the desire, being the same thing as hunger, obviously cannot be explained by it, but only by a physiological account of the way in which hunger arises. In the two latter senses of the 'desire for food' hunger does not account for it. Hunger, whether considered simply as a painful feeling or as involving an instinctive impulse to remove that feehng, may exist without the desire for food in either of these senses. The quest and taking of food do not necessarily imply more than hunger and an instinctive impulse to remove it. They do not necessarily imply even the revival of an image of pleasure previously associated with eating some sort of food ; much less desire for an object, presented as such. To begin with, even by the human infant, food 138 THE WILL [bk. II must be sought and obtained instinctively, without any previous experience of it as something that will remove the pain of hunger, without any presentation to the mind of the removal of pain as an end to which means are to be sought. If the quest of food must thus in some cases be instinctive, ?'.«. carried on without consciousness of an object to which it is directed, there is nothing to show that it is not so in all, ex- cept where an experience of our own, or an experience which admits of communication to us, testifies to the contrary. 122. Now that which takes place in the soul of an animal when hungry and seeking food is not an experience of this kind. The reason, therefore, which we have for saying of ourselves or our fellow-men that we desire food as an object of which we are conscious, does not apply to animals. Those animals indeed with which we chiefly associate, exhibit all the signs of impulses to action excited by recurrent images of pleasure previously experienced, but this recurrence of the image of a past pleasure does not in itself amount to the consciousness of a desired object consisting in a particular pleasure. Self-consciousness is implied in the one as it is not in the other. The mere revival in a sentient subject of the image of a past pleasure, with the consequent impulse after the renewal of the pleasure, does not imply any con- sciousness by the subject of itself in distinction from the pleasure, as the subject which has enjoyed it, and may enjoy it again, and which has also enjoyed other pleasures comparable with it ; nor any consciousness of an objective world to which belong the conditions of the pleasure — the means to it, and its consequences. 123. As our principal concern is to ascertain what desire in ourselves is, not what desire in the animals is not, we need not dwell on the objections which naturally suggest themselves to the view that the actions of animals in all cases admit of being explained without the ascription to them of self-consciousness. They are objections which would probably disappear when once the difference was realised between the existence of an individual soul and the in- CH. u] DESIRE 139 dividual's presentation of his individuality to himself— his distinction of himself from relations in which he stands to a world. Even when the difference has been apprehended, the affectionate observer of the dog and the horse may be slow to admit that their behaviour represents merely the sequence of impulses upon images of pain and pleasure, without conscious reference to self or to a world; which means without either such memory or such perception, such fear or such hope, as ours. We cannot deny, at any rate of the beasts friendly to man, that in a certain sense they learn by experience ; that the processes by which the trained or practised animal seeks to obtain the pleasure or avoid the pain, of which the imagination excites its impulse, imply the association with the imagined pleasure or pain of the images of many sensations which have been found to be connected with that pleasure or pain. It is readily assumed that such habitual sequence of images amounts to an experience of facts like our own ; to an apprehension of an objective world, of which the necessary correlative is consciousness of self. The assumption becomes inveterate through the practice of describing the behaviour of animals in terms derived from our own experience, — a practice constantly becoming more prevalent, as the description of animal life becomes a more favourite subject of literary art. It is not to the purpose here to.criticise the assumption in detail. It is enough to point out that it is an assumption ; that the consciousness of objects as such, whether objects of knowledge or objects of desire, is more and other than any established sequence of images or any direction of desire by- such sequent images ; and that this consciousness of objects, whether any animals partake of it or no, is the characteristic thing in human experience, both in the ex- perience through which we become acquainted with nature and in that through which morality arises. 124. The desire for food— to return to that primary instance — though there are senses in which it is independent of self-consciousness, is not in those senses an element in 140 THE WILL [bk. n our moral experience. As a determinant of our action as men, it is a desire for an object, of the presentation of which self-consciousness is the condition. Whether we take the object desired to be the removal of a particular pain or enjoyment of a particular pleasure, or the maintenance of life and strength, or some further object for the sake of which life and strength are sought ; or whether we suppose a wish for each of these ends to be included in the unity of a will directed to the taking of food ; in any case the object is rendered an object to us by a self which distinguishes itself from its experience. The pain of hunger, the pleasure of eating, are alike presented as constituents in a universe of pains and pleasures, which the subject contemplates himself as possibly suffering and enjoying, and in relation to which he places the pain or pleasure that for the time predominates in his imagination. There is for him a world of feeling, how- ever limited in its actual range yet boundless in capacity, of which he presents himself as the centre. It is by its relation to this world that any particular pleasure is defined for him as an object of desire, and thus, however animal in its origin, becomes to him, through such reference to a ' before and after ' of experience, what it is not to the animal that feels but does not distinguish itself from its immediate feeling. This being true even of animal pleasure, if desired as an object or as we desire it, it is more plainly true of such an object as the maintenance of life and strength, and of any end for the sake of which life and strength are desired. To conceive his life as an end, to conceive ends for which he seeks to live, are clearly the functions only of a being who can distinguish the manifold of his experience actual and possible from himself, and at the same time gather it to- gether as related to his single self. 125. Even those desires of a man, then, which originate in animal want or susceptibility to animal pleasure, in the sense that without such want or susceptibility they would not be, yet become what they are in man, as desires consciously directed to objects, through the self-consciousness which is CH. n] DESIRE 141 the condition of those objects or any objects being presented. And it is only as consciously directed to objects that they have a moral quality or contribute to make us what we are as moral agents. To desire food, in the sense either of being hungry or of having an impulse excited by an imagination of some pleasure of eating, without reference to a self which presents the pleasure to itself as a good among other possible good things, is not a function of our moral nature. If in our waking and sane life we are capable of such a merely animal experience at all, it at any rate does not affect us for the better or worse as men. It has no bearing on the state of soul or character to which the terms good or bad in the moral sense are applied. In order to have such a bearing, however dependent on susceptibilities of the animal soul, it must take its essential character from that supervention of self-consciousness upon these susceptibilities through which a man becomes aware of the pleasure derived from them as an end which he makes his own. 126. Nor can it be admitted that those desired objects which are of most concern in the moral life of the civilised and educated man, who has outgrown mere sensuality, are directly dependent on animal susceptibilities at all. It is not merely their character as objects which the man makes his good that they owe to self-consciousness. The suscepti- bilities in which the desires themselves originate, unlike the susceptibilities to the pain of hunger or pleasure of eating, do not arise out of the animal system, but out of a state of things which only self-conscious agents can bring about. The conflict of the moral life would be a much simpler affair than it is if it were mainly fought over those ' bodily pleasures,' in dealing with which, according to Aristotle, the qualities of ' continence and incontinence ' are exhibited. The most formidable forces which 'right reason' has to subdue or render contributory to some ' true good ' of man, are passions of which reason is in a certain sense itself the parent. They are passions which the animals know not. Because they are excited by the conditions of distinctively 142 THE WILL [bk. II human society. They relate to objects which only the intercourse of self-conscious agents can bring into existence. This is often true of passions which on first thoughts we might be inclined to reckon merely animal appetites. The drunkard probably drinks, as a rule, not for the pleasure of drinking, but to drown pains or win pleasures — pains for instance of self-reproach, pleasures of a quickened fancy or of a sense of good fellowship — of which only the thinking man is capable. The love which is apt to be most danger- ously at war with duty is not a mere sexual impulse, but the passion for a person, in which the consciousness on the lover's part both of his own individuality and of that of the beloved person is at the utmost intensity. Our envies, jealousies, and ambitions— whatever the resemblance between their outward signs and certain expressions of emotion in animals — are all in their proper nature distinctively human, because all founded on interests possible only to self-con- scious beings. We cannot separate such passions from their exciting causes. Take away those occasions of them which arise out of our intercourse as persons with persons, and the passions themselves as we know them disappear. The advantages which I envy in my neighbour, the favour of society or of a particular person which I lose and he wins and which makes me jealous of him, the superiority in form or power or place of which the imagination excites my ambition — these would have no more existence for an agent not self-conscious, or not dealing with other self-conscious agents, than colour has for the blind. 127. It should further be noticed that not only do those desires and passions which form part of our moral experience depend on the action of a self-conscious soul in respect of the presentation of their objects, many of them also in respect of the conditions under which the susceptibility to them arises, but that the same action is implied in the manner in which they qualify each other. We are apt to speak of our desires for this object and that as if each operated on us singly, or as if each had its effect on us CH. Il] DESIRE 143 independently of the others, though our conduct may repre- sent their combined result. But such language is not a true expression of our experience. We are never so exclusively possessed by the desire for any object as to be quite un- affected by the thought of other desired objects, of which we are conscious that the loss or gain would have a bearing on our happiness. In reflection upon our motives we abstract the predominant desire from that qualification, whether in the way of added strength or of abatement, which it derives from the belief on the part of the desiring subject that its satisfaction involves the satisfaction or frustration of other desires. But it is in fact always so qualified. Our absorption in it is never so complete but that the consideration of a possible happiness conditional upon the satisfaction of other desires makes a difference to it, though it may not be such a difference as makes its sign in outward conduct. We do not indeed desire the objects of our ordinary interests for the sake of our general happi- ness, any more than for the sake of the pleasure which the satisfaction of desire constitutes. As has often been pointed out, if there were not desires for particular objects other than the desire for happiness, there could be no such thing as the desire for happiness ; for there would be nothing to constitute the happiness desired. But in every desire I so far detach myself from the desire as to conceive myself in possible enjoyment of the satisfaction of other desires, in other words, as a subject of happiness ; and the desire itself is more or less stimulated or checked, according as its gratification in this involuntary forecast appears conducive to happiness or otherwise. 128. Even with the man of most concentrated purpose, the object on which his heart is set— e.^. the acquisition of an estate, election to Parliament, the execution of some design in literature or art — though it may admit of descrip- tion by a single phrase, really involves the satisfaction of many different desires. The several objects of these admit of distinction, but they are not to be considered so many 144 THE WILL [bk. II separate forces combining to make up the actual resultant motive. No one of them apart from the rest would be what it is, because each, as it really actuates the man, is affected by the desire for personal well-being ; and that well-being presents itself to him as involving the satisfaction of them all. In the cases of concentrated purpose supposed, the man has come to identify his well-being with his success in bringing about a certain event or series of events. To him, as he forecasts his future, the possibility of that success being attained (his acquisition of the estate, his election to Parlia- ment) presents itself as the possibility of his greatest good. It would not seem so, indeed, unless he had (or had once had) various desires, each directed to its specific object other than his well-being, and unless he contemplated the satisfac^ tion of these desires as involved in this particular success ; but on the other hand no one of these desires would actuate him as it does, in the way of directing all his effort to the single end for which he Uves, unless it were strengthened and sustained by the anticipation of a well-being, in which he conceives the satisfaction of the other desires to be as much involved as the satisfaction of this particular one. The conception of this well-being is the medium through which each desire is at once qualified and reinforced by all the rest, in directing the man's effort to that end in which he presents to himself the satisfaction of them all. In the case of men whose effort is less concentrated in its direction, who live with more divided aims, though 'chance desires' have greater weight, yet none of these is unaffected by the idea of a happiness not to be identified with the satisfaction of any single desire. Now it is only to the self-conscious soul, which dis- tinguishes itself from all desires in turn, that such an idea is possible. In this further sense, then — not only as the con- dition (i) of the presentation of objects, whether desired or perceived, and (2) of the susceptibilities in which those of our desires which are of most moral importance for good or evil originate, but (3) as the source of the idea of happiness — CH. ll] DESIRE 145 it is self-consciousness that makes the action of desire what it really is in the life of moral beings. If it is true that no desire actuates us without qualification by the consciousness of our capacity for other experience than that which this particular desire constitutes, then, in that sense, as well as in the other senses indicated, it is true that every desire which actuates us has a character that self-consciousness gives it. The objects of a man's various desires form a system, con- nected by memory and anticipation, in which each is quali- fied by the rest ; and just as the object of what we reckon a single desire derives its unity from the unity of the self-pre- senting consciousness in and for which alone it exists, so the system of a man's desires has its bond of union in the single subject, which always carries with it. the consciousness of objects that have been and may be desired into the con- sciousness of the object which at present is being desired. 129. To revert then to the question from which this part of our discussion started, we shall be right in refusing to admit that particular desires are the only realities and that ' Desire ' is a logical fiction; right in asserting a real existence of Desire as such, if by this we understand the one soul or subject, and that a self-conscious soul or subject, which desires in all the desires of each of us, and as belonging to which alone, as related to each other through relation to it, our several desires are what they are. But if we mean anything else than this when we hypostatise desire — as we do when we talk of Desire moving us to act in such or such a way, misleading us, overcoming us, conflicting with Reason, &c. — then 'Desire' is a logical abstraction which we are mistaking for reality. It is thus equally important to bear in mind that there is a real unity in all a man's desires, a common ground of them all, and that this real unity or common ground is simply the man's self, as conscious of itself and consciously seeking in the satisfaction of desires the satisfaction of itself. But the real unity underlying the operations of intelligence is also the man's self-conscious self. It is only in virtue of L 146 THE WILL [bK. II his self-consciousness, as has previously been pointed out, that he is aware of facts as facts, or that his experience reveals to him a world of related objects. It is clear then that we must not imagine Desire and Intellect, as our phrase- ology sometimes misleads us into doing, to be separate agents or influences, always independent of each other, and in the moral life often conflicting. The real agent called Desire is the man or self or subject as desiring ; the real agent called intellect is the man as understanding, as perceiving and conceiving ; and the man that desires is identical with the man that understands. Yet, on the other hand, to desire is clearly not the same thing as to understand. How then is the state of the case to be truly represented ? 130. We commonly content ourselves with saying that the same person has distinct faculties of desire and under- standing; and to this statement, so far as it goes, no objection can fairly be made. It is equally impossible to derive desire from intellect and intellect from desire; impossible to treat any desire as a mode of understanding, or any act of understanding as a mode of desire. No reason can be given why any perception or conception should lead to desire, unless the soul has to begin with some possibility called into activity by the idea, but other than that of which the activity constitutes the idea — the perception or concep- tion. And, conversely, we cannot explain how a desire should set intellectual activities in motion except on a corresponding supposition. This being so, we must ascribe to the self-conscious soul or man two equally primitive, co-ordinate, possibilities of desiring and understanding. But we may not regard these as independent of each other, or suppose that one can really exist without the other, since they have a common source in one and the same self- consciousness. The man carries with him into his desires the same single self-consciousness which makes his acts of understanding what they are, and into his acts of under- standing the same single self-consciousness which makes his CH.ll] DESIRE AND INTELLECT I47 desires what they are. No desire which forms part of our moral experience would be what it is, if it were not the desire of a subject which also understands : no act of our intelligence would be what it is, if it were not the act of a subject which also desires. This point would not be worth insisting on, if it meant merely that desires and operations of the intellect mutually succeed each other; that in order to the excitement of desire for an object, as distinct from appetite or instinctive impulse, there must have been a perception, involving at least some elementary acts of memory and inference ; and that a desire, again, commonly sets in motion an intellectual consideration of consequences and ways and means. The meaning is that every desire which is within the experience of a moral agent, involves a mode of consciousness the same as that which is involved in acts of understanding ; every act of understanding a mode of self-consciousness the same as that which is involved in desire. The element common to both lies in the consciousness of self and a world as in a sense opposed to each other, and in the conscious effort to overcome this opposition. This, however, will seem one of those dark and lofty statements which excite the suspicion of common sense. The reader's patience is there- fore requested during one or two paragraphs of explanation, 131. Desire for an object may be said generally to be a consciousness of an object as already existing in and for the consciousness itself, which at the same time strives to give the object another existence than that which it thus has — to make it exist really and not merely in the desiring consciousness. A man desires, let us suppose, to taste a bottle of fine wine, to hear a certain piece of music, to see Athens, to do a service to a friend, to finish a book that he has in hand. In each case the desired object, as such, exists merely in his consciousness, and the desire for it involves the consciousness of the difference between such existence of the desired object and that realisation of it towards which the desire strives, and which, when attained, L 2 148 THE WILL [bK. II is the satisfaction or extinction of the desire. In that sense the desire is at once a consciousness of opposition between a man's self and the real world, and an effort to overcome it by giving a reality in the world, a reality under the condi- tions of fact, to the object which, as desired, exists merely in his consciousness. It is true of course that the bottle of wine, the piece of music, the city of Athens, exist quite in- dependently of the consciousness of any desiring subject ; but these are not the desired objects. The experience of tasting the wine or hearing the music is the desired object ; and this does not, any more than the anticipated service to the friend or the achievement of writing the book, exist while desired except in and for the consciousness of the person desiring it. So soon as it existed otherwise the desire would cease. It is true also that, though the desired object is one which for the person desiring it remains to be realised — to have reality given it — yet his desire for it is a real and defi- nitely conditioned fact. To a superior intelligence contem- plating the state of the case, the man's desire, with the un- attained object which it implies, would be as real as anything else in the world. And further, while it would be apparent to such an intelligence that it was only in virtue of the man's self-consciousness that the desired object existed for him, as such ; only through it that he was capable of such an expe- rience as that of which, if the desire be not simply sensual, the forecast moves him ; on the other hand it would be no less apparent that the desire, however distinctively human, presupposes and entails some modification of the animal system. We are here considering, however^ what desire for an object is to the person experiencing the desire, while experiencing it, not what it might be to another regarding it speculatively as a fact. As so experienced, the common characteristic of every such desire is its direction to an object consciously presented as not yet real, and of which the realisation would satisfy, i. e. extinguish, the desire. To- wards this extinction of itself in the realisation of its object every desire is in itself an effort, however the effort may be CH. Il] DESIRE AND INTELLECT 149 prevented from making its outward sign by the interference of other desires or by the circumstances of the case. 132. Such desire, then, implies on the part of the desiring subject (a) a distinction of itself at once from its desire and from the real world ; {b) a consciousness that the conditions of the real world are at present not in harmony with it, the subject of the desire ; {c) an effort, however undeveloped or misdirected, so to adjust the conditions of the real world as to procure satisfaction of the desire. Let us now turn for a moment to consider the generic nature of our thought. Here too we find the same general characteristic, a relation between a subject and a world of manifold facts, of which at first it is conscious simply as alien to itself, but which it is in constant process of adjusting to itself or making its own. This is no less true of thought in the form of specu- lative understanding, the process of learning to know facts and their relations, than it is true of it in the practical form of giving effect and reality to ideas. We have already seen how it is only for a self-conscious soul that the senses reveal facts or objects at all. The same self-consciousness which arrests successive sensations as facts to be attended to, finds itself baffled and thwarted so long as the facts re- main an unconnected manifold. That it should bring them into relation to each other is the condition of its finding itself at home in them, of its making them its own. This establishment or discovery of relations— we naturally call it establishment when we think of it as a function of our own minds, discovery when we think of it as a function deter- mined for us by the mind that is in the world — is the essen- tial thing in all understanding. It is involved in those per- ceptions of objects which we are apt improperly to oppose to acts of understanding, but which all imply the discursive process of consciousness, bringing different sensuous presen- tations into relation to each other as equally related to the single conscious subject ; and it is involved in those infer- ences and theories of relations between relations which we commonly treat as the work of understanding par excellence. ISO THE WILL [bk. 11 Whatever the object which we set ourselves to understand, the process begins with our attention being challenged by some fact as simply alien and external to us, as no other- wise related to us than is implied in its being there to be known ; and it ends, or rather is constantly approaching an end never reached, in the mental appropriation of the fact, through its being brought under definite relations with the cosmos of facts in which we are already at home. 133. Now if this is a true account of speculative thinking, which it is our natural habit to put in stronger contrast with desire than we do practical thinking, it is clear that between the action of the self-conscious soul in desiring and its action in learning to know there is a real unity. Each implies on the part of the soul the consciousness of a world not itself or its own. Each implies the effort of the soul in different ways to overcome this negation or opposition — the one in the way of gathering the objects presented through the senses into the unity of an intelligible order ; the other in the way of giving to, or obtaining for, objects, which various susceptibilities of the self-conscious soul suggest to it and which so far exist for it only in idea, a reality among sensible matters of fact. The unity of the self-conscious soul thus exhi- bits itself in these its seemingly most different activities. Accordingly, if we understand by thought, as exercised ex farte nostra, the consciousness in a soul of a world of manifold facts, related to each other through relation to itself but at the same time other than itself, and its operation in appropriating that world or making itself at home in it, it will follow from what has been said that thought in this sense is equally involved in the exercise of desire for objects and in the employment of understanding about facts. In the one case it appears in the formation of ideal objects and the quest of means to their realisation ; in the other, it appears in the cognisance of a manifold reality which it is sought to unite in a connected whole. This community of principle in the two cases we may properly indicate by calling our inner life, as determined by desires for objects. CH. n] DESIRE AND INTELLECT 15 1 practical thought, while we call the activity of understanding speculative thought. 134. Nor is this all. The exercise of the one activity is always a necessary accompaniment of the other. In all exercise of the understanding desire is at work. The result of any process of cognition is desired throughout it. No man learns to know anything without desiring to know it. The presentation of a fact which does not on the first view fit itself into any of our established theories of the world, awakens a desire for such adjustment, which may be effected either by further acquaintance with the relations of the fact, or by a modification of our previous theories, or by a com- bination of both processes. All acquisition of knowledge takes place in this way, and in every stage of the process we are moved by a forecast, however vague, of its result. The learner of course knows not how he will assimilate the strange fact till he has done so, but the idea of its assimila- tion as possible evokes his effort, precisely as, in a case naturally described as one of desire, the idea, let us say, of winning the love of a woman evokes the effort of the lover to realise the idea. Thus the process of our understanding in its most distinc- tive sense is necessarily accompanied by desire. But can it conversely be maintained of desire, as we experience it, not only that it has in common with understanding the essential characteristics of conscious relation between self and a world, and of conscious effort to overcome the opposition between the two, but that it necessarily carries with it an exercise of understanding in the distinctive sense, as we have just seen that our exercise of understanding necessarily carries with it desire? On reflection it will appear to be only some arbitrary abridgment of our conception of desire which makes us hesitate to admit that it is so. So soon as any desire has become more than an indefinite yearning for we know not what, so soon as it is really desire /iia vofiov, 5 iWdirii Sia TO KadoKov^, his articulation, and application to the particulars of life, of that principle of an absolute value in the human person as such, of a like claim to consideration in all men, which is imphed in the law and conventional morality of Christendom, but of which the application in law is from the nature of the case merely general and prohibitory, while its application in conventional morality is in fact partial and inconsistent. ' The recognition of the claims of a common humanity ' is a phrase that has become so familiar in modern ears that we are apt to suspect it of being cant. Yet this very familiarity is proof of the extent to which the idea represented by it has affected law and institutions. The phrase is indeed cant in the mouth of any one in whom there is no conscientious will giving vitality and application to the idea which, as merely embodied in laws and institutions, would be abortive and dead. But if it is only the conscience of the individual that brings the principle of human equality into productive con- tact with the particular facts of human life, on the other hand it is from the embodiment of the principle in laws and insti- tutions and social requirements that the conscience itself appropriates it. The mistake of those who deny the a priori character of such 'intuitions'^ of the conscience as that ' I.e. his 'rectification of law, where law fails through being general.' Arist. Eth. Nic. V. jt. 6. ^ I use the term ' intuition ' here, in the sense commonly attached to it by recent English writers on Morals, for a judgment not derived deductively or inductively from other judgments. The reader should be on his guard against confusing this sense of the term with that in 250 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill represented by Kant's formula, does not lie in tracing a history of the intuitions, but in ignoring the immanent operation of ideas of the reason in the process of social organisation, upon which the intuitions as in the individual depend. A short summary of the view which we have been seeking to oppose to theirs will make this view clearer, as it affects the intuition on which the practice of justice is founded. 216. The individual's conscience is reason in him as in- formed by the work of reason without him in the structure and controlling sentiments of society. The basis of that structure, the source of those sentiments, can only be a self- objectifying spirit; a spirit through the action of which beings such as we are, endowed with certain animal susceptibilities and affected by certain natural sympathies, become capable of striving after some bettering or fulfilment of themselves, which they conceive as an absolute good, and in which they include a like bettering or fulfilment of others. Without such spiritual action, in however elementary a form, there can be no society, in the proper human sense, at all ; no community of persons, however small> to whom the treatment in any re- spect by each of the other as himself would be intelligible. On the other hand, given any community of persons ren- dered possible by such a spiritual principle, it is potentially a community of all men of whom one can communicate with the other as ' I ' with ' Thou.' The recognition of reciprocal claims, established as between its own members within each of a multitude of social groups, admits of establishment be- tween members of all the groups taken together. There is no necessary limit of numbers or space beyond which the spiritual principle of social relation becomes ineffective. The impediments to its action in bringing about a practical recog- nition of universal humanfellowship, though greater in degree, are the same in kind as those which interfere with the main- tenance of unity in the family, the tribe, or the .urban com- monwealth. They are all reducible to what we may con- which it is used as an equivalent for tlie German 'Anschauung,' or apprehension of an object. CH. in] DUTy TO HUMANITY 251 veniently call the antagonism of the natural to the spiritual man. The prime impediment, alike to the maijitenance of the narrower and to the formation- of wider -feHowshipvis selfishness : which we may describe provisionally (pending a more thorough enquiry into the relation between pleasure and the good) asji preference of private pleasure to common good. But the wider, the more universal the fellowship that is in question, the more serious become those impediments to it, of which selfishness may and does take advantage, but which are so far independent of it that they bring the most self-devoted members of one tribe or state into what seems on both sides inevitable hostility with those of another. Such are ignorance, with the fear that springs from ignorance ; misapprehension of the physical conditions of well-being, and consequent suspicion that the gain of one community must be the loss of another ; geographical separations and demar- cations, with the misunderstandings that arise from them. The effect of these has often been to make it seem a necessary incident of a man's obligation to his own tribe or nation that he should deny obligations towards men of another tribe or nation. And while higher motives have thus co-operated with mere selfishness in strengthening national separation and antagonism, it would be idle to deny a large share, in the process by which such influences have been partially over- come, to forces— e.g. the force of conquest and, in particular, of Roman conquest — which, though they have been applied and guided in a manner only possible to distinctively rational agents, have been very slightly under the control of any desire for social good on the part of the persons wielding them. But where the selfishness of man has proposed, his better reason has disposed. Whatever the means, the result has been a gradual removal of obstacles to that recognition of a universal fellowship which the action of reason in men potentially constitutes. Large masses of men have been brought under the control each of a single system of law ; and while each system has carried with it manifold results of selfish 252 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill violence and seeming accident, each has been essentially an expression of reason, as embodying an idea of permanent well- being which the individual conceives to be common to his nation with himself. Each has maintained alike, under what- ever differences of form, the institutions of the family and of property ; and there has thus arisen, along with an order of life which habituates the individual to the subordination of his likes and dislikes to social requirements, a sort of common language of right, in which the idea of universal human fellowship, of claims in man as man — itself the outcome of the same reason which has yielded the laws of particular communities — can find the expression necessary to its taking hold on the minds of men. 217. In the light of these considerations we may trace a history, if we like to call it so, of the just man's conscience — of the conscience which dictates to him an equal regard to the well-being, estimated on the same principle as his own, of all whom his actions may affect. It is a history, however, which does not carry us back to anything beyond reason. It is a history of which reason is the beginning and the end. It is reason which renders the individual capable of self- imposed obedience to the law of his family and of his state, while it is to reason that this law itself owes its existence. It is thus both teacher and learner of the lesson through which a conscience of any kind, with the habit of conformity to conscience, is first acquired, and the individual becomes capable of a reverence which can control inclinations to pleasure. Reason is equally the medium of that extension of one system of law over many communities, of like systems over a still wider range, which, in prophetic souls reflecting on it, first elicits the latent idea of a fellowship of all, and furnishes them with a mode of expression through which the idea may be brought home to ordinary men. When it is so brought home, the personal habits which are needed to give practical effect to it, and which on their part only needed the leaven of this idea to expand into a wider beneficence, are already there. But they are there through the action CH. Ill] DUTY TO HUMANITY 253 of the same reason, as already yielding social order and obedience within narrower forms of community. Thus in the conscientious citizen of modern Christendom reason without and reason within, reason as objective and reason as subjective, reason as the better spirit of the social order in which he lives, and reason as his loyal recognition and interpretation of that spirit — these being but different aspects of one and the same reality, which is the operation of the divine mind in man — combine to yield both the judg- ment, and obedience tp the judgment, which we variously express by saying that every human person has an absolute value ; that humanity in the person of every one is always to be treated as an end, never merely as a means ; that in the estimate of that well-being which forms the true good every one is to count for one and no one for more than one; that every one has a ' suum ' which every one else is bound to render him. CHAPTER IV THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL (CONTINUED) C. The Determination of the Idea of Common Good 218, The development of morality, which we have been considering, has been a development from the primary recognition of an absolute and common good — a good common as between some group of persons interested in each other, absolute as that of which the goodness is conceived to be independent of the likes and dislikes of individuals ; but we have so far considered the development only with reference to the extension of the range of persons between whom the good is conceived to be common, and who on this ground come to recognise equivalent duties to each other. The outcome of the process, when treated in this one-sided way, exhibits itself merely as the intuition of the educated conscience that the true good must be good for all men, so that no one should seek to gain by another's loss, gain and loss being estimated on the same principle for each. It has not appeared so far how the conscience is trained in the apprehension of what in particular the good is, and in the consequent imposition on itself of particular duties. We have treated the precept ' suum cuique ' as if the just man arrived at the idea of its applicability to all men, and at the corresponding disposition to apply it, without any such definite enlightenment in regard to the good proper to every one with whom he may have to do, as is necessary for his practical guidance. Some such defect of treatment is un- avoidable so long as abstraction of some kind is the condition of all exposition ; so long as we can only attend to one aspect of any reality at a time, though quite aware that it is only one aspect. We have now to make up for the defect by con- sidering the gradual determination of the idea of good, which goes along with the growth of the conviction that it is PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 255 good for all men alike, and of the disposition to act accord- ingly. 219. In doing so we must first recall some conclusions previously arrived at. The idea of a good, we saw, is the idea of something that will satisfy a desire. In no case is to think of a pleasure the same thing as to think of a good. Only if some pleasure is the object of desire does the anticipation of the satisfaction of the desire yield the idea of the pleasure as a good. When, as is constantly the case, the object of strongest desire to a man — the object to which he is actually directing himself — is not any pleasure, then it is not any pleasure that is thought of as a good, for it is not any pleasure that is the object with which the man thinks of satisfying himself. In that case it is only so far as the man in desiring contemplates the pleasure, or relief from pain, that will be constituted by satisfaction of the desire— a pleasure of which the imagination cannot from the nature of the case have excited the desire — that any idea of pleasantness enters into the idea of the object as good at all. Taken by itself, then, if it could be taken by itself, the mere succession of desires in a man, as reflected on, would yield the presentation of many different good things, in which the satisfaction of those desires had been found and was expected to recur. Many of these would be pleasures, because many objects of desire are pleasures (though the thought even of these as pleasures is different from the thought of them as good) ; but many would not be pleasures, because there are many objects of desire which are not imagined pleasures, and which, though pleasure may be anticipated in their attainment, cannot be desired on account of that pleasure. That very reflection on desires, however, which is necessary to the idea of the several objects satisfying them as good, implies that the subject of the desires distinguishes himself from them. Hence there necessarily accompanies or supervenes upon the idea of manifold good things, in which manifold satis- factions have been or may be foundj the idea of a possible object which may yield satisfaction of the desiring man or 256 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill self, as such, who, as satisfaction of each particular desire is attained, still finds himself anew dissatisfied and wanting. 220. Such an idea is implied in the most elementary moral judgments. It must be operative in every one who judges of actions or dispositions as virtuous or vicious, and must be supposed by him to be operative in every one to whom he ascribes virtue or vice. For an agent merely capable of seeking the satisfaction of successive desires, without capacity for conceiving a satisfaction of himself as other than the satisfaction of any particular desire, and in consequence without capacity for conceiving anything as good petma- nently or on the whole, there could be no possibility of judging that any desire should or should not be gratified. No such judgment can be formed of any desire, unless the desire is considered with reference to a good other than such as passes with the satisfaction of a desire. Even if the judg- ment involved no more than a comparison of the pleasures that had been experienced in the gratification of different desires, and a decision that one should not be gratified be- cause interfering with the gratification of another from which more pleasure was expected, this very comparison would imply that the person making it distinguished himself from his desires and was cognisant of something good for himself on the whole — though for himself only in respect of his capacity for pleasure — to which good he expects the gratifi- cation of one desire to contribute more than that of another. Now the capacity for regarding certain desires as desires which should not be gratified, must be supposed in any one who is either to form moral judgments or to have them applied to him. This must be equally admitted whether we consider action or disposition to be the proper object of moral judgment ; whether we hold it to be by effects or by motives that actions are rendered morally good or bad. Un- less a man could think of himself as capable of governing his actions by the consideration that of his desires some should, while others should not, be gratified, the distinc- tion of praise-worthy and blame-worthy actions would be CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 257 unmeaning to him. He could not apprehend the dis- tinction, nor could it with any significance be applied to his actions. 221. It will scarcely be disputed, then, that the possibility of moral judgments implies some idea of a good, other than any particular pleasure or satisfaction of passing desire, with the superior value of which the value of any such pleasure or satisfaction may be compared. But we are apt to look upon the idea of superior good as formed merely by the combina- tion in thought of the many particular pleasures and satisfac- tions, as an imagined sum of them. Every one has experience of certain pleasures, of which he retains the memory and de- sires the recurrence. Their recurrence in the largest quantity and with the greatest intensity that he can imagine, forms for him, it is supposed, when he thinks calmly of the matter, that greatest good by reference to which he can estimate the value of the pleasures which from time to time he desires, counting them objects of which the desire should or should not be gratified, according as their enjoyment is found upon experience to be compatible or otherwise with the enjoyment of that greatest sum of imaginable pleasures. Now the question is whether the practical idea of some- thing good on the whole, of a true or chief or highest or ultimate good — the idea implied in the capacity for moral judgment — could even in its earliest stages be formed in this way. The process by which on first thoughts we are led to suppose that it can be and is so formed, would seem to be as follows. The good we rightly identify with the desired. We at the same time accept the notion that the object of desire is always, some imagined pleasure — a notion which would not commend itself as it does, but for the confusion into which we readily fall between the pleasure, or relief from pain, constituted by the satisfaction of any desire, and the object exciting the desire. Every particular good being thus supposed to be some pleasure, we infer that the greatest good for any, individual must be the greatest quantity of pleasure possible for him, and that the greatest good of which the 258 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill idea can affect him must be tlie greatest sum of pleasures that he can imagine. It is the latter part of the inference that is here specially in question. Upon reflection it will appear that, from the supposition that every desire has some imagined pleasure for its object, it not only is no legitimate inference that a greatest sum of imaginable pleasures is most desired and therefore presents itself to the individual as his greatest good ; it rather follows that no such sum of pleasures can be desired at all. If the supposition is admitted, we are justified indeed in arguing that, in one sense of the term,' the greatest pleasure is most desired, but only in the sense in which the greatest pleasure means the most intense particular pleasure that can be remembered or imagined. To argue from it that a greatest sum of imaginable pleasures is the object most desired, or one that can be desired at all, is to argue from desire for a state of feeling to desire for something which is not a pos- sible state of feeling; There can be no such thing as a state of feeling made up of a sum of pleasures ; and if the only possible object of desire is a state of pleasant feeling, as remembered or imagined, there can be no such thing als de- sire for a sum of pleasures. A sum of pleasures is not a pleasure, nor is the thought of it a remembrance or imagina- tion of pleasure, such as on the supposition excites desire. It can only exist for the thought of a person considering certain pleasures as addible quantities, but neither enjoying them nor imagining their enjoyment. For the feeling of a pleased person, or in relation to his sense of enjoyment, pleasures cannot form a sum. However numerous the sources of a state of pleasant feeling, it is one, and is over before another can be enjoyed. It and its successors can be added together in thought, but not in enjoyment or in imagi- nation of enjoyment. If then desire is only for pleasure, /,«. for an enjoyment or feeling of pleasure, we are simply the victims of words when we talk of desire for a sum of plea- sures, much more when we take the greatest imaginable sum to be the most desired. We are confusing a sum of pleasures CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 259 as counted or combined in thought, with a sum of pleasures as felt or enjoyed, which is a nonentity. 222. In the above it is not intended to deny that there may be in fact such a thing as desire for a sum or contem- plated series of pleasures, or that a man may be so affected by it as to judge that some particular desire should not be gratified, if its gratification would interfere with the attainment of that more desirable object. The contention is merely that there could not ' be such a desire if desire were solely for pleasure, in the sense of being always excited by an imagi- nation of some feeling of pleasure. As there cannot be a feel- ing of a sum of pleasures, neither can there be an imagination of such a feeling. Desire for a sum or series of pleasures is only possible so far as upon sundry desires, each excited by imagination of a particular pleasure, there supervenes in a man a desire not excited by any such imagination ; a desire for self-satisfaction. The man thinks of himself — he cannot be properly said to imagine himself — as the permanent subject of these successive desires and of the successive pleasures by imagination of which they have been excited ; and a desire to satisfy himself in their successive enjoyment, unless counteracted by a desire to satisfy himself in some other way (whether with some particular pleasure imagined, or with some object that is not pleasure at all), may arise in conse- quence. Thus, in order to account for the transition from desire for imagined pleasures to desire for a sum or series of pleasures, we must suppose the action of a principle wholly different from desire for imagined pleasures. We must sup- pose a determination of desire by the conception of self, its direction to self-satisfaction. The idea of something good on the whole, even if nothing but a sum of pleasures entered into the idea as present to the mind of one whom it renders capable of moral judgment, could yet not result from the recurrence of images of pleasure or from a combination of desires each excited by such an image. A desire to satisfy oneself, then, as distinct from desire for a feeling of pleasure, being necessary even to desire for a sum of pleasures, the s 2 26o MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill question is whether it can be a contemplated possibility of satisfying oneself with pleasures that yields the idea of a true or highest good, with which particular gratifications of desire may be contrasted. 223. Now it is not in dispute that we may and constantly do seek self-satisfaction for the moment in some imagined pleasure, though in our calmer mind we know that the pleasure cannot afford the self-satisfaction sought. We could not deny this, according to the account previously given of the will, without denying that the will is often directed to the attainment of pleasure. To deny it would be as untrue as to say of any one that his object is always a pleasure, even the habitual '^ pleasure-seeker ' being liable to particular propensions excited quite otherwise than by imaginations of pleasure. But, though self-satisfaction is constantly being sought in some pleasure or another, without reflection on the impossibility of its being found there, it is clear that interest in the attainment of a pleasure cannot suggest an idea, such as can control action, of something truly good or good on the whole— an idea of which the import lies in contrast with the pleasure of which the attraction is for the moment most strongly felt, and which presupposes some consideration of the question where self-satisfaction is really to be found. Reflecting on his desires for certain pleasures, a man may, no doubt, judge one of them to be more of a good than another, on the ground of its greater present attraction for him ; but such a judgment neither implies nor could yield the contrast of the desired with the desirable, of good for the moment with good on the whole. It does indeed imply in any one so judging a distinction of himself from his feelings, which, at a further stage of its action, yields the idea of something good on the whole. This idea arises from a man's thought of himself as there to be satisfied when any feeling, in the enjoyment of which he may have sought satisfaction, is over. It is the idea of something in which he may be satisfied, not for this time and turn merely, but at least more permanently. Could a contemplated sue- CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 261 cession of pleasures, then, seem to him to offer this relatively permanent satisfaction ? Could he, while reflecting on him- self so far as to conceive the need of a lasting good, fail to reflect also on the fleeting nature of the pleasures of which he contemplates the succession ? Could he be deluded by his own faculty of summing the stages of a succession into supposing that a series of pleasures, of which only one will be in enjoyment at each stage of the series, and none at all at the end, is the more lasting good of which he is in search, and for the sake of which he calls in question the value of the pleasure for the time most attractive in imagination ? 224. To answer these questions in the negative may seem unwarrantable, if for no other reason, in presence of the deliberate judgment of so many enlightened persons who tell us that their only conception — the only conception which seems to them possible— of a true good is just that of a greatest sum of pleasures ; that when they decide against the pursuit of a particular pleasure as not good on the whole, they simply mean that its enjoyment would be incompatible with the attainment of a larger sum of pleasures which it is open to them to enjoy. Can we doubt that such persons really form their judgments of the good as they suppose themselves to do ; and is it not absurd to deny that those conceptions of the true good, which we inherit and which affect our consciences, may at any rate have been formed in the same way ? Now undoubtedly, if \ve must accept as true the account which most persons, under the influence of the current philosophy, give of the ultimate moral idea which actuates them ; if we are to admit that well-being means for them a sum of pleasures, the highest well-being the largest possible sum of pleasures ; it is useless further to argue the question before us. But there are reasons for not accepting that account. It rests on a supposition that all desire is for pleasure. This supposition chiefly commends itself, as has been previously pointed out, through the confusion into which we readily fall, in reflecting on any desire, between the object 262 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill of which the idea excites the desire, and the pleasure we anticipate in the fulfilment of the desire— the pleasure, as it is sometimes called, of success. If an ordinarily unselfish man, unaccustomed to precise analysis of mental experiences, is appealed to by a Hedonistic philosopher to say whether in calm moments of reflection, when exempt from the pressure of appetite or of any particular passion, the good for which he finds himself wishing is not always pleasure — not any single pleasure, but a quantity of pleasures more or less distinctly articulated in thought, or perhaps simply pleasurable existence — he is apt to assent. He does so because, being interested in certain objects, and being aware that, when he reflects on his interests, he often says to himself ' how pleasant it will be when such or such an object is attained,' he mistakes the desire to satisfy himself in the attainment of the objects for a desire to satisfy himself with the pleasure of the attainment. No doubt this pleasure of attainment is one which, upon self-reflection, the man really contemplates himself as enjoying ; there is really a desire for it which co-operates with his various interests ; but it could not take the place of the objects of these various interests without destroying the interests and with them its own possibility. This however does not prevent men who are in fact deeply absorbed in the pursuit of objects other than pleasures from being argued into the belief that, because they are conscious of anticipating pleasures of attainment, pleasure is the object of their pursuit. The further step is then easily taken of interpreting this pleasure as made up of those several pleasures to which, through the confusion above noticed, it has come to be supposed that all desires are directed. Thus we settle down into the notion that our motive principles are on the one hand particular passions, each excited by imagination of some pleasure or some pain, and on the other a deliberate desire for a good made up of as many particular desired pleasures as, after deduction for incidental pains, we deem ourselves capable of obtaining. This deliberate desire is taken to be CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 263 the source of our disapproval of certain pleasures as not good on the whole, because not compatible with the acquisition of that larger sum of pleasures which is more deliberately desired. 225. As to the mistake of supposing all desires to have some pleasure or other for their object, enough has perhaps been said. But writers who have fully recognised this mistake, who have most strenuously asserted that particular desires terminate upon their objects, and that those objects in many cases are not pleasures, have adhered to the notion that the deliberate desire for what is good on ths whole is equivalent to desire for a greatest possible quantity of pleasure. They have indeed generally expressed this as a desire for happiness, but they have also been generally ready to accept the identification of happiness with a sum of pleasures, of greatest happiness with a greatest sum of pleasures. It might perhaps have been otherwise if the convenient ambiguity attaching to the term ' happiness ' did not tend to hide from us the diflSculty of dealing upon this theory with that desire for the good of others, the genuine- ness of which we should be slow to dispute. Clearly a desire for the good of others, though that greatest good be understood to consist for them in pleasures, is not a desire for pleasure on the part of the person who enter- tains it, unless he desires the production of pleasure' to others, not as an end, but as a means to his own. Now that benevolence is not to be considered as a desire for any pleasure to oneself, other than that of doing the benevolent act, is one of the few points — and it speaks well for the improvement of our time that it should be so — on which moralists seem to have come almost to an agreement. But to consider it a desire for the pleasure of doing the bene- volent act is to fall into the fallacy of supposing a desire to be excited by imagination of its own satisfaction — a fallacy from which such writers as Butler and Hutcheson, and in recent years Mr. H. Sidgwick\ have kept themselves clear. 226. A desire for the good of others, then, though it be ' Methods of Ethics, Book I. chap. iv. 264 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill a desire to produce pleasure in them, is not a desire for pleasure. We may, if we like, apply both to it and to the desire for our own true well-being the common designation ' desire for happiness ; ' but, if the desire for our own well- being consists in a desire for a sum of pleasures, we are applying the common designation to the two kinds of desire in absolutely different senses. We shall have to take it that there are two co-ordinate principles, 'Benevolence' and ' Reasonable Self-Love,' alike, according to the phraseology of the last century, in being calm or settled or deliberate principles, but wholly different as desires in respect of the objects to which they are directed, since one is, while the other is not, a desire for pleasure j and we shall have to suppose that these serve indifferently as grounds for moral approbation and disapprobation, the reason for rejecting desired pleasures as not good on the whole being sometimes that they are incompatible with the object sought by Benevolence, sometimes that they are incompatible with that sought by Reasonable Self-Love. That our practical judgments as to the true good rest on two such different principles is a conclusion which, once clearly faced, every enquirer would gladly escape, as re- pugnant both to the philosophic craving for unity, and to that ideal of 'singleness of heart' which we have been accustomed to associate with the highest virtue. The method of escaping it generally favoured by Utilitarians involves the fallacy, already sufficiently noticed, of supposing benevolent desires to have for their object the pleasure of their own satisfaction. This fallacy once discerned, the conclusion can only be avoided either by a bolder denial of the existence of a deliberate and disinterested benevolence than we are generally prepared for — by a return, in short, to the position of Hobbes — or by reconsideration of the view that ' Reasonable Self-Love,' desire for one's own true good, is equivalent to desire for a sum of pleasures. 227. Such a reconsideration is forced upon us from a different quarter so soon as we take account of the fact, CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 265 already noticed, that pleasures do not admit of being accumulated in enjoyment. A man who is enjoying a pleasure for the thousandth time has no more pleasure, however much more an enumerator might reckon him to have had — nay, if novelty adds a charm to pleasure, he has less —than the man who is enjoying it for the first time. We may talk, if we like, of a larger sum of pleasures as more of a good than a less sum, of a largest possible sum as the greatest or highest good, but in doing so we are bound to remember, if we would not be misled by words, that we are talking of ' goods ' of which, from the nature of the case, there can be neither possession nor any approach to possession. Now when any one is deliberately judging what is for his good on the whole, in the light of the experience presupposed by such a judgment, it would seem that he can scarcely help being alive to this state of the case and being affected by it in his judgment. Reflection upon the perishing nature of pleasures suggests itself to every one unsophisticated in his ' moralising ' arid unbiassed by philosophical systems. It is traceable in literature as far back as the literature of reflection extends. It would be far more reasonable to suppose that it was the source of the deliberate quest for something good on the whole, than that it could be set aside in such a quest. And if it cannot be set aside, it must effectually prevent the man who has practically asked himself what it is that can satisfy him, from seeking a sum of pleasures, even 'the greatest possible,' in expectation that it can satisfy or tend to satisfy him ; in other words, under the persuasion that it is that truly or ultimately desirable object for the sake of which a particular desired pleasure should be rejected. He cannot really look forward to any millionth repetition of a pleasant feeling as bringing him nearer to the satisfaction of himself than he was the first time the pleasure was felt. It will not at all follow that such a person, if challenged by a philosopher to say what the ultimate good is, of which the idea actuates him, might not, under pressure of the impossibility of adequately defining it, be drawn into accepting an account of it as 366 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill a greatest sum of pleasures. The action of the idea in him, however, is not dependent on the account he may give of it. The question is whether the idea, as it really actuates him, can be the idea of a sum of pleasures, of which he must be aware — and have become aware before the idea could con- sciously actuate him — that each perishes in the enjoyment. To the present writer it seems that this question, once plainly put, carries a negative answer with it. 228. ' But why,' it may be objected, 'should the fact that a greatest sum of pleasures cannot be enjoyed as a sum, i.e. all at once, prevent a man from wishing to enjoy this greatest sum, as it may be enjoyed, successively, and from regarding this successive enjoyment as the object supremely desirable?' Now undoubtedly, as already admitted, a man may think of himself as enjoying many pleasures in succession, may desire their successive enjoyment and, reflecting on his desire, esteem the enjoyment a good. But it is not the pleasures as a sum that attract him. He cannot imagine them as a sum, for the imagination of pleasure must always be of some specific feeling of pleasure, which must have ceased to possess the imagination before another can possess it. What affects him is the thought of himself as capable of a state of continuous enjoyable existence, and on the contrary as liable to a like continuity of pain. The consideration how many pleasures there will be in the course of the enjoyable exist- ence, what their sum will amount to, does not at all enter into or affect the thought of it as desirable. If he judges a pleasure, which now attracts him, to be not truly a good on the ground of its incompatibility with ulterior pleasure, it is not because he presents to himself two possible sums of pleasure— one as the result would be if the pleasure now attracting him were enjoyed, the other as it would be if that pleasure were forgone — and pronounces the latter the larger. It is because he believes the pleasure which he disapproves to entail an unnecessary breach in the enjoyable existence, which he wishes for without reference to any sum of pleasures that an enumerator might find it to contain. CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 267 This, we say, is the case if a. particular imagined pleasure is 'in a calm hour' condemned on account of its known incompatibility with ulterior pleasure, which must mean not any imagined pleasure but a conceived succession of plea- sures. But while not denying that an attractive pleasure may be disapproved on this account, we could not admit that the ordinary reference of a healthy moral man to his own true happiness, as a reason for rejecting present pleasure, was to be thus explained. If it were, it would not have much effect upon conduct. The thought of oneself as in a state of enjoy- able existence, if it were not a thought of anything else than this, could scarcely countervail the attraction of an imagined pleasure, here and now intensely desired. An imagination of pain might be effectual for the purpose, but hardly a thought of pleasure, which is not an imagination of any pleasure in particular. In truth a man's reference to his own true happi- ness is a reference to the objects which chiefly interest him, and has its controlling power on that account. More strictly, it is a reference to an ideal state of well-being, a state in which he shall be satisfied; but the objects of the man's chief interests supply the filling of that ideal state. The idea of such a state, indeed, neither is, nor is conceived as being, fully realisable by us. The objects of which we contemplate the attainment as necessary to its fulfilment are not contemplated as completely fulfilling it. In our contemplation of them as truly good the forecast of an indefinable Better is always present. But in any considera- tion of true happiness which is other than the vague dis- content of the sated or bafHed voluptuary, the consciousness of objects which we are seeking to realise, of ideas to which we are trying to give effect, holds the first place. Just because we wish for the attainment of such objects, we are unhappy till we attain them ; and thus, owing to the difficulty of mentally articulating them, we are apt to lump them in our thoughts as happiness. But they do not con- sist in pleasures. The ideas of them, which we are seeking to realise, are not ideas of pleasures. Though we may look 268 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS tsK. Ill forward to our life in attaining them, or when they are attained, as a pleasant one — and certainly we cannot look forward to" it as otherwise — this anticipation is quite secondary. It is only brought into distinct consciousness, if at all, during intervals of relaxed energy or under the pressure of an argumentative Hedonist. In short, it is the realisation of those objects in which we are mainly interested, not the succession of enjoyments which we shall experience in realising them, that forms the definite content of our idea of true happiness, so far as it has such content at all. 229. Our conclusion then is that it is a misinterpretation of consciousness, arising in a manner not inexphcable, to regard the idea of a truer or higher good, with which the good of any particular pleasure or the gratification of any particular passion may be contrasted — an idea necessary to the capacity for moral judgment — as equivalent or re- ducible to the idea of a larger sum of pleasures enjoy- able by the person entertaining the idea. In the mind at least of those persons over whom the idea has any con- trolling power, its filling is supplied by ideal object^ to which they are seeking to give reality, and of which the realisa- tion forms their prevailing interest. Such an ideal object '> for example, is the welfare of a family. In those forms of human life which we can know, either from the intercourse of present society or from the record of the past, this object has probably had the largest share in filling up the idea of true or permanent good. As a man reflects — perhaps quite inarticulately — on the transitoriness of the pleasures by imagination of which his desires are from hour to hour excited ; as he asks (practically, if without formal expression) what can satisfy the self which abides throughout and survives those desires; the thought of the well-being of a family, with which he identifies himself and of which the continuity is as his own, possesses his mind. It is interest in this well- being which forms the most primitive and universal counter- ' It will be understood that by an ideal object is meant an object present in idea but not yet given in reality. CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 269 vailing influence, apart from imagination of pain, to the attraction of imagined pleasures. If not strong enough to prevent such pursuit of pleasures as has been found incom- patible with the well-being of a family, it at least awakens self- reproach in the pursuit, a consciousness that it should not be. Now whatever difficulty there may be in adequately defining this interest — as there must be, for it is an interest which, though fundamentally always the same, is constantly actualising itself in new ways — there is one thing which it clearly is not. It is not, directly or indirectly, an interest, on the part of the person influenced by it, either in winning any particular pleasure, or in securing an enjoyable existence, or in getting as much pleasure as he can. Doubtless in looking forward to a well-being of his family, he thinks of himself as conscious of it and sharing in it, even though he may expect to be ' laid in the grave ' before his idea of the family well-being is realised. Every one thus immortalises himself, who looks forward to the realisation of ideal objects, with which on the one hand he identifies himself, and which on the other hand he cannot think of as bounded by his earthly life, — objects in which he thinks of himself as stil' living when dead. But to suppose, because a man looks forward to a satisfaction of his interest in the well-being of his family and contemplates enjoyment in that satisfaction, that therefore such enjoyment is the object of the interest, would be to repeat the mistake of supposing a desire to be excitable by the idea of its own satisfaction. The fact, if it be a fact, that the man's conception of the well-being of his family is nothing but a conception of it as possessing the means to a sustained succession of pleasures, does not affect the case in this respect. It remains equally true that his desire for the family well-being is absolutely different from a desire for pleasure. 230. There may not be the means of proving that, as a matter, of fact, the form in which true good, or good on the whole, was, first conceived was that of family well-being. The earliest forms in which the most essential practical 270 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill ideas have taken effect must always, from the nature of the case, remain beyond the reach of historical investigation. We are warranted however by simple consideration of its nature, in holding that the idea of true good could only become matter of definite consciousness in view of its possible realisation in an object which at once excites a strong interest, and can at the same time be regarded as having the permanence necessary to satisfy the demand arising from a man's involuntary contemplation of his own permanence. The idea of the good, it must be remembered, like all practical ideas, is primarily a demand. It is not derived from observation of what exists but from an inward requirement that something should be; something that will yield self-satisfaction of the kind that is sought when we think of ourselves as surviving each particular desire and its gratification. It is this requirement or demand that first sets us upon seeking to bring objects into existence, in which some sort of abiding satisfaction may be found ; but it is only in contemplation of these objects as in some measure realised or in process of realisation, that the demand arrives at any clear consciousness of itself, or that it can yield the idea of something as truly good, in contrast with something else that is not so. 231. Now among the objects thus brought into existence by demand for the satisfaction of an abiding self, and of which the contemplation first supplied some definite con- tent to the idea of a true good, it would seem that the most primitive and elementary must have been those that contribute to supply the wants of a family — to keep its members alive and comfortably alive. If it is asked by what warrant we carry back the institution of the family into the life of the most primitive men, we answer that we carry it back no further than the interest in permanent good. From beings incapable of such an interest, even though connected by acts of generation with ourselves, we cannot in any intelligible sense have been developed. They cannot have had any such essential community with ourselves as CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 271 would be implied in calling them men. But the capacity for such an interest is also the capacity which renders possible the family bond. That determination of an animal organism by a self-conscious principle, which makes a man and is presupposed by the interest in permanent good, carries with it a certain appropriation by the man to him- self of the beings with whom he is connected by natural ties, so that they become to him as himself and in pro- viding for himself he provides for them. Projecting him- self into the future as a permanent subject of possible well-being or ill-being — and he must so project himself in seeking for a permanent good — he associates his kindred with himself. It is this association that neutralises the effect which the anticipation of death must otherwise have on the demand for permanent good. At a stage of intel- lectual development when any theories of immortality would be unmeaning to them, men have already, in the thought of a society of which the life is their own life but which- survives them^ a medium in which they carry themselves forward beyond the limits of animal existence. 232. Thus we conclude that, in the earliest stages of human consciousness in which the idea of a true or per- manent good could lead any one to call in question the good of an immediately attractive pleasure, it was already an idea of a social good — of a good not private to the man himself, but good for him as a member of a community. We conclude that it must have been so, because it is a man's thought of himself as permanent that gives rise to the idea of such a good, and because the thought of himself as permanent is inseparable from an identification of himself with others, in whose continued life he con- templates himself as living j and because further, as a consequence of this, the objects which the effort to realise this thought brings, into being, and in contemplation of which the idea of permanent good passes from the more blindly operative to the more clearly conscious stage, are arrangements of life, or habits of action, or applications of 272 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI the forces and products of nature, calculated to contribute to a common well-being. Hence the distinction commonly supposed to exist between considerate Benevolence and • reasonable Self-Love, as co-ordinate principles on which moral approbation is founded, is a fiction of philosophers. In saying this we must not be understood either to be, denying that reasonable Self-Love is a source of moral ap- probation, or to be seeking to reduce Benevolence in any way to desire for pleasure to oneself. The meaning is that the distinction of good for self and good for others has never entered into that idea of a true good on which moral judg- ments are founded. It must have been held to do so, no doubt (except upon the selfish hypothesis), if the actuating idea of a true good, as for oneself, had been founded on desire for a sum of pleasures ; since a desire for pleasure, though it may be balanced by a desire to produce pleasure, and though the two desires may suggest in certain cases the same course of outward action, must always be absolutely different from it as a motive. But in fact the idea of a true good as for oneself is not an idea of a series of pleasures to be enjoyed by oneself. It is ultimately or in principle an idea of satisfaction for a self that abides and contemplates itself as abiding, but which can only so contemplate itself in identification with some sort of society; which can only look forward to a satisfaction of itself as permanent, on condition that it shall also be a satisfaction of those in community with whom alone it can think of itself as continuing to live. For practical purposes, or as it ordinarily affects a man, it is an idea of an order of life, more or less established, but liable to constant interference from actions prompted by passion or desire fot pleasure; an order in the rnaintenance and advancement of which he conceives his permanent well- being to consist. This well-being he doubtless conceives as his own, but that he should conceive it as exclusively his own — his own in any sense in which it is not equally and coincidentally a well-being of others — would be incompatible with the fact that it is only as living in community, as sharing CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 273 the life of others, as incorporated in the continuous being of a family or nation, of a state or a church, that he can sustain himself in that thought of his own permanence to which the thought of permanent well-being is correlative. His own permanent well-being he thus necessarily presents to himself as a social well-being. The rule of action, which a con- sideration of this well-being suggests, may sometimes forbid the indulgence of generous impulses, as it will constantly forbid the pursuit of an attractive pleasure ; but between it and the rule of considerate Benevolence there can never be a conflict, for they are one and the same rule, founded on one and the same quest for a self-satisfaction which shall abide, but which no man can contemplate as abiding except so far as he identifies himself with a society whose well- being is to him as his own. 233. After all this argumentation, however, which may already seem too prolix, we may be sure that the old objection will here return. This permanent well-being, what is it — what is it conceived as being by the person who de- sires it — but a succession of pleasures, or of states in which pleasure predominates over pain, whether it is of himself or of others that the man thinks as enjoying this succession ? We can best finally answer this question by gathering into a summary form the view which it is sought to oppose to that suggested by the question. But before doing so it will be well also to put in a final ' caveat ' against two misapprehen- sions, which may be lurking in our minds when we put the question. Though we answered it in the aflfirmative, we should be none the nearer to a reduction of. the moral life to an origin in mere succession of feelings. As has already been pointed out [§ 222], a desire for one's own permanent well-being, though the well-being looked forward to consisted merely in a succession of pleasures, would still be quite a different thing, would imply a consciousness of quite a different nature, from desire excited by an imagined pleasure. Nor, if we answer it in the afifirmative, will any recognition of sympathy bring us nearer to an identification of self- 274 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill I'egarding and ' altruistic ' motives. It is clear that desire for a well-being as consisting in a succession of pleasures to oneselfj is quite different from desire for a well-being that consists in a succession of pleasures to others. The fact that one man may be pleased or pained by the know- ledge of another's pleasure or pain does not alter the fact that each man's pleasure or pain is private to himself. Desires are determined by their objects; and desire for pleasure, having an absolutely different object, is an ab- solutely different desire from desire for the production of pleasure to others. If therefore a man's desire for his own true well-being is essentially a desire that he may enjoy a succession of pleasures, and that for the well-being of others a desire to convey to them a succession of pleasures, the two desires are opposite, though perhaps reconcilable prin- ciples of action, and we must fall back on the view, which we have been seeking to set aside, of the co-ordination, as distinct from the identity, of Benevolence and Reasonable Self-Love. 234. This premised, to the question, What is the well- being which in a calm hour we desire but a succession of pleasures ? we reply as follows. The ground of this desire is a demand for an abiding satisfaction of an abiding self. In a succession of pleasures there can be no such satisfaction, nor in the longest prolongation of the succession any nearer approach to it than in the first pleasure enjoyed. If a man, therefore, under the influence of the spiritual demand described, were to seek any succession of pleasures as that which would satisfy the demand, he would be under a delusion. Such a delusion may be possible, but wei are not to suppose that it takes place because many persons, through a mistaken analysis of their inner experience, affirm that they have no idea of well-being but as a succession of pleasures. The demand for an abiding self-satisfaction has led to an ordering of life in which some permanent provision is made, better or worse, for the satisfaction of those interests which are"not interests in the procuring of pleasure, CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 275 but which may be described most generally as interests in the development of our faculties, and in the like develop- ment of those for whom we care. When a man ' sits down in a calm hour ' to consider what his permanent well-being consists in, what it is that in desir- ing it he really desires, it is not indeed to be supposed that he traces the desire back to its ultimate source in his self- objectifying personality, or that he thinks of its object in the abstract form of that which will satisfy the demand arising from such a personality. But, if unbiassed either by particular passions or by philosophical prepossessions, he will identify his well-being with an order of life which that demand has brought into existence. The thought of his well-being will be to him the thought of himself as living in the successful pursuit of various interests which the order of society— taking the term in its "widest sense — has determined for him ; in- terests ranging, perhaps, from provision for his family to the improvement of the public health or to the production of a system of philosophy. The constituents of the contemplated well-being will be the objects of those various interests, objects {e.g. the provision for a family or the sanitation of a town) in process of realisation, which, when realised, take their place as permanent contributions to an abiding social good. In them therefore the man who carries himself for- ward in thought along the continued life of a family or a nation, a state or a church, anticipates a lasting and accu- mulating possession, as he cannot do in successive enjoy- ments. In them he can think of himself as really coming nearer to an absolute good. Just so far as he is interested in such objects, he must indeed anticipate pleasure in their realisation, but the objects, not the pleasure, form the actu- ating content of his idea of true well-being. A transfer of his interest from the objects to the pleasure would be its' destruction. 235. If this answer is accepted to the question, what it is that we desire in desiring our own true or permanent well- being, it would seem that we have already answered the T 3 276 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill question, what it is that we desire in desiring the true well- being of others. It is the same common well-being, the same good of a society which we also desire as our own. No doubt, there are generous impulses consisting in desires to convey pleasures, simply as such, to others, or to lessen their pains. These are as little to be ignored as they are to be identified with desires for pleasures to oneself. But the desire for the well-being, whether as of others or as of oneself, is no more to be identified with such generous impulses, with which it may very well conflict, than those impulses that are excited by the imagination of pleasure. The objects of which a man anticipates the realisation in looking forward to such well-being, are objects, as we have seen, which he necessarily thinks of as realised for a society no less than for himself, for himself only as a member of a society. The opposition of self and others does not enter into the consideration of a well-being so constituted. Gener- ous impulses and desires for pleasures may indeed co-operate with the desire for it, though never equivalent to that desire, and may do so in different degrees in different cases. The objects most prominent in a man's working idea of true well- being will vary, no doubt, according to circumstances and his idiosyncrasy. To revert to instances previously given, in one case the sanitation of a town, in another the compo- sition of a book on an abstruse subject, may hold the largest place in a man's mind when he sets himself to enquire what in particular forms the content of the idea of true well-being, as he individually is actuated by it. In the former case it can be understood that the impulse to convey pleasures to particular persons, or to relieve their pains, might effectually co-operate with the idea as it actuates the individual, while it scarcely could do so in the latter case. In both cases, again, anticipated pleasures of achievement might stimulate the work which interest in a well-being not constituted by pleasures initiates and directs, though that they should be- come the main objects of interest would be fatal to the work. But however the idea of a true good may vary in the par- CH.1V] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 277 ticular aspect which it presents to the individual according to the special nature of his higher interests, and in what- ever measures impulsive benevolence or any desire for plea- sure may respectively further its operation in him, it remains true that, in its actuation of the individual, no less than in that ordering of society which at once is effected through that actuation of individuals and in turn conditions it, the idea does not admit of the distinction between good for self and good for others. As the source of moral action and of moral judgment, it has equally to control, and in controlling must be equally independent of, the desire for pleasure and the desire to please. 236. But granting that in a man's idea of well-being as true or permanent there is such an identification of his own and others' well-being, he must still think of it as standing in some definite relation to others as to himself. He may think of their true good as also his and of his as also theirs, but how, it will be asked, does he conceive of the true good for others, if not as their happiness, i.e. as the most unbroken succession of pleasures possible for them ? We answer that the happiness which, under influence of the idea of perma- nent good, a man seeks for others is of the same kind as the happiness which, under influence of the same idea, he seeks for himself. We have seen that true happiness, as he conceives it for himself, consists in the realisation of the objects of various interests by which he is possessed — interests of which he is only capable through self-identifica- tion with a society. True happiness, as he conceives it for others, consists in the realisation for them of the same objects. His own interest in these objects carries with it an ascription of a like interest to others, and in the realisa- tion of the objects he anticipates a happiness to them, just as he anticipates it to himself. Now the interest, as he experiences it in himself, is an interest, not in pleasure, but in the objects— these not being pleasures; and what he seeks to procure for others is a satisfaction of a like interest, which is not an interest in pleasures. He seeks to help 278 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill them in attaining objects which he supposes to be common to them with him, and these objects, not being pleasures in his case, cannot be pleasures in theirs. In the realisation of the objects there must be pleasure for the others, on sup- position of their interest in the objects, as for himself, and in anticipating their realisation of the objects he will doubt- less also anticipate the pleasure incidental to it; but it is primarily the objects which he seeks to help them in gain- ing, the pleasure only as incidental to the attainment of those particular objects. Pleasures incidental to the attainment of other objects, though equally pleasures, he would have no interest in conveying to them. It is a true happiness which he seeks for them, and the truth of their happiness depends on the nature of the desired objects, not themselves plea- sures, to the realisation of which it is incidental. 237. By way of illustration, we may again revert to the instance of a man supremely interested in the sanitation of a town. Such a man would naturally be described as de- voted to the true happiness of his fellow-creatures. No doubt his great object is to help the men whom he sees about him to live more happily, and, absorbed in his work, he is not likely to analyse very accurately what it is that he presents to himself when he thinks of their living more happily. It is not at all essential that he should do so. If in confusion or haste he pronounces that the happiness he is seeking for them consists merely in a succession of plea-, sures, the mistake is probably of little practical importance. It matters less than if he made the same speculative mistake in regard to the end which he seeks for himself. A theory that his object for himself was pleasure — the pleasure, as perhaps he might say, of successful work^might strengthen the pleasure-seeking tendency, by which such a man, like all the rest of us, must really be affected, till there might be danger of its weakening or supplanting the interest which is, in fact, the condition of his pleasure in his work. A misin- terpretation of the happiness which he seeks for others can have no such mischievous effect. Even if, through the CH. IV] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 279 notion that his motive was desire for the mere pleasure of others, it really became so, he would not have become a pleasure-seeker. He would have become a practically less wise and useful, but not a selfish man. None the less, however, such a beneficent person would be really misinterpreting the object which mainly moves him in so describing it. It is not pleasure, as such, to be enjoyed by other persons, that he seeks to bring about, but an improvement of the persons, of which pleasure is the incident and the sign. He conceives them, like himself, as having objects which it is their vocation to realise, which health is the condition of their realising, and which form part of one great social end, the same for himself as for them. What this end is he conceives, like the rest of us, very dimly, though, but for the power which the idea of there being such an end exercises over him, not only directly but indirectly through those institutions of society which are its product, he would not live the life which he does. Pressed to give an account of it, he readily in his description puts the pleasure, which is the incident of realisation, in place of that realisation of worthy objects to which he is in fact seeking to help his neighbours. He speaks as if that ' happiness ' of others which he is seeking to promote were merely pleasure irrespectively of the conditions of the plea- sure, whereas in truth it is a fulfilment of capabilities which, without clear analysis of what they are, but on the strength of his own experience, he assigns to the others. 238. There are two questions, however, of which the consideration might make him more clearly aware what his mind on the matter really is ; might convince him that, not pleasure as such, but the attainment of objects other than pleasures though involving pleasure in their attainment, is the end to which he seeks to help other men. Let him ask himself whether he can look upon the value of the pleasure, which he supposes himself to be labouring to produce, as depending simply on its amount ; whether he does not, for others as for himself, distinguish between higher and lower 28o MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill pleasures according to the nature of the pursuit out of which they arise, or according to the state of mind to which they are relative. If he does, it must follow that it is not pleasure as such, or by itself, that he is seeking to produce, but pleasure as an incident of a life of which the value or desirability does not consist in its pleasantness. Let him ask himself, further, whether the ideal end which he seeks for others as for himself, though it be an end never realised, is not something in which a permanent satisfaction can be found ; whether he himself could find true happiness in a succession of pleasures of which each, having been enjoyed, leaves him with the consciousness of being no nearer satis- faction than he was before ; whether on the contrary he does not count it an essential ciondition of every contribution to his own true happiness that it should bring him nearer to the fulfilment of his mission, to a completion of his capa- cities, as no enjoyment of pleasure can be held to do ; and whether his final object in working for the true happiness of others can be to help them to a succession of pleasures, which would be no contribution to a true happiness as he seeks it for himself. 239. These considerations might make such a man aware that his interest in true happiness as for himself, and his interest in it as for others, are not two interests but one in^ terest, of which the object is not a succession of pleasures but a fulfilment of itself, a bettering of itself, a realisation of its capabilities, on the part of the human soul. These capabilities are not distinctively capabilities of pleasure- The pleasure of their realisation does not differ as pleasure, except perhaps in respect of its less intensity, from any animal enjoyment. They are capabilities of certain kinds of life and action, of which (as previously explained) no adequate account can be given till they are attained. Of what ultimate well-being may be, therefore, we are unable to say anything but that it must be the complete fulfilment of our capabilities, even while the idea that there is such an ultimate well-being may be the guiding idea of our lives. CH. iv] PLEASURE AND COMMON GOOD 28r But of particular forms of life and action we can say that they are better, or contribute more to true well-being than others, because in them there is a further fulfilment of man's capabilities, and therefore a nearer approach to the end in which alone he can find satisfaction for himself. That interest in a true good which leads us to reject attractive pleasures as pleasures which should not be enjoyed, and to endure repellent pains as pains which should be undergone, is interest in the furtherance of such better forms of life and action — in their furtherance because they are better. The special features of the object in which the true good is sought will vary in different ages and with different persons, according to circumstances and idiosyncrasy. There are circumstances in which it cannot present itself to the individual as anything else than the work of keeping a family comfortably alive, without reference to the well-being of any wider society in which the family is included, or to any other form of family well-being than such as consists in the decent satisfaction of animal wants. From such a form of the in- terest in true good to one in which it mainly expresses itself in the advancement of some branch of knowledge, or the improvement of the public health, or the endeavour after ' personal holiness,' there may seem to be a great step. But in all its forms the interest has the common characteristic of being directed to an object which is an object for the in- dividual only so far as he identifies himself with a society, and seeks neither an imagined pleasure nor a succession of pleasures, but a bettering of the life which is at once his and the society's. 240. We have dwelt thus at length on the difference be- tween the interest in a true good or permanent well-being in all its forms, and the desire to experience any succession of pleasures, even such a succession as an imaginary enumerator might find to make up the largest possible sum, in order to avoid misapprehension in consideration of the process by which the idea of a true good defines itself and, in defining 282 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill itself, gives rise to the conception of particular duties. This process, we saw, was really inseparable from that of which the main features have already been considered ; the exten- sion, namely, of the range of persons between whom the good is conceived to be common, and who on this ground recognise equivalent duties to each other. Following out that extension as if it were a separate process, we found that its outcome was the intuition of the educated conscience that the true good must be good for all men, so that no one should seek to gain by another's loss, gain and loss being estimated on the same principle for each. But it had not so far appeared how the conscience is trained in the appre- hension of what in particular the good is, and in the conse- quent imposition on itself of particular duties. This defect was to be made up by considering the gradual determina- tion of the idea of good, which goes along with the growth of the conviction that it is good for all men alike. We committed ourselves a little way back to the familiar opinion — more likely to find acceptance than many here advanced — that the idea of a true good first took hold of men in the form of a consideration of what was needed to keep the members of a family alive and comfortably alive. Now between a state of mind in which the idea of good is only operative in this form, and one which can at least naturally express itself in the proposition that the only true good is the good will, can there be anything in common ? Is it not idle to attempt to connect them as phases in the operation of a single spiritual principle ? It would be so, no dpubt, if interest in provision for the necessities of a family really ex- hausted the spiritual demand from which it arises. But this is not the case. It must be remembered that provision for the wants of a family, of the kind we are contemplating, can- not have been a merely instinctive process. It cannot have been so, at least, on supposition that it was a process of which we can understand the nature from our own experience, or that it was a stage in the development of the men that we are and know. • It would not have had anything in common CH. iv] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 283 with the family interests by which we are ourselves influenced, unless it rested not on instinct but on self-consciousness— on a man's projection of himself in thought into a future, as a subject of a possibly permanent satisfaction, to be found in the satisfaction of the wants of the family with which he identifies himself. Now this power of contemplating him- self as possibly coming to be that which he is not, and as so coming to be in and through a society in which he lives a permanent life, is in promise and potency an interest in the bettering of mankind, in the realisation of its capabilities or the fulfilment of its vocation, conceived as an absolutely desirable end. Between the most primitive and limited form of the interest, as represented by the eifort to provide for the future wants of a family, and its most highly generalised form, lie the interests of ordinary good citizens in various elements of a social well-being. All have a common basis in the demand for abiding self-satisfaction which, according to the theory we have sought to maintain, is yielded by the action of an eternal self-conscious principle in and upon an animal nature. That demand however only gradually exhibits what it has in it to require. Until life has been so organised as to afford some regular relief from the pressure of animal wants, an interest in what Aristotle calls to eS (ijv, as distinct from t6 f^v', cannot emerge. Yet that primitive organisation of life through which some such relief is afforded, being rational not instinctive, would be impossible without the action of the same self-objectifying principle which in a later stage exhibits itself in the pursuit of ends to which life is a means, as distinct from the pursuit of means of living. The higher interest is latent in the lower, nor would it be possible to draw a line at which the mere living of the family ceases to be the sole object and its well-being begins to be cared for. 241. But, when a supply of the means of living has been sufficiently secured to allow room for a consideration of the ends of living, what are those ends taken to be ? Can any ' ' Living well,' or ' well-being,' as distinct from merely ' living.' 284 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill such progress be noted in men's conception of them as could justify us in speaking of a development of the idea of duty ? If the idea of good were simply equivalent to the idea of a maximum of pleasure, a growth of moral ideas would simply mean a progressive discovery of means to pleasure. A development of the idea of duty, in the sense of a process affecting our conception of the ends of action, there could not be. If on this hypothesis we are to speak of a moral development at all, it can only be in the sense of an in- creasing enlightenment as to what should be done, in order to an end of which itself the idea undergoes no modification. It is otherwise if the idea of the good is an idea of something which man should become for the sake of becoming it, or in order to fulfil his capabilities and in so doing to satisfy, himself. The idea of the good, according to this view, is an idea, if the expression may be allowed, which gradually creates its own filling. It is not an idea like that of any pleasure, which a man retains from an experience that he has had and would like to have again. It is an idea to which nothing that has happened to us or that we can find in ex- istence corresponds, but which sets us upon causing certain things to happen, upon bringing certain things into existence. Acting in us, to begin with, as a demand which is ignorant of what will satisfy itself, it only arrives at a more definite consciousness of its own nature and tendency through reflection on its own creations— on habits and institutions and modes of life which, as a demand not reflected upon, it has brought into being. Moral development then will not be merely progress in the discovery and practice of means to an end which throughout remains the same for the subject of the development. It will imply a progressive determina- tion of the idea of the end itself, as the subject of it, through reflection on that which, under influence of the idea but without adequate reflection upon it, he has done and has become, comes to be more fully aware of what he has it in him to do and to become. 242. Of a moral development in this sense we have CH.IV] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 285 evidence in the result ; and we can understand the principle of it; but the stages in the process by which the principle thus unfolds itself remain obscure. As has been already pointed out, such an end as provision for the maintenance of a family, if pursued not instinctively but with consciousness of the end pursued, implies in the person pursuing it a motive quite different from desire either for an imagined pleasure or for relief from want. It implies the thought of a possibly permanent satisfaction, and an effort to attain that satisfac- tion in the satisfaction of others. Here is already a moral and spiritual, as distinct from an animal or merely natural, interest — an interest in an object which only thought con- stitutes, an interest in bringing about something that should be, as distinct from desire to feel again a pleasure already felt. But to be actuated by such an interest does not ne- cessarily imply any reflection on its nature ; and hence in men under its influence there need not be any conception of a moral as other than a material good. Food and drink, warmth and clothing, may still seem to them to be the only good things which they desire for themselves or for others. This may probably still be the case with some wholly savage tribes ; it may have once been the case with our own ancestors. If it was, of the process by which they emerged from it we know nothing, for they have already emerged from it in the earliest state of mind which has left any record of itself. All that we can say is that an interest moral and spiritual in the sense explained — however unaware of its own nature, however unable to describe itself as directed to other than material objects — must have been at work to bring about the habits and institutions, the standards of praise and blame, which we inherit, even the remotest and most elementary which our investigations can reach. We know further that if that interest, even in the form of interest in the mere provision for the material support of a family, were duly reflected upon, those who were influenced by it must have become aware that they had objects inde- pendent of the gratification of their animal nature; and. 286 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. HI having become aware of this, they could not fail with more or less distinctness to conceive that permanent welfare of the family, which it was their great object to promote, as consisting, at any rate among other things, in the continu- ance in others of an interest like their own ; in other words, as consisting in the propagation of virtue. 243. When and how and by what degrees this process of reflection may have taken place, we cannot say. It is reason- able to suppose that till a certain amount of shelter had been secured from the pressure of natural wants, it would be impossible. The work of .making provision for the family would be too absorbing for a man to ask himself what was implied in his interest in making it, and thus to become aware of there being such a thing as a moral nature in himself and others, or of a moral value as distinct from the value of that which- can be seen and touched and tasted. However strong in him the interest in the welfare of his society — which, as we have seen, is essentially a moral interest — until some relief had been won from the constant care of providing for that welfare in material forms, he would have no time to think of any intrinsic value in the persons for whom the provision was made, or in the qualities which enabled it to be made. Somehow or other, however — by what steps we know not — with all peoples that have a history the time of reflection has come, and with it the supervention upon those moral interests that are unconscious of their morality, of an interest in moral qualities as such. An interest has arisen, over and above that in keeping the members of a family or tribe alive, in rendering them persons of a certain kind ; in forming in them certain qualities, not as a means to anything ulterior which the possession of these qualities might bring about, but simply for the sake of that possession ; in inducing in them habits of action on account of the intrinsic value of those habits, as forms of activity in which man achieves what he has it in him to achieve, and so far satisfies himself. There has arisen, in short, a conception of good things of the soul, as having a value distinct from and independent of the good CH. IV] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 287 things of the body, if not as the only things truly good, to which all other goodness is merely relative. Already in the. earliest stages of the development of the human soul, of which we have any recorded expression, this distinction is virtually recognised. Such a formal classifi- cation as that which Aristotle assumes to be familiar, between TO em-OS ayaSa, ra irepi V'<'XW and to nepi (Tana}, is, of COUrse, only the product of what may be called reflection upon reflec- tion. It is the achievement of men who have not only learnt to recognise and value the spiritual qualities to which material things serve as instruments or means of expression, but have formed the abstract conception of a universe of values which may be exhaustively classified. But independently of such abstract conceptions, we have evidence in the earliest literature accessible to us of the conception and appreciation of impalpable virtues of the character and disposition, stand- ing in no direct relation to the senses or to animal wants — courage, wisdom, fidelity, and the like. The distinction is at least apprehended between the sensible good things that come to a man, or belong or attach to him as from without, and the good qualities of the man. It may be that the latter are chiefly considered in relation to the former, as qualities contributing to the material welfare of a society ; but, though there may be as yet no clear notion of virtue as a pure good in itself independently of anything extraneous that it may obtain, it is understood that prosperity and the desert of prosperity are different things. And the recognition of desert is in itself a recognition of a moral or spiritual good, as distinct from one sensible or material. It is evidence that the moral nature, implied in the interest in a social well- being, has so far reflected on itself as to arrive at moral conceptions. 244. Whenever and wherever, then, the interest in a social good has come to carry with it any distinct idea of social merit — of qualities that make the good member of a family, ' External goods, goods of the soul, and goods of the body. Eth. Nic. I. viii. b. 288 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. ill or good tribesman, or good citizen — we have the beginning of that education of the conscience of which the end is the conviction that the only true good is to be good. This process is properly complementary to that previously analysed, of which the end was described as the conviction that the true good is good for all men, and good for them all in virtue of the same nature and capacity. The one process is comple- mentary to the other, because the only good in the pursuit of which there can be no competition of interests, the only good which is really common to all who may pursue it, is that which consists in the universal will to be good — in the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and in the persons of others. The conviction of a community of good for all men can never be really harmonised with our notions of what is good, so long as anything else than self-devotion to an ideal of mutual service is the end by reference to which those notions are formed. 245. In fact we are very far, in our ordinary estimates of good, whether for ourselves or for others, from keeping such a standard before us, and just for that reason the conviction of the community of good for all men, while retaining its hold on us as an abstract principle, has little positive influence over our practical judgments. It is a source of counsels of perfection which we do not ' see our way ' to carrying out. It makes itself felt in certain prohibitions, e.g. of slavery, but it has no such effect on the ordering of life as to secure for those whom we admit that it is wrong to use as chattels much real opportunity of self-development. They are left to sink or swim in the stream of unrelenting competition, in which we admit that the weaker has not a chance. So far as negative rights go — rights to be letalone — theyareadmittedto member- ship of civil society, but the good things to which the pursuits of society are in fact directed turn out to be no good things for them. Civil society may be, and is, founded on the idea of there being a common good, but that idea in relation to the less favoured members of society is in effect unrealised, CH. iv] VIRTUE AS THE COMMON GOOD 289 and it is unrealised because the good is being sought in objects which admit of being competed for. They are of such a kind that they cannot be equally attained by all. The success of some in obtaining them is incompatible with the success of others. Until the object generally sought as good comes to be a state of mind or character of which the attainment, or approach to attainment, by each is itself a con- tribution to its attainment by every one else, social life must continue to be one of war — a war, indeed, in which the neutral ground is constantly being extended and which is itself con- stantly yielding new tendencies to peace, but in which at the same time new vistas of hostile interests, with new prospects of failure for the weaker, are as constantly opening. CHAPTER V. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MORAL IDEAL — CONTINUED. D. TTie Greek and the Modern Conceptions of Virtue. 246. Our next business will be to consider more in detail how that gradual spiritualisation or dematerialisation (in the sense explained) of the idea of true good, through which alone it can come to answer the inward demand which is its source, exhibits itself in the accepted standards of virtue and in the duties which the candid conscience recognises. The concep- tion of virtue is the conception of social merit as founded on a certain sort of character or habit of will. Every form of virtue arises from the effort of the individual to satisfy him- self with some good conceived as true or permanent, and it is only as common to himself with a society that the individual can so conceive of a good. He must in some way identify himself with others in order to conceive himself as the subject of a good which can be opposed to such as passes with his own gratification. Thus both the practice of virtue and the current standard of virtue, which on the one hand presupposes the practice and on the other reacts upon and sustains it, have a history corresponding to the gradual development and deter- mination of the idea of what social good consists in. The virtue which is practised and esteemed with reference to a common well-being, constituted by such good things as, according to the distinction above noticed, would fall under the head of ' external ' or ' bodily goods,' has indeed an ele- ment of identity with the virtue practised or esteemed with reference to a well-being of which the virtue itself is an integral element, but has also an important difference from it. The identity between the two kinds of virtue consists in the fact that the good to which each is relative is a common good and is desired as such. In both cases the virtue rests upon an GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 291 interest which is effectually distinguished from any desire for pleasure, from any egoistic passion, by being directed to an object which the individual presents to himself as common to him with others and as desirable on that account. The difference lies in the degree of truth and adequacy with which the common good is conceived in one case as compared with the other. When the end with reference to which social merit is judged of is merely some form of material well-being, the moral effort is being directed to an end of merely relative value as if it were of absolute value. That effort rests, as we have seen, on the inward demand for a true or abiding self- satisfaction, and this is not to be found in the possession of means to a succession of pleasures any more than in the succession itself, not in the possession of anything which one man or group of men can possess to the exclusion of another. A common good conceived as consisting in such possession is inadequately conceived — conceived in a manner which must ultimately lead to the self-defeat of the moral effort — and the virtue directed by the conception, though it has the root of identity, just pointed out, with a higher virtue, is so far inferior. Considered merely as ' self-devotion ' it may be on a level with the highest virtue. There may be as genuine self-devotion in the act of the barbarian warrior who gives up his life that his tribe may win a piece of land from its neighbours, as in that of the missionary who dies in carrying the gospel to the heathen. But it is a falsely abstract view of virtue to take no account of the end in pursuit of which the self is devoted. The real value of the virtue rises with the more full and clear conception of the end to which it is directed, as a character not a good fortune, as a fulfilment of human capabilities from within not an accession of good things from without, as a function not a possession. The progress of mankind in respect of the standard and practice of virtue has lain in such a development of the conception of its end. 247. We cannot so write without being reminded of the u 2 292 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill famous opening of Kant's ' Foundation of the Metaphysic of Morals,' — ' Nothing can be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, but a Good Will.' In describing the development in question, however, as a growth of the conviction that the only uncon- ditional good is a good will, and a consequent more definite refei'ence of virtue to this unconditional good as its end, we run a risk of misapprehension. Can it be intended, the reader may ask, that no action is morally good, or directed as it should be, unless the object of the doer is to promote goodness or to become good ? Has this been the object with reference to which, as a matter of fact, the habits and dis- positions ordinarily reputed virtuous have come to be so reputed? If the ultimate dictum of the enlightened con- science is to be that, just as according to St. Paul 'whatsoever is not of faith is sin,' so no action is morally good unless done for the sake of its goodness, shall we not have to make out some wholly new diaypari or ' table ' of the virtues, in- capable of natural adjustment to the actual usage of our terms of praise and blame ? Is it not more rational to say with Hume that ' no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality ' ? ' The formula quoted from Kant is certainly liable to be understood in a way which challenges these objections. The good will may be taken to mean a will possessed by some abstract idea of goodness or of moral law ; and, if such possession were possible at all, except perhaps during ' Treatise on Human Nature, Book III. Part II. § i. The ground for the proposition in the text is thus put by Hume in the sequel : ' It is a plain fallacy to say, that a virtuous motive is requisite to render an action honest, and at the same time that a regard to the honesty is the motive of the action. We can never have a regard to the virtue of an action, unless the action be antecedently virtuous. No action can be virtuous but so far as it proceeds from a virtuous motive. A virtuous motive therefore must precede the regard to the virtue ; and 'tis impossible that the virtuous motive and the regard to the virtue can be the same.' CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 293 moments of special spiritual detachment from the actualities of life, it would amount to a paralysis of the will for all effec- tual application to great objects of human interest. It would no longer be the will of the good workman, the good father, or the good citizen. But it is not thus that we understand the good will. The principle which it is here sought to maintain is that the perfection of human character — a per- fection of individuals which is also that of society, and of society which is also that of individuals — ^is for man the only object of absolute or intrinsic value ; that, this perfection consisting in a fulfilment of man's capabilities according to the divine idea or plan of them, we cannot know or describe in detail what it is except so far as it has been already attained ; but that the supreme condition of any progress tO' wards its attainment is the action in men, under some form or other, of an interest in its attainment as a governing in- terest or will; and that the same interest — not in abstraction from other interests, but as an organising influence upon and among them — must be active in every character which has any share in the perfection spoken of or makes any approach to it, since this perfection, being that of an agent who is properly an object to himself, cannot lie in any use that is made of him, but only in a use that he makes of himself. 248. We hold that in fact the estimation of virtue, the award of praise and blame, has always had reference to man himself, not to anything adventitious to man, as the object of ultimate value from which the value of any virtue was derived. In those primitive conditions of society, in which attention was so necessarily concentrated on the simple maintenance of life that there was no room for the virtues of culture and reflection to develope, we have no reason to doubt that it was a contemplation of possible persons who should exist in the family which gave the family interest its real meaning to those who were actuated by itj just as now, to the poor person whose waking hours are spent in the struggle to keep his family respectable, it is not any abstrac- tion of the family, but the contemplation of sons and 294 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill daughters, as persons living decent lives in the future, that is the moving influence. The primitive virtue that meant merely valour in the struggle for a life of which others were to share the benefit had yet its animating principle in the idea of something which the valorous man and the others, in and for themselves, were to become. As the horizon of man's possibilities expands upon the view, as new forms of social merit relative to the fulfilment of those capabilities come to be recognised, the conception of virtue becomes proportionately complex. With an Athenian in the period of the bloom of Hellas, the term which we can only render 'virtue' was apparently used for any eminent faculty exercised in anyof the regionsof human achievement' — regions scarcely less wide and various then than now — so that Aristotle found it necessary to distinguish ' intellectual virtues ' from those of habit and character. But however discrepant may seem to us to have been the kinds of excellence or ability that were alike spoken of as the ' virtue ' of men, however little they may have been affected by any conception of moral law, of any duty owed by man to God or his neighbour, as such, they were still dependent both for their estimation and for their practice on the conception of intrinsic value, as lying not in anything that might happen to a man, in his pleasure or his good fortune, but in what he might do and might become. Virtue was a hivafiK tiepytTiKfj, a faculty of beneficence"- The range of recognised beneficence was wide, as the range of capabilities of which men were be- coming conscious was wide. There was a 'virtue' to be exhibited in handicraft no less than in the functions of a magistrate or citizen-soldier or head of a family ; but it was some interest in the achievement by men of what they had it in them to do, in their becoming the best they had it in them to become, that at once governed the estimation of virtue in all these cases and inspired or sustained the practice. 249. There were ages, no doubt, in which this interest, ' Time. I. xxxiii. 2 ; II. xl. 6 (Arnold's note); Arist. Rhet, I. ix, a. ' Arist. loc, cit. CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 295 though active enough, took little account of itself; ages in which the question was never raised how far the forms of action which commonly excited praise were really co-operative with each other, or really contributory to the end which was being pursued with little reflection on its nature. When and how the period of reflection is reached, what are the conditions which enable some nations to reach it while others apparently do not, we do not know ; but when it is reached, there arises a quest for some definite and consistent conception of the main ends of human achievement. Is there some one direc- tion, common to all the forms of activity esteemed as virtuous, which explains and justifies that estimation ? This question, it is to be observed, is in its effiect by no means merely a specu- lative one. In the process of bringing into clear and har- monious consciousness the nature of ends previously pursued under the influence of some idea of value which could give no account of itself, the incompatibility of some of these ends with others becomes apparent, and the possibility suggests it- self of so methodising life as to avoid the misdirection of activity and keep it to channels in which it may really con- tribute to the one end of supreme value, however that may be conceived. Hence along with the conviction of the unity of virtue, which finds so clear and strong an expression in the Greek philosophers, we find an attempt both to reform the current estimation of the several practices and dispositions counted virtuous, and to introduce a systematic order of living for individuals and communities, corresponding to the idea of the unity of the end. The habit of derogation from the uses of 'mere philosophy,' common alike to Christian advocates and the professors of natural science, has led us too much to ignore the immense practical service which Socrates and his followers rendered to mankind. From them in effect comes the connected scheme of virtues and duties within which the educated conscience of Christendom still moves, when it is impartially reflecting on what ought to be done. Religious teachers have no doubt affected the hopes and fears which actuate us in the pursuit of 296 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill virtue or rouse us from its neglect. Religious societies have both strengthened men in the performance of recognised duties, and taught them to recognise relations of duty towards those whom they might otherwise have been content to treat as beyond the pale of such duties ; but the articulated scheme of what the virtues and duties are, in their difference and in their unity, remains for us now in its main outlines what the Greek philosophers left it. 250. In their Ethical teaching, however, the greatest of the Greek philosophers — those to whom Christendom owes, not indeed its highest moral inspiration, but its moral cate- gories, its forms of practical judgment — never professed to be inventors. They did not claim to be prophets of new truth, but exponents of principles on which the good citizen, if he thought the matter out, would find that he had already been acting. They were seeking a clearer view of the end or good towards which the /Sior ttoXit-ikos, the citizen-life, was actually directed. And this conception of their vocation was not less true than, in its superiority to personal self- assertion, it was noble. They were really organs through which reason, as operative in men, became more clearly aware of the work it had been doing in the creation and maintenance of free social life, and in the activities of which that life is at once the source and the result. In thus becoming aware of its work the same reason through them gave a further reality to itself in human life. The demand for an abiding satis- faction, for a true or permanent good, in action upon the wants and fears and social impulses of men, had yielded the institutions of the family and the state. These again had brought into play certain spiritual dispositions and energies, recognised as beneficent and stimulated by the effect of that recognition on the social man, but not yet guided by any clear consciousness of the end which gave them their value. In arriving at that consciousness of itself, as it did specially through the Greek philosophers, the same spiritual demand which had given rise to the old virtue yielded a virtue which was in a certain important sense new ; a character which CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 297 would not be satisfied without understanding the law which it obeyed, without knowing what the true good was, for which the demand had hitherto been more blindly at work. 251. We speak of the change advisedly as consisting not merely in a new theory about virtue, but in a higher order of virtue itself. Socrates and his followers are not rightly regarded as the originators of an interesting moral specula- tion, such, for instance, as Hume may have started as to the nature of ' moral sense,' or the evolutionists as to its here- ditary development. They represent, though it might be too much to say that they introduced, a new demand, or at least a fuller expression of an old demand, of the moral nature. Now though our actual moral attainment may always be far below what our conscience requires of us, it does tend to rise in response to a heightened requirement of conscience, and will not rise without it. Such a requirement is implied in the conception of the unity of virtue, as determined by one idea of practical good which was to be the conscious spring of the perfectly virtuous life— an idea of it as consist- ing in some intrinsic excellence, some full realisation of the capabilities, of the thinking and willing soul. Here we have — not indeed in its source, but in that first clear expression through which it manifests its life — the conviction that every form of real goodness must rest on a will to be good, which has no object but its own fulfilment. When the same con- viction came before the world, not in the form of a philosophy but in the language of religious aspiration — ' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God' — and when there seemed to be a personal human life which could be contemplated as one in which it had been realised, it appealed to a much wider range of persons than it had done in the schools of Greece, and moved the heart with a new power. But if those affected by it came to ask themselves what it meant for them — in what the morality resting on purity of heart consisted —it was mainly in forms derived, knowingly or unknowingly, from the Greek philosophers that the answer had to be given. 252. The purity of the heart can only consist in the nature 298 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill of its motives or governing interests. Actions, the same out- wardly, represent a heart more or less pure, according as the motive which prompts them is more or less singly or pre- dominantly an interest in some form or other of that which is truly good ; or — to say the same thing in a manner less liable to be misunderstood, since motives do not admit of isolation — according as the motive belongs to a character more or less thoroughly governed by such an interest. This distinction of true from seeming virtue, as dependent on the motive of each, was brought out by Plato and Aristotle with a clearness which was in fact final. Their account of the true good itself was indeed but formal and provisional, as, for reasons already indicated, every such account must be ; though, unless mankind has lived its last two thousand years in vain, the formal and provisional account of the good should mean more for us than it could mean for the Greeks. But that a conscious direction to this good — a ' purity of heart ' in this sense — was the condition of all true virtue and constituted the essential unity between one form of virtue and another, this they taught with all the consistency and directness which a Christian teacher could desire, which indeed stands in strong contrast with the appeal to semi-sensual motives that has been common, and perhaps necessary for popular practical effect, m the Christian Church. ToO khXou fvcKW kohov yap tovto roir apfTuU ', is the formula in which Aristotle sums up the teach- ing of himself and his master as to the basis of goodness. Like every formula, it may have come to be used as cant, but in its original significance it conveyed the great principle that a direction of a man's will to the highest possible realisa- tion of his faculties is the common ground of every form of true virtue. This direction of the will, according to both Aristotle and Plato, was to be founded on habit; but the habit even in its earliest and least reflective stage was to be under the direction of reason, as embodied in law or acting through a personal educator, and through appropriate teach- ' ' Desire for wliat is beautiful or noble ; this is llic common characteristic of all the virtues.' Arist. IClli. Nic, IV. ii. 7. CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 299 ing was in due time to pass into a fully intelligent and appre- ciative conformity to the reason which was its source. Given this direction of the will, uniting intellectual apprehension with strongest desire, all virtue was given ' : without it there was, in the proper sense, none, but at best only such a possi- bility of virtue as may be afforded by tendencies and habits, directed from without to higher ends than the subject has intelligently made his own. 253. This view of the essential principle of all virtue at once distinguishes the doctrine of Plato and Aristotle from any form of Hedonism, or of Utilitarianism so far as Hedonistic. The condition of virtuous action according to them did not lie in its production of a certain effect, but in its relation to a certain object, as rationally desired by the agent ; and this was an object of which the nature, as desired, was not that which according to the Hedonist alone excites desire. It was not an imagined pleasure. But a student of these philosophers will be apt to remark that, although clearly the quality which, according to them, makes an action good is not that which makes it good "according to the Utilitarian, and is relative to some other end than the pleasure which the Utilitarian deems alone either desired or desirable, it is not so clear what this other end is. And this indefiniteness, he will argue, in the con- ception of the end, on conscious direction to which virtue is made to depend, must be just so far an indefiniteness in the conception of virtue itself. An end, which is not pleasure, is to be desired for its own sake ; so far ' purity of heart ' is insisted on ; but, unless we know what the end is, we are still in the dark as to the real characteristics of the heart purely devoted to it. If from the Hedonistic point of view ' purity of heart ' can have no meaning at all, can the Greek philosophers on the other hand, it may be askedj do more than assure us that there must be such a thing and that it ' Cf. Arist. EtI). Nic. VI. xiii. 6. "A/ta 7-17 ippoviiati. lua ovaig iraaat Inap^ovaiv {sc. al apeTai\ ' The single virtue of practical wisdom implies the presence of all the moral virtues.' 30O MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill is morally all-important, without being able to point to any real interest corresponding to this formal idea? Did not ' purity of heart ' acquire a meaning in the Christian Church, other than it could have borne in the schools of philosophy, because the Christian revelation supplied this interest ? Now that there are senses in which a higher moral standard is possible for the Christian citizen than was possible for the Greek of Aristotle's age, will not be disputed. We have already dwelt on an important difference, arising out of the fact that a practical conviction of the brotherhood of all men, such as was impossible to the Greek, brings with it for us a new standard of justice — not indeed a new concep- tion of what is due towards those who have claims of right upon us, but a new view of the range of persons who have such claims. As we proceed we shall see how the interests of the ' pure heart ' have become really more determinate, its demands upon itself fuller, in the Christian society than they were to the most enlightened and conscientious Greek. But for the present our concern is rather to point out the greatness — in a certain sense the completeness and finality — of the advance in spiritual development which the Greek philosophers represent. Once for all they conceived and expressed the conception of a free or pure morality, as resting on what we may venture to call a disinterested interest in the good ; of the several virtues as so many applications of that interest to the main relations of social life; of the good itself not as anything external to the capacities virtuously exercised in its pursuit, but as their full realisation. This idea was one which was to govern the growth of all the true and vital moral conviction which has descended to us. It had indeed still to acquire fulness and determinateness with the formation of habits and insti- tutions corresponding to it, but it was itself the source of that formation. It was not indeed ever to become such a definitely presentable rule of life as we often sigh for, but we must bear in mind that, so far as the shortcomings which we are apt to complain of in it arise from the impossibility CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 301 either of envisaging or of exhaustively defining the good which it presupposes, they are inseparable from the very nature of morality, as an effort not an attainment, a pro- gressive construction of what should be, not an enjoyment of what is, governed not by sight but by faith. They are shortcomings, in fact, to which it is only through illusions that we can claim superiority. 254. Aristotle, as we know, with all the wisdom of Plato before him, which he was well able to appropriate, could find no better definition of the true good for man than the full exercise or realisation of the soul's faculties in accord- ance with its proper excellence, which was an excellence of thought, speculative and practical. The pure morality then, which we credit him with having so well conceived, must have meant morality determined by interest in such a good. But what real import or filling, it will be asked, can such an interest have? Is not the conception of morality, as determined by this interest, if it is really no more than it professes to be, essentially an empty conception ? To this we answer that it would have been an empty conception, if there had not already taken place such a realisation of the soul's faculties as gave a meaning, though not its full and final meaning, to the definition of the good. In fact, how- ever, as we have already seen, the same spiritual principle which yielded the demand for an account of what was good in itself, and the conception of true goodness as determined by interest in that good, had also yielded a realisation of the soul's faculties in certain pursuits and achievements, and in a certain organisation of life. Already there were arts and sciences, already families and states, with established rules of what was necessary for their maintenance and fur- therance. Thus such a definition of the good as Aristotle gives us was more than explanatory of the meaning of a name. It was rather the indication of a spiritual problem, of which some progress had been made in the solution. The realisation of the soul's faculties had not to wait to begin ; the desire for, the interest in, such a good had not 302 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill Still to be initiated. The philosopher had ' not to bring before men an absolutely new object of pursuit, but to bring them to consider what gave its value to an object already pursued. 255. From that very consideration, it is true, the object took a new character for the consciousness of the person pursuing it. It began to be for him what it had previously been only in itself, or in idea, or for some divine spirit working through him but without his knowledge. The realisation of the soul's faculties in the state, for instance, though in one sense it has already been an object to every one who duly performs his functions as a citizen, becomes an object in a new sense to one who is conscious of his citizen's work as contributing in some humble way to an end whicli is the bettering of the citizens, and who does it or seeks to do it, not for incidental pleasure or reward, but for the sake of that end. To awaken such a consciousness in men, and thus to enable them to do old work in a spirit that made it new, was the function of the Socratic philoso- phers. They had not to create wisdom, or fortitude, or temperance, or justice. They had not to direct the habits of action, recognised as laudable under those names, to any other object than that in relation to which they had always had their value; but they had to make it clear that this object, being a perfection of the rational man, an unfolding of his capacities in full harmonious activity, was not one to which the virtuous practices were related as means to an external end, but itself included their exercise. To do so was to establish the principle of the conviction that goodness is to be sought for its own sake and, as so sought, is itself and alone the good ; but it was not to leave the conception of goodness without definite content. On the contrary it was to determine it further, as a conception of the modes of action, hitherto counted virtuous, with the added qualifica- tion that, in order to be truly virtuous, they must be. brought into harmony with each other as jointly contributing to a perfection of life, and must each have their root in a" char- CH. V] GREEK AND MODERN IDEAS OF VIRTUE 303 acter of which the governing interest was an interest in that perfection. 256. In the development of that reflective morality which our own consciences inherit, both the fundamental principle and the mode of its articulation have retained the form which they first took in the minds of the Greek philoso- phers. To whatever alien speculative influences we may have been subject — and of late no doubt the influences of evolutionary Hedonism have been strongly alien — we do not get rid of the conviction that to be good in one of the many forms of goodness is for the individual the good ; that, inexhaustibly various as those forms may be, each of them must be founded on a will, of which the good in one or other of these forms is the object ; and that the good for man, in that universal sense in which it is beyond the reach of the individual's realisation, must yet be of a kind which is related to all forms of individual goodness as the life of a body to the various vital functions, at once result- ing from them and rendering them possible. And when we come to ask ourselves what are the essential forms in which, however otherwise modified, the will for true good (which is the will to be good) must appear, our answer follows the outlines of the Greek classification of the virtues. It is the will to know what is true, tc) make what is beauti- ful; to endure pain and fear, to resist the allurements of pleasure {i.e. to be brave and temperate), if not, as the Greek would have said, in the service of the state, yet in the interest of some form of human society ; to take for oneself, to give to others, of those things which admit of being given and taken, not what one is inclined to but what is due. 257. It was not, of course, by accident that, when reflec- tive morality first took shape among the Greeks, it became aware of these main lines through which the good was to be pursued. As was said above, the effort after a true good had already worked in these lines and was to continue to work in them, and it is the continuity of that work as carried on by us— the actual progressive realisation of human capaci- 304 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. ill ties in knowledge, in art, and in social life — that has been the ground of identity between the first systematic reflection on the goodness exhibited in those Hnes, and all reflection on the same subject that has followed. And just as it has been the continuity in the actual pursuit of the true good that has kept those standards of virtue, which arise in reflec- tion upon the pursuit, the same through succeeding ages, so it has been in sequence upon variations in the actual pursuit, which have taken place independently of reflection, that variations in the standards implying reflection have arisen. On the whole the variations in the object pursued as good, though there have been periods apparently of mere loss and shrinkage, have consisted in its acquisition of greater fulness and determinateness. In like manner the differences be- tween our standards of virtue and those recognised by the Greek philosophers arise from the greater fulness of condi- tions which we include in our conception of the perfecting of human life. The realisation of human capacities has, in fact, taken a far wider range with us than in the most advanced of ancient states. As actually achieved, it is a much more complete thing than it was two thousand years ago, and every progress achieved opens up a further vista of possibilities still unrealised. In consequence the attainment of true good presents itself to men under new forms. The bettering of human life, though the principle of it is the same now as in the Socratic age, has to be carried on in new ways ; and the actual pursuit of true good being thus complicated, reflection on what is implied in the pursuit yields standards of virtue which, though identical in principle with those recognised by Aristotle, are far more comprehen- sive and wide-reaching in their demands. This will appear more clearly if we consider how Aristotle's account of fortitude and temperance would have to be modified in order to answer the requirements of the Christian conscience. 258. If a 'Christian worker' who devotes himself, un- noticed and unrewarded, at the risk of life and at the ck. v] - PohTiTUDk 305 sacrifice of every pleasure but that of his work, to the service of the sick, the ignorant and the debased, were told that his ideal of virtue was in principle the same as that of the dvdpdoi, ' the brave man,' described by Aristotle, and if he were in- duced to read the description, he would probably seem to himself to find nothing of his ideal in it. Yet the statement would be true. The principle of self-devotion for a worthy end in resistance to pain and fear is the same in both cases. But Aristotle could only conceive the self-devotion in some form in which it had actually appeared. He knew it in no higher form than as it appeared in the citizen-soldier, who faced death calmly in battle for his State. In that further realisation of the soul's capacities which has taken place in the history of Christendom, it has appeared in a far greater wealth of forms. In Aristotle's view the /Si'os Trpannxos — the life of rational self-determined activity — was only possible for a few among the few. It presupposed active participa- tion in a civil community. Such communities could only exist in certain select nations, and, where they existed, only a few of the people contributing to their maintenance and living under their direction were fit to share in civil func- tions. These alone had moral claims or capabilities. The rest were instruments of their convenience. In modern Christen- dom it is not merely our theories of life but the facts of life that have changed. ' Weak things of the world and things that are despised hath God called.' With the recognition of rights in human beings as such, on which we have previously dwelt (§ 201 and foil.), there comes a new realisation of human capacities, not only for the emancipated multitude, but for those whom Aristotle would have allowed to be previously sharers in the /3ior npoKTiKos. The problems of life become for them far more difficult indeed, but, jtist on account of their greater range and complication, they be- come of such a kind as to elicit powers previously unused. We are apt to speak as if the life of the Greek or Roman citizen, in the full bloom of municipal civilisation, was much fuller and richer than that of the modern citizen under a 3o6 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill regime of universal freedom and equal rights. For the many we admit the modern system may be a gain, but for the few we take it to be a corresponding loss. Yet this is surely a very superficial view. The range of faculties called into play in any work of social direction or improvement must be much wider, when the material to be dealt with , consists no longer of supposed chattels but of persons as- serting recognised rights, whose welfare forms an integral element in the social good which the directing citizen has to keep in view. Only if we leave long-suffering, consider- ateness, the charity which ' beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,' with all the art of the moral physician, out of account in our estimate of the realisation of the soul's powers, can we question the greater fulness of the realisation in the present life of Christendom, as com- pared with the highest life of the ancient world. 259. It is a consequence of this change in the realities of social life that the conception of moral heroism has greatly widened— widened not in the sense of more attenu- ated abstraction but of more concrete filling — so that it requires some patience of reflection to trace the identity of principle through all its forms. The Quaker philanthropist can scarcely recognise a brother in the citizen-soldier, or the soldier a brother in the philanthropist. It is indeed in one sense a new type of virtue that has come into being with the recognition of the divine image, of spiritual functions and possibilities, in all forms of weak and suffering humanity. The secondary motives, which assist self-devotion in war or in the performance of functions of recognised utility be- fore the eyes of fellow-citizens, are absent when neither from the recipients of the service done nor from any spectators of it can any such praise be forthcoming as might confirm in the agent the consciousness of doihg nobly. Yet every day and all about us pain is being endured and fear resisted in rendering such service. The hopelessly sick are being tended ; the foolish and ignorant are being treated as rational persons j human beings whom a Greek would have looked CH. v] FORTITUDE 307 on as chattels, or as a social encumbrance to be got rid of, are having pains bestowed on them which only a faith in unapparent possibilities of their nature could justify. In the whole view of life which this work implies, in the objects which inspire it, as those whom they influence would de- scribe them, in the qualities of temper and behaviour which it calls into play, it seems to present a strong contrast to that which the Greek philosopher would have looked for from his ideally brave man. It implies a view of life in which the maintenance of any form of political society scarcely holds a place ; in which lives that would be contemptible and valueless, if estimated with reference to the purposes of the state, are invested with a value of their own in virtue of capabilities for some society not seen as yet. Its object, whether described simply as the service of the suffering and ignoble, or as the service of God manifested in suffering and ignobility, is one which the philosophic Greek would scarcely have recognised as a form of the koKov. The qualities of self-adjustment, of sympathy with inferiors, of tolerance for the weak and foolish, which are exercised in it, are very different from the pride of self-sufficing strength which with Aristotle was inseparable from heroic endurance. 260. Yet beneath these differences lies a substantial identity. The willingness to endure even unto complete self- renunciation, even to the point of forsaking all possibility of pleasure, or, as Aristotle puts it, of passing the point beyond which there seems no longer to be either good or evil ' ; the willingness to do this in the service of the highest public cause which the agent can conceive— whether the cause of the state or the cause of the kingdom of Christ — because it is part of the noble life, of the ' more excellent way,' so to do ; this is common to the ideal of fortitude equally as conceived by Aristotle and as it has been pursued in the Christian Church. If we cannot ignore, on the one hand, the limitations in Aristotle's view of the conditions under which his ideal could be realised ' — conditions which would ' Eth. Nic. III. vi. 6 ; ix. 4, 5. ^ lb. III. vi. 7, and foil. X 2 308 MORAL WEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. HI have rendered it wholly unrealisable in the chief occupations of Christian charity— oil the other hand it is only fair to notice how free it is from debasement by any notion of a compensation which the brave man is to find in pleasures of another world for present endurance. The fact, indeed, that Christian preachers have not been ashamed to dwell upon such compensation as a motive to self-renunciation, ought not to be taken to imply that the heroism of charity exhibited in the Christian Church has really been vitiated by pleasure- seeking motives. Religious rhetoric is apt to be far in arrear of the motives which it seeks to express, and to strengthen by expression. ' Unspeakable joys ' has been but a phrase to convey the yearning of the soul for that perfection which is indescribable except so far as attained. Joys that are unspeakable are unimaginable, and the desire which really has such joys for its object is quite different from a desire excited by an imagination of pleasure. In short, we are not entitled to say that the Aristotelian ideal of fortitude has been either more or less pure than that which has been operative in Christendom ; but there is no doubt that the latter has become far more compre- hensive, and it has become so in correspondence with an enhanced fulness in our conception of the ends of living. Faculties, dispositions, occupations, persons, of which a Greek citizen would have taken no account, or taken account only to despise, are now recognised as having their place in the realisation of the powers of the human soul, in the due evolution of the spiritual from the animal man. It is in consequence of this recognition that the will to endure even unto death for a worthy end has come to find worthy ends where the Greek saw nothing but ugliness and mean- ness, and to express itself in obscure labours of love as well as in the splendid heroism at which a world might wonder. 261. Alongside of ' fortitude ' in the reflective morality of Greece was placed ' temperance,' as that habit of will which stands to the allurements of pleasure in the same relation as ' fortitude ' to pain and fear. If we wish to compare the CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 309 standard of self-denial in respect of pleasures, which the conscience of Christendom in its highest forms has come to prescribe, with the standard recognised by the Greek phi- losophers, it is to the account which the latter give of aax^potnjin; that we must tum. The first impression of any one who came to this account, having his mind charged with the highest lessons of Christian self-denial, would be of its great poverty — a poverty more striking, as it will probably appear, in the case of 'temperance' than in the case of ' courage.' He finds 'temperance ' restricted by Aristotle to control over the mere animal appetites ; or, more exactly, to control over desire for the pleasures incidental to the satis- faction of those appetites. The particular usage of a name, indeed, is of slight importance. If Aristotle had reasons for limiting o-ca^poo-wi; to a certain meaning, and made up elsewhere for what is lacking in his account of the virtue described under that name, no fault could be found. But aaxpfioavvr) and avhpiia between them have to do duty for the whole of what we understand by self-denial. However little we may have cleared up the moral demand which we express to ourselves as the duty of self-denial, we cannot get rid of the conviction that it is a demand at any rate of much wider significance in regard to indulgence in pleasures than that which Aristotle describes as actuating the ' temperate ' man, nor do we find the deficiency made good in any account which he gives of other forms of virtue. 262. If we look a little closer, however, we shall notice the identity between the habit of will of which ' temperance,' as conceived by Aristotle, is an expression, and that on which every renunciation of pleasures, even the widest and completest, if it is to be of moral value, must rest. No 'ascetic' moralist, so far as known, has supposed such renunciation to be possible, or, if possible, to be of value merely on its own account. It becomes possible only through the prevalence of desire for some object other than the enjoyment of pleasure. It is this desire alone, not the renunciation of pleasures except as an incident or sign of 310 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill such desire, that can be of moral value; just as, on the other side, it is not desires for pleasures that are in them- selves morally evil, but the occupation of the will by them — the direction of a man's self to this or that pleasure as his good — to the exclusion of those higher interests which cannot possess the man along with them, and which can only themselves be accounted desires for pleasure through the fallacy, previously dwelt upon, of supposing a desire to have for its object the pleasure of its own satisfaction. Perhaps, under a true conviction of the essential immorality of the pleasure-seeking character, certain moralists may have sometimes spoken as if there were intrinsic evil in desires for pleasure apart from their competition with other desires, and again some intrinsic good in the renunciation of plea- sures apart from interest in the higher object for the sake of which they are renounced ; but this has only been through unguardedness in expression. With Kant, for instance, whatever his rigour in identifying moral badness with selfish- ness and this with pleasure-seeking, it was never doubtful that the goodness of the good will lay in the prevalence of interest in a worthy object, badness in such a failure of the worthy interest as enables the desire for pleasure to prevail. His error consisted in his too abstract view of the interest on which he held that true goodness must depend, and which he seems to reduce to interest in the fulfilment of moral law according to the most abstract possible conception of it. Of this no more can be said here. For the present our concern is to point out the agreement between the motive which the reflective Greek regarded as the basis of the virtue mani- fested in control over certain desires for pleasure, and the source of that self-denial which our own consciences require of us. 283. It must be admitted that, when Aristotle treats most methodically of aa(j>poiTvvti, he does little to specify the par- ticular form of that interest in the koKov which he considered to be the basis of the virtue. He seems more intent on specifying the psychological nature of the pleasures, over CH. V] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 311 desire for which the term cra>(f>poawri, as strictly applied, implies due control. But to a Greek who was told that the virtue of temperance was a mastery over certain desires, exercised toC koKov evcKo, there would be no practical doubt what the motive was to be, what was to be the object in which a prevailing interest was to enable him to exercise this mastery. In his view it could only be reverence for the divine order of the state, such a desire to fulfil his proper function in the community as might keep under the body and control the insolence of overweening lust. The regime of equal law, the free combination of mutually respecting citizens in the enactment of a common good, was the 'beautiful thing' of which the attraction might, through a fitting education, become so strong as to neutralise every lust that tended to disqualify a man for the effectual rendering of service to his state, or tempted him to deal wantonly with his neighbour. It was this character of the motive or interest on which it was understood to rest, that gave to poSiirioK Xcyo/ievois^ — waiving the consideration of other forms of self-denial— we shall find that the highest Greek standard, as represented by the philosophers, falls short of that which a conscience, duly responsive to the highest claims, would now require of us. The principles from which it was derived, so far as they were practically available and tenable, seem to have been twofold. One was that all indulgence should be avoided which unfitted a man for the discharge of his duties in peace or war ; the other, that such a check should be kept on the lusts of the flesh as might prevent them from issuing in what a Greek knew as v^pts — a kind of self-assertion, and aggression upon the rights of others in respect of person and property, for which we have not an equivalent name, but which was looked upon as the anti- thesis of the civil spirit. We speak of these as the only practically available and tenable principles that were recognised for the regulation of 'temperance.' There is indeed another notion which is perhaps the one most constantly and distinctly alleged by the philosophers as a reason for being ' temperate.' This is the notion that the kind of pleasure with which temperance has to do is in some way unworthy of man, because one of which the other animals are susceptible. It is not very likely, however, to have represented a conviction of the general con- science, nor does it appear how any practical standard of temperance could have been derived from such a notion. The conviction that there is a lower and a higher — that there are objects less and more worthy of man — is no doubt one ' 'The pleasures of eating, drinking:, and sexual intercourse.' Eth. Nic. III. X. 10. 3r4 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill of the most fundamental of our moral nature ; or rather it is one of the simplest expressions for the demand which is that nature. This conviction must carry with it a disapproval of indulgences which interfere with the pursuit of the more worthy objects — such, e.g., as disqualify for efficient citizen- ship — but it is a false philosophical gloss on this disapproval to treat it as grounded on the fact that these indulgences are of a kind which are not distinctive of man, but are shared by the ' lower animals.' Just in that respect in which they are matter of disapproval, in so far, that is to say, as they inter- fere with the fulfilment of some higher human function, they are not indulgences of a kind in which the animals are found to partake. The animals do not, so far as we know, gratify their appetites in a way that interferes with the attainment of any object that they are capable of presenting to them- selves \ If the gratification of appetites, therefore, called for our disapproval on the ground of its being common to us with them, it should be disapproved in itself and altogether, not on account of any obstruction which it offers to other and higher ends (for in the case of the animals there is no such obstruction), but on account of some intrinsic quality belonging to it. The conclusion would be that we should aim at an entire suppression of animal gratification^ which would entail the extinction of the human race. We should have no measure of excess in such gratification — for one degree of it is no more ' brutal ' than another — but a reason, practically inoperative, for rejecting it altogether. On the other hand, a little consideration would show that the attraction of pleasures, ' of which the other animals par- take,' has really little to do with the practices condemned by the philosophers and by our conscience as ' intemperate.' It is probably never the pleasure of drinking, strictly so called, that leads a man to get drunk. The mere pleasures of eating, apart from the gratification of vanity and undefin- able social enjoyments, have but a slight share in promoting ' So Aristotle remarks that temperance and its opposite are not predicable of brutes. Eth. Nic. VII. vi. 6. CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 315 the ' excesses of the table.' The temptations to sexual im- morality would be much less formidable than they are, if the attractive pleasure consisted merely in the satisfaction of sexual appetite. Thus, without including in our conception of intemperance any other vices than Aristotle had in view when applying the name, we must still maintain (i) that these vices are not in fact mainly due to the attraction of pleasures of which other animals, so far as we know, are susceptible, and (2) that, if they were, this would afford no intelligible ground for treating such practices as vices, which might not equally be urged as a reason for an abstinence incompatible with the continuance of our race. 266. Returning, then, to those really tenable principles of temperance, wepi airitav xai itotS>v Koi tS>v acjtpoSicriai', specified above, with which the Greek philosophers supply us, do we find that, as applied by the philosophers, they afford a stan- dard of temperance adequate either to the recognised ideal, or to the highest practice, of the modern world ? The answer must be that on the most important point, nepi rav d(l>po8iaiav, they do not. The limit which, on the strength of them, the philosophers would have drawn between lawful and lawless love, would not have been that which our consciences would call on us to observe. It would not have excluded all indul- gence of the sexual passion except as between man and woman in monogamous married life. The failure, however, was not in the intrinsic nature of the principles recognised by the philosophers, for there is no true foundation for the strictest sexual morality other than that social duty which they asserted. The failure arose from the structure of exist- ing society, which determined their application of their principles. As we have more than once pointed out, while there is one sense in which moral ideas must precede practice, there is another in which they follow and depend upon it. The moral judgment at its best in any age or country — /. e. in those persons who are as purely interested in the perfec- tion of mankind and as keenly alive to the conditions of that perfection as is then possible — is still limited in many ways 3l6 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill by the degree of progress actually made towards the attain- ment of that perfection. It was thus the actual condition of women, the actual existence of slavery, the fact that as yet there had been no realisation, even the most elementary, of the idea of there being a single human family with equal rights throughout — it was this that rendered the Greek philosophers incapable of such an idea of chastity as any unbrutalised English citizen, whatever his practice, if he were honest with himself would acknowledge. To outrage the person of a fellow-citizen, to violate the sanctity of his family rights, was for the Greek as much as for us a blamable intemperance. In the eye of the philosophers it meant a sub- jection of the higher, or civil, or law-reverencing, man to that lower man in us which knows not law ; and they were quite aware that not merely the abstinence from such acts, but the conquest of the lusts which lead to them by a higher interest, was the condition of true virtue. To the spirit of our Lord's re-enactment of the seventh commandment in the sermon on the Mount, to the substitution of the rule of the pure heart for that of mere outward observance, they were no strangers. What they had still to learn was not that the duty of chastity, like any other, was to be fulfilled from the heart and with a pure will, but the full extent of that duty. 267. And this they failed to appreciate because the prac- tical realisation of the possibilities of mankind in society had not then reached a stage in which the proper and equal sacredness of all women, as self-determining and self- respecting persons, could be understood. Society was not in a state in whicli the principle that humanity in the person of every one is to be treated always as an end, never merely as a means, could be apprehended in its full universality; and it is this principle alone, however it may be stated, which affords a rational ground for the obligation to chastity as we understand it. The society of modern Christendom, it is needless to say, is far enough from acting upon it, but in its conscience it recognises the principle as it was not recognised in the ancient world. The legal investment of CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 317 every one with personal rights makes it impossible for one whose mind is open to the claims of others to ignore the wrong of treating a woman as the servant of his pleasures at the cost of her own degradation. Though the wrong is still habitually done, it is done under a rebuke of conscience of which a Greek of Aristotle's time, with most women about him in slavery, and without even the capacity (to judge from the writings of the philosophers) for an ideal of society in which this should be otherwise, could not have been sensible. The sensibility could only arise in sequence upon that change in the actual structure of society through which the human person, as such, without distinction of sex, became the subject of rights. That change was itself, indeed, as has been previously pointed out in this treatise, the embodi- ment of a demand which forms the basis of our moral nature — the demand on the part of the individual for a good which shall be at once his own and the good of others. But- this demand needed to take effect in laws and institutions which give every one rights against every one, before the general conscience could prescribe such a rule of chastity, founded on the sacredness of the persons of women, as we acknowledge. And just as it is through an actual change in the structure of society that our ideal in this matter has come to be more exacting than that of the Greek philoso- phers, so it is only through a further social change that we can expect a more general conformity to the ideal to be arrived at. Only as the negative equality before the law, which is already established in Christendom, comes to be supplemented by a more positive equality of conditions and a more real possibility for women to make their own career in life, will the rule of chastity, which our consciences acknow- ledge, become generally enforced in practice through the more universal refusal of women to be parties to its violation. 268. In this matter of chastity, then, there is a serious inferiority of the highest Greek ideal to the highest ideal of Christendom, but it is important to notice where the inferiority lies. We have no right to disparage the Greek 3l8 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill ideal on the ground of any inferiority in the motive which the Greek philosophers would have considered the true basis of this, as of every, form of temperance. There can be no higher motive to it than that civil spirit, in the fullest and truest sense, on which they conceived it to rest. But we may fairly disparage their ideal in respect of the kind of life which the realisation of this motive was considered to require. The sexual temperance which they demanded, they demanded on the true ground, but not in full enough measure. In that respect their ideal had certain inevitable shortcomings — inevitable, because no ideal can go more than a certain distance, in the detail of conduct which it requires, beyond the conditions of the given age. And this comparative poverty of the Greek ideal becomes more apparent when we reflect that, as has been pointed out above, the only form in which the virtuous., renunciation of pleasures presents itself to the philosophers is that of tem- perance irepi a-iriav Kal ttotSiv Kai rav dv. Temperance, thus limited, has in their systems to do duty for the whole of what we should call self-denial. Under no other title than that of the a-axppav is the self-denying man described by the philosophers. And it may fairly be argued that, in respect of the governing principle of the will, the aa>(l)pav, as they conceive him, does not differ from the highest type of self-denial known to Christian society. But the range of action which they looked for from him, as the expression of this principle, was very limited in comparison with the forms of self-denial with which we are practically familiar ; and it was so limited because great part of the objects, by which in the society of modern Christendom self-denial is in fact elicited, in Greek society was not there to elicit it. 269. If we consider, in regard to any person whom we credit with a high degree of habitual self-denial, what are the pleasures which we suppose him to deny himself, it will appear that those, in relation to which alone Aristotle supposed ' temperance ' to be exercised, form a very small part of them. In determining the province of ' temperance ' CH.V] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 319 Aristotle, following the psychology of Plato ', expressly ex- cludes two kinds of pleasure: (i) 'pleasures of the soul,' as instances of which he gives the pleasures of gratified ambition and love of learning; (2) such 'pleasures of the body ' as are received through the senses of hearing, sight, or smell. It is not such pleasures as these that the tem- perate man forgoes. Now, as has been already said, this exclusion would be a very small matter if it merely con- cerned the usage of the name ' temperance.' The important point is that the ancient philosophers seemingly give no place to that type of virtuous character in which devotion to some form of true good leads to a renunciation of such pleasures as those included in the above classes. Yet it is just such pleasures as these of which the renunciation is involved in that self-denial which in our impartial and un- sophisticated judgment we most admire — that which in our consciences we set before ourselves as the highest ideal. It would seem no great thing to us that in the service of man- kind one should confine himself to necessary food and drink, and should observe the strictest limitations of Chris- tian morality in the matter of sexual indulgence ; and it is such indulgence alone, we must remember, not the enjoy- ments of family life, that would fall within the class of pleasures in which, according to the Greek philosophers, temperance is exercised. We have examples about us of much severer sacrifice. There are men, we know, who with the keenest sensibility to such pleasures as those of ' gratified ambition and love of learning,' yet deliberately forgo them ; who shut themselves out from an abundance of aesthetic enjoyments which would be open to them, as well as from those of family life ; and who do this in order to meet the claims which the work of realising the possibilities of the human soul in society — a work a hundred-fold more com- plex as it presents itself to us than as it presented itself to Aristotle — seems to make upon them. Such sacrifices are made now, as they were not made in the days of the Greek 1 Eth. Nic. III. X. 2, 3; Plato, Philebus, 51. 320 MORAL ID&AL AND MOIiAL PliOGRESS [B^.iil philosophers, and in that sense a higher type of living is known among us ; not because there are men now more ready to fulfil recognised duties than there were then, but because with the altered structure of society men have become alive to claims to which, with the most open eye and heart, they could not be alive then. 270. To an ancient Greek a society composed of a small group of freemen, having recognised claims upon each other and using a much larger body of men with no such recog- nised claims as instruments in their service, seemed the only possible society. In such an order of things those calls could not be heard which evoke the sacrifices constantly witnessed in the nobler lives of Christendom, sacrifices which would be quite other than they are, if they did not involve the renunciation of those ' pleasures of the soul ' and ' un- mixed pleasures,' as they were reckoned in the Platonic psychology, which it did not occur to the philosophers that there could be any occasion in the exercise of the highest virtue to forgo. The calls for such sacrifice arise from that enfranchisement of all men which, though in itself but negative' in its nature, carries with it for the responsive con- science a claim on the part of all men to such positive help from all men as is needed to make their freedom real. Where the Greek saw a supply of possibly serviceable labour, having no end or function but to be made really serviceable to the privileged few, the Christian citizen sees a multitude of persons, who in their actual present condition may have no advantage over the slaves of an ancient state, but who in undeveloped possibility, and in the claims which arise out of that possibility, are all that he himself is. Seeing this, he finds a necessity laid upon him. It is no time to enjoy the pleasures of eye and ear, of search for knowledge, of friendly intercourse, of applauded speech or writing, while the mass of men whom we call our brethren, and whom we declare to be meant with us for eternal destinies, are left without ' Negative, because amounting merely to the denial to any one of a right to use others as his instruments or property. CH.v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 321 the chance, which only the help of others can gain for them, of making themselves in act what in possibility we believe them to be. Interest in the problem of social deliverance, in one or other of the innumerable forms in which it pre- sents itself to us, but in which it could not present itself under such a state of society as that contemplated by the Greek, forbids a surrender to enjoyments which are not incidental to that work of deliverance, whatever the value which they, or the activities to which they belong, might otherwise have. 271. There thus arise those forms of self-denial which did not enter within the horizon of the ancient moralists, and in which, if anywhere, we are entitled to trace the ethical progress of our own age. Questions whether we are better than our fathers are idle enough, but it is not so idle — indeed it is a necessity of our moral nature — to endeavour, through what- ever darkness and discouragement, to trace 'some increasing purpose through the ages,' of which the gradual fulfilment elicits a fuller exertion of the moral capabilities of individuals. Such a purpose we may not unreasonably hold to be directed to the development of society into a state in which all human beings shall be treated as, actually or in promise, persons — as agents of whom each is an end equally to himself and to others. The idea of a society of free and law-abiding persons, each his own master yet each his brother's keeper, was first definitely formed among the Greeks, and its formation was the condition of all subsequent progress in the direction described; but with theni, as has been often enough remarked, it was limited in its application to select groups of men surrounded by populations of aliens and slaves. In its universality, as capable of application to the whole human race, an attempt has first been made to act upon it in modern Christendom. With every advance towards its universal application comes a complication of the necessity, under which the conscientious man feels himself placed, of sacri- ficing personal pleasure in satisfaction of the claims of human brotherhood. On the one side the freedom of every one to Y 322 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill shift for himself — a freedom to a great extent really secured — on the other, the responsibility of every one for every one, acknowledged by the awakened conscience ; these together form a moral situation in which the good citizen has no leisure to think of developing in due proportion his own faculties of enjoyment. The will to be good is not purer or stronger in him than it must have been in any Greek who came near to the philosopher's ideal, but the recognition of new social claims compels its exercise in a new and larger self-denial. 272. An objection, indeed, is pretty sure to be made to the whole principle upon which we reckon such self-denial as is here contemplated a higher virtue than entered into the Greek ideal. ' Are we entitled,' it may be asked, ' to make a virtue out of the renunciation of anything intrin- sically good, and are not the pleasures which we suppose to be renounced by the self-denying servant of mankind intrinsically good? We may indeed, upon the principles of " universalistic Hedonism," admire the conduct of such a person, as suited to the times of present distress. The general capacity for pleasure being so Umited by the faulty conditions of society, we may admit it to be the best thing in the long run that there should be men ready to forgo the most really desirable pleasures for the sake of rendering others ultimately more capable of them. The public spirit, the altruistic enthusiasm, of such men is of great value, as a means to the end which consists in the maximum of pleasure obtainable by human (or perhaps all sentient) bdngs, taken together; and for that reason it is rightly counted virtuous. But it is not more virtuous in proportion to the amount and desirability of the pleasure sacrificed by those under its influence ; nor is it any inferiority of the Greek ideal of virtue to that here put forward as character- istic of modern Christendom, that it did not imply any sacrifice of "pure" pleasures, /.«. of such pleasures as carry no pain in their train. It would be another matter if it could be alleged against the Greek ideal that it did not imply public spirit ; but this is not pretended. The fault alleged CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 323 is merely that public spirit, as the Greek conceived it, involved a less costly sacrifice on the part of the individual than do those forms of altruistic enthusiasm to which we are now taught to aspire. But if the allegation is true, so much the better for the Greek ideal. If the conditions of modern life are such that the completest fulfilment of social duty does often call for the renunciation of much pure pleasure on the part of the individual, this may put difficulties in the way of an optimistic view of human history, but it cannot make the ideal of virtue as more painful higher than the ideal of it as more pleasant. The only pleasures of which a limitation is properly included in the conception of the highest virtue, are those of which the enjoyment beyond a certain point either interferes with the individual's health, and thus with his capacity for other enjoyment, or involves some aggression upon the rights of others, and thus lessens the pos- sibiHty of enjoyment on their part. It was just these plea- sures of which a due limitation was taken to be implied in that constituent of the virtuous character which the ancients call temperance. It was not their defect, but their merit, that they did not conceive the highest virtue to involve properly a rejection of normal pleasures of any other kind.' 273. From the point of view of Hedonistic Utilitarianism such an objection is inevitable and unanswerable. It is well to allow full weight to it, were it only for the sake of forcing ourselves to consider whether the actual admiration of our consciences, which we can hardly doubt is most fully commanded by the life of the largest self-denial, is in accord with such Utilitarianism. The answer which must be given to it, according to the theory previously set forth in this treatise, can easily be anticipated. It is not because it involves the renunciation of so much pleasure that we deem the life of larger self-denial, which the Christian conscience calls for, a higher life than was conceived of by the Greek philosophers; but because it implies a fuller realisation of the capacities of the human soul. It is not the renun- ciation, as such, but the spiritual state which it represents, y 2 324 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill that constitutes the value of the life spent in self-devoted service to mankind ; and it represents, we must remember, not merely a certain system of desires and interests, on the part of the persons who make the renunciation, but a certain social development in consequence of which those desires and interests are called into play. As we have seen, it is the emancipation of the multitude, and the social situations arising out of it, that call forth the energies of the self-denying life as we now witness it. When we compare the realisation of human capabilities implied in that life with the realisation of them implied in the highest type of citizenship contemplated by the ancient philosophers, we must take account not merely of some typical representative of Christian charity on the one side, and of the ideal Greek citizen on the other, each in his separate individuality, but of the moral and spiritual con- ditions of other men, to which these several types of character are relative. For it is human society as a whole that we must look upon as the organism in which the capacities of the human soul are unfolded. Human society indeed is essentially a society of self-determined persons. There can be no progress of society which is not a develop- ment of capacities on the part of persons composing it, considered as ends in themselves. But in estimating the worth of any type of virtue, as implying or tending to bring about a realisation of man's spiritual capacities, we must not confine our view to some particular group of men exhibiting the virtue. We must consider also those relations between them and other men, by which the particular type of virtue is determined. We must enquire whether any apparent splendour in that virtue is due to a degradation of human society outside the particular group, or whether, on the contrary, the virtue of the few takes its character from their assistance in the struggle upward of the many. 274. Now, when we compare the life of service to man- kind, involving so much sacrifice of pure pleasure, which is lived by the men whom in our consciences we think best. CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 335 and which they reproach themselves for not making one of more complete self-denial, with the life of free activity in bodily and intellectual exercises, in friendly converse, in civil debate, in the enjoyment of beautiful sights and sounds, which we commonly ascribe to the Greeks, and which their philosophers certainly set before them as an ideal, we might be apt, on the first view, to think that, even though measured not merely by the quantity of pleasure incidental to it but by the fulness of the realisation of human capabilities implied in it, the latter kind of life was the higher of the two. Man for man, the Greek who at all came up to the ideal of the philosophers might seem to be intrinsically a nobler being — one of more fully developed powers — than the self- mortifying Christian, upon whom the sense of duty to a suffer- ing world weighs too heavily to allow of his giving free play to enjoyable activities, of which he would otherwise be capable. But such a comparison of man with man, in abstraction from the rest of mankind, is not the way to ascertain the real value of the virtue of either in its relation to the possibilities of the human soul. If (as would seem to be the case) the free play of spiritual activity in the life of the Greek citizen, with its consequent bright enjoyableness, depended partly on the seclusion of the Greek communities from the mass of mankind, partly on their keeping in slavery so much of the mass as was in necessary contact with them ; if the seclusion and the slavery were incidental to a state of things in which the powers of the human soul, considered as the soul of universal human society, were still in their nonage ; then, whatever value we may ascribe to the highest type of Greek life, as suggesting an ideal of ' liberty, equality and fraternity,' afterwards to be realised on a wider scale, we cannot regard its exemption from the impeding cares, which the intercommunication of mankind on terms of recognised equality brings with it, as constituting a real superiority. 275. Though it is not to be pretended, then, that the life of the self-denying Christian citizen is morally the better on account of the burden of care and the manifold limitations, 326 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill which the acknowledged claims of human brotherhood im- pose on it, it must be maintained on the other hand that the life of the Greek citizen was not morally the better for the freedom from such burden and limitations which he enjoyed ; because this freedom was correlative to an unde- veloped condition on the part of the rest of mankind. The title of the modern or Christian type of virtue to a positive superiority is not to be found in the burden, unknown to the Greeks, which it bears, but in that which the presence of this burden implies ; the new spiritual activity, namely, on the part of the multitude, now conscious of their claims and set free to assert them practically, and the wider range of interests in human good which in response to those claims are awakened in the hearts of the virtuous. That this enhanced activity, these enlarged interests, should involve for the virtuous much voluntary curtailment of the innocent pleasures which, but for such disturbing claims and interests, would be open to them, is, as regards the attainment of moral good, a matter of indifference. For the curtailment in itself they are neither the better nor the worse ; but in the actual order of things, so far as appears, it is a necessary incident of progress towards that full development of what man has it in him to be, that satisfaction of the demand of the human soul for its own perfection, which is for us the good ; and for that reason it is the part of the highest virtue to welcome it. 276. We may speculate, indeed, on the possibility of a state of things in which the most entire devotion to the service of mankind shall be compatible with the widest experience of pleasure on the part of the devoted person. We may argue that the perfection of the human soul implies its unimpeded activity, which is pleasure ; and that there- fore, though in certain stages of the progress towards such perfection there may be for certain persons an abridgment of pleasure, its attainment must be pure enjoyment. Or again we may comfort ourselves with surmising that, though to this or that individual citizen his self-devotedness may mean a large sacrifice of pleasure, yet to others, who have CH. v] TEMPERANCE AND SELF-DENIAL 327 the benefit of his devotion without sharing in it, there is in consequence such an accession of pleasure that the result is a large addition to the sum of enjoyment on the whole. All speculation of this kind, however, provokes much counter-speculation. By what right, it may be asked, do we assume that the more developed or perfect state of the human soul is one in which a larger aggregate of pleasure is enjoyed than in the less perfect state ? There is pleasure, no doubt, in all satisfaction of desire, there is pleasure in all unimpeded activity. So far therefore, as a man has desired the perfection of the human soul, th^re will be plea- sure to him in the consciousness of contributing to that perfection, but not necessarily a greater amount than he has to forgo in order to the contribution. So far as the perfec- tion is attained, again, there will be less impediment to the activity directed to its attainment, and therefore more plea- sure in the exercise of the activity. But it would seem at least possible that, according to the plan of the world, the perfection of the human soul may involve the constant presence of a lower nature, consisting in certain tendencies, never indeed dominant, but in conflict with which alone the higher energies of man can emerge. In that case it may very well be that the desire for human perfection, which is the desire for true good, though gradually coming to taste more of the particular pleasure incidental to its satisfaction and to the free play of the action which it moves, as it more fully attains its end, may never be destined to carry men, even in its fullest satisfaction, into a state of pure enjoy- ment, or into one in which they will be exempt from large demands for the rejection of possible pleasure. 277. At any rate, whatever may be the future in store for it, we should scarcely question the loss of otherwise possible pleasure which the dominance of such a desire entails on those who are possessed by it, were it not for the confusion which leads us to assume that the satisfaction of a strongest desire must always convey to the subject of it a pleasure greater than any which he would otherwise have 328 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill enjoyed. It is true, of course, that for any one in whom the desire for goodness or the love of mankind, or however else we may describe the impulse to a life of sacrifice, is really the dominant motive, it would be impossible really to enjoy those pleasures, however innocent, which interfere with his giving effect to the desire and which he rejects for that reason. But it does not follow from this that he would not have had more enjoyment on the Ayhole if the dominant desire had been different, and if he had been free to take his fill of the innocent pleasures from which it has withheld him. According to all appearances and any fair interpreta- tion of them, he certainly would have had more. Whether the loss of pleasure in the life of such a man through the disturbing action of his altruistic enthusiasm is or is not compensated by a consequent accession of pleasure to others, who have the benefit of the results of his en- thusiasm without sharing in the disturbance or self-denialj may be more open to doubt. If our nature were such that the saint or reformer could set himself to confer happiness on others without seeking to communicate a character like his own ; if we could take advantage of the services of such an one without admiring and aspiring in some measure to become like him, the gain to the general sum of pleasures as the result of his activity would be less doubtful than it is. But if, as we must hold to be the case, the character and activity of the altruistic enthusiast, under ordinary conditions of temperament and circumstance, is not preponderatingly pleasure-giving to the enthusiast himself; and if his effect upon others is always in greater or less degree to disturb their acquiescence in the life of ordinary enjoyment ; then the case is at least not clear in favour of the assumption that the effect of such a character and activity is an addition to the aggregate of human pleasure, one man taken with another. He must be much stiffened in hedonistic theory who could maintain that the life which ended on the cross was one of more enjoyment than that which would have been open to the Crucified but for the purpose which led CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 329 to this end ; and the Crucified himself foresaw that he came not to send peace on earth but a sword. It would be un- warrantable indeed to found a general ethical argument on this example, but it may be fairly used to bring home to our minds that question as to the suflficiency of the hedonistic justification of the self-denying life, which is all that it would be to our purpose here to suggest. 278. These considerations have arisen from our noticing that the practical attitude towards pleasures, which in our consciences we regard as belonging to the highest virtue, is one of larger renunciation than was contemplated by the Greek philosophers as entering into the ideal of virtue. In this respect we claim a superiority for the modern or Chris- tian ideal, independently of all attempts to show that con- duct in accordance with it is more productive of pleasure in the long run or to mankind on the whole. The success of such attempts we hold to be at least very questionable. It is not by their aid that we seek to show the more self-denying (or pleasure-renouncing) type of virtue to be the higher ; nor, on the other hand, is this view founded on any impression that a virtue is more of a virtue for being painful. We give the advantage to the Christian type because it implies, directly on the part of those by whom it is exhibited, a wider range of interest and activity in the work of perfecting mankind, and indirectly, on the part of the multitude by whose claims it is elicited, a liberation of their powers un- known to the ancient world. 279. This conclusion, it will be remembered, has been arrived at in the process of comparing those manifestations of the good will which the Greek philosophers presented to themselves, under the names avSpfia and o-wi^poo-ui'i;, as specially related to the endurance of pain and the rejection of certain pleasures for worthy objects, with the self-denying disposition which our consciences acknowledge as the best. In the root of the matter the Greek conception of these virtues is thoroughly sound. They are consideired genuine 330 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. hi only when resting on a pure and good will, which is a will to be good — a will directed not to anything external, or anything in respect of which it is passive, but to its own perfection, to the attainment of what is noblest in human character and action. In this respect that which we may call, after its first clear enunciators, the Platonic or Aristotelian conception of virtue, as has been said above, is final. It marks the great transition, whenever and however achieved, in the develop- ment of the idea of true good from the state of mind in which it is conceived as a well-being more or less independent of what a man is in himself, to that in which it is conceived as a well-being constituted by character and action. Its defects, as compared with the standard which we now acknowledge, arose from the actual shortcoming in the then achievement of the human soul — the soul of human society — as compared with that of which we are ourselves partakers. As has been previously pointed out, an explicit or reflec- tive ideal ' of the true good, or of virtue as a habit of will directed to it, can only follow upon a practical pursuit of the good, arising indeed out of the same spiritual demand which is the source of the ideal, but not yet consciously regulated by any theoretical form of it. In this pursuit have arisen institutions and arrangements of life, social requirements and expectations, conventional awards of praise and blame. It is in reflection upon these — in the effort to extract some common meaning from them, to reject what is temporary and accidental in them, while retaining what is essential — that there is formed such an explicit ideal of the good and of virtue as we find in the Greek philosophers. Any one who really conformed to their ideal of virtue would, no doubt, have lived a better life than any one was actually living, be- cause he would have been pursuing, sustainedly and upon a principle of which he was aware, a line of conduct which in fact the best men were only pursuing with frequent lapses through defect either of will or judgment. But in their determinate conception or filling up of the ideal, and in ' I.e. an ideal which the persons affected by it have reflected on. CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 331 their consequent conception of the sort of behaviour in which the virtuous will was to be exhibited, they were necessarily limited by the actual state of human society. 'Human brotherhood' had no meaning for them. They had no adequate notion of the claims in response to which the good will should be exercised. In respect of the institutions and arrangements of life, of the social requirements, etc., just spoken of, a great range of new experience has come into being for us which did not exist for them. The soul of human society has realised its capacities in new ways. We know that it can achieve, because it has done so, much of which the Greek philosophers did not dream. 280. Hence has resulted a change in the ideal of what its full realisation would be, and consequently a change in the conception of what is required from the individual as a contribution to that realisation. In particular the idea has been formed of the possible inclusion of all men in one society of equals, and much has been actually done towards its realisation. For those citizens of Christendom on whom the idea of Christendom has taken hold, such a society does actually exist. For them— according to their conscientious conviction, if not according to their practice — mankind is a society of which the members owe reciprocal services to each other, simply as man to maiL And the idea of this social unity has been so far realised that the modern state, unlike the ancient, secures equality before the law to all persons living within the territory over which its jurisdiction extends, and in theory at least treats aliens as no less possessed of rights. Thus when we come to interpret that formal definition of the good, as a realisation of the powers of the human soul or the perfecting of man, which is true for us as for Aristotle, into that detail in which alone it can afford guidance for the actions of individuals, the particular inj&hc- tions which we derive from it are in many ways different from any that Aristotle could have thought of. For us as for him the good for the individual is to be good, and to be good is to contribute in some way disinterestedly, or for the sake of 332 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill doing it, to the perfecting of man. But when we ask ourselves how we should thus contribute, or what are the particular forms of virtuous life to which we should aspire, our answer is determined by the consciousness of claims upon us on the part of other men which, as we now see, must be satisfied in order to any perfecting of the human soul, but which were not, and in the then state of society could not be, recognised by the Greek philosophers. It is the consciousness of such claims that makes the real difference between what our con- sciences require of us, or our standards of virtue, and the requirements or standards which Greek Ethics represent. 281. It must be borne in mind, however, that the social development, which has given the idea of human brother- hood a hold on our consciences such as it could not have for the Greeks, would itself have been impossible but for the action of that idea of the good and of goodness which first found formal expression in the Greek philosophers. It implies interest in an object which is common to all men in the proper sense, — in the sense, namely, that there can be no competition for its attainment between man and man; and the only interest that satisfies this condition is the interest, under some form or other, in the perfecting of man or the realisation of the powers of the human soul. It is not to be pretended, indeed, that this in its purity, or apart from other interests, has been the only influence at work in maintaining and extending social union. It is obvious, for instance, that trade has played an important part in bringing and keeping men together; and trade is the offspring of other interests than that just described. The force of con quest, again, such as that which led to the establishment for some centuries of the ' Pax Romana ' round the basin of the Mediterranean, has done much to break down estranging demarcations between different groups of men; and conquest has generally originated in selfish passions. But neither trade nor conquest by themselves would have helped to widen the comprehension of political union, to extend the range within which reciprocal claims are recognised of man on man, and CH.V] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 333 ultimately to familiarise men with the idea of human brother- hood. For this there must have been another interest at work, applying the immediate results of trade and conquest to other ends than those which the trader and conqueror had in view ; the interest in being good and doing good. Apart from this, other interests might tend to combine certain men for certain purposes and for a time, but because directed to objects which each desires for himself alone and not for another— objects which cannot really be attained in common •^they divide in spirit, even when they combine temporarily in outward effect ; and, sooner or later, the spiritual division must make its outward sign. 282. It is sometimes supposed, indeed, that desires of which the object on each man's part is his own pleasure, may gradually produce a universal harmony and adjustment of claims, as it comes to be discovered that the means by which each may get most pleasure for himself are also the means which serve to yield most pleasure to every one else. The acceptance of this view probably arises from a combina- tion of two notions ; one, the notion that in the long run, or on the whole, the greatest amount of pleasure results to each individual from that order of life and society which yields most pleasure in the long run to every other individual ; the other, the notion that a man's desire for pleasure is or may become a desire for pleasure on the whole, as distinct from any particular pleasure. Putting these two notions together, we conclude that men, having no other motive than desire for pleasure, may, after sufficient experience, be led by their several desires each to act in a way productive of most pleasure to all the rest. But while the first of these notions is fairly arguable, the second is certainly false. To be actuated by a desire for pleasure is to be actuated by a desire for some specific pleasure to be enjoyed by oneself. No two or more persons whose desires were only of this kind could really desire any- thing in common. Under the given institutions of society one man's desire for pleasure may, no doubt, lead to a 334 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill course of action which will incidentally produce pleasure to another ; as in trade, when A's desire for the pleasure to be got by the possession of some article leads him to give B a price for it, which enables B in turn to obtain some plea- sure that he desires. But even in this case it is clear not only that the desires of A and B, as desires for pleasures, are not directed to a common object, but that, if left to their natural course, they would lead to] conflict. A desires the pleasure which he obtains by buying the article of B, but {qua desiring pleasure) he does not desire, he has an aversion to, the loss of means to other pleasures involved in paying a price for it. He only pays the price, and so adjusts his desire for pleasure to B's, because under the given social order he can obtain the article in no other way. The desires, in short, of different men, so far as directed each to some pleasure, are in themselves tendencies to con- flict between man and man. In many cases, through the action of society, there has come to be some established means of compromise between them, such as that of buying and selling ; but the cases in which no such settled means of compromise is available, and in which therefore A'cannot gratify his particular desire for pleasure without depriving B of the chance of gratifying his, occur constantly enough to show us what is the natural tendency of a desire for pleasure, if left to itself*. ' Kant (Werke, ed. Rosenkranz, viii. p. 138) illustrates the fallacy, as he considers it, of supposing that a moral harmony can result from the desire on the part of each man for his own greatest pleasure, by the story of the pledge given by King Francis to the Emperor Charles, ' was mein Bruder Karl haben will (Mailand), das will ich auch haben.' It will naturally be retorted on Kant that the illustration is inapt, because, while Charles and Francis could not each possess the duchy of Milan, the pleasures desired by men of well-regulated minds, are such that each can gratify his desire without interfering with the gratification of the other. On reflection, however, it will appear that this possibility of adjusting the desires for pleasure of different men (as in buying and selling) depends on the presence of controlling agencies which are themselves not the product of desires for plea- sures ; and that on the estranging tendency of these desires, if left to CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTUE 335 283. If we are enquiring, then, for an interest adequate to account for the existence of an ever-widening social union, in which the claims of all are acknowledged by the loyal citizen as the measure of what he may claim for himself, it is not in the desire for pleasure that we can find it, or in those 'particular passions,' such as ambition, which are wrongly supposed to have pleasure for their object, but which resemble the desire for pleasure in being directed to some object private in each case to the person under the influence of the passion. Given a social authority strong enough to insist on respect for general convenience in the individual's pursuit of his ends, and minded to do so, then desire for pleasure, aversion from pain, and the various egoistic passions, may adjust themselves to its requirements and even be enlisted in its service ; but they cannot be the source of such an authority. It can have its origin only in an interest of which the object is a common good ; a good in the effort after which there can be no competition between man and man ; of which the pursuit by any individual is an equal service to others and to himself. Such a good may be pursued in many different forms by persons quite uncon- scious of any community in their pursuits ; by the craftsman or writer, set upon making his work as good as he can themselves, Kant Is substantially right. There are, no doubt, social pleasures, pleasures which are like all others in that each man who desires them desires them for himself alone, but which can only be enjoyed in company, and which therefore bring men together. But though desires for such pleasures might lead men to associate temporarily for the purpose of their gratification, the association would itself tend to bring them into collision with other men associated for a like pur- pose, and would be hable to perpetual disruption, as desires for plea- sures of a different kind arose in the persons so associated. There are also pleasures, such as the enjoyment of the common air and sunshine, of which the sources cannot be appropriated, and for which therefore, under the simplest conditions of life, the desire as entertained by different men cannot tend to conflict. Under any other conditions, however, the opportunity for enjoying such pleasures, though not the sources of them, would become matter of competition, and thereupon the desire even for them would become a tendency to conflict. 33^ MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. Ill without reference to his own glorification; by the father devoted to the education of his family, or the citizen devoted to the service of his state. No one probably can present to himself the manner of its pursuit, as it must have been pur- sued in order to the formation of the most primitive tribal or civil society. If we would find an expression applicable to it in all its forms, ' the realisation of the capacities of the human soul,' or ' the perfecting of man,' seems best suited for the purpose. To most men, indeed, engaged in the pursuit of any common good, this expression might convey no meaning. Nevertheless it is as part of, or as contributing to, such a realisation, that the object of their pursuit has its attraction for them ; and it is for the same reason that it has the characteristic described, of being an object for which there can be no competition between man and man, and of which the pursuit is of general service. 284. Of such a good there had, of course, been pursuit ages before the Greek philosophers began to reflect on it and seek to define it. A proof of this was the very existence of the communities in which the philosophers lived, and of which they themselves only professed to explain the true idea. But it is one thing for men to be actuated by an inward demand for — to make spiritual effort after — a good which in its intrinsic nature is universal or common to all men; another thing for them to conceive it in its uni- versality. It was because it helped men to such a con- ception of the good in its universality that the teaching of the philosophers was of so much practical importance in the social history of man. The Greek citizen who loyally served his state, or sought to know the truth for its own sake, was striving for a good not private to himself but in its own nature universal; yet he had no notion of there being any identity in the ends of living, for himself on the one side, and for slaves and barbarians on the other. The philosophers themselves — such was the practical limitation of their view by the conditions of life around them — would not have told him that there was. But when they told him CH. v] GREEK AND MODERN IDEALS OF VIRTVE 337 that the object of his life should be duly to fulfil his function as a man, or to contribute to a good consisting in a realisa- tion of the soul's faculties, they were directing him to an object which in fact was common to him with all men, with- out possibility of competition for it, without distinction of Greek or barbarian, bond or'free. Their teaching was thus, in its own nature, of a kind to yield a social result which they did not themselves contemplate, and which tended to make good the practical shortcomings of their teaching itself. 285. It would not be to the purpose here to enter on the complicated and probably unanswerable question of the share which different personal influences may have had in gaining acceptance for the idea of human brotherhood, and in giving it some practical effect in the organisation of society. We have no disposition to hold a brief for the Greek philosophers against the founders of the Christian Church, or for the latter against the former. All that it is sought to maintain is this ; that the society of which we are consciously members — a society founded on the self- subordination of each individual to the rational claims of others, and potentially all-inclusive — could not have come into existence except (i) through the action in men of a desire of which (unlike the desire for pleasure) the object is in its own nature common to all; and (2) through the formation in men's minds of a conception of what this object is, sufficiently full and clear to prevent its being regarded as an object for any one set of men to the exclusion of another. It was among the followers of Socrates, so far as we know, that such a conception was for the first time formed and expressed— for the first time, at any rate, in the history of the traceable antecedents of modern Christendom. Inevit- able prejudice, arising from the condition of society about them, prevented them from apprehending the social corol- laries of their own conception. But the conception of the perfecting of man as the good for all, of a habit of will directed to that work in some of its forms as the good for each, had been definitely formed in certain minds, and only z 338 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bK. HI needed opportunity to bear its natural fruit. When through the establishment of the ' Pax Romana ' round the basin of the Mediterranean, or otherwise, the external conditions had been fulfilled for the initiation of a society aiming at universality ; when a person had appeared charging himself with the work of establishing a kingdom of God among men, announcing purity of heart as the sole condition of member- ship of that kingdom, and able to inspire his followers with a belief in the perpetuity of his spiritual presence and work among them ; then the time came for the value of the philo- sopher's work to appear. They had provided men with a definite and, in principle, true conception of what it is to be good — a conception in- volving no conditions but such as it belongs to man as man, without distinction of race or caste or intellectual gifts, to fulfil. When the old barriers of nations and caste were being broken down ; when a new society, all-embracing in idea and aspiration, was forming itself on the basis of the common vocation ' Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect,' there was need of conceptions, at once definite and free from national or ceremonial limitations, as to the modes of virtuous living in which that vocation was to be fulfilled. Without them the universal society must have re- mained an idea and aspiration, for there would have been no intellectual medium through which its members could communicate and co-operate with each other in furtherance of the universal object. It was in consequence of Greek philosophy, or rather of that general reflection upon morality which Greek philosophy represented, that such conceptions were forthcoming. By their means men could arrive at a common understanding of the goodness which, as citizens of the kingdom of God, it was to be their common object to promote in themselves and others. The reciprocal claim of all upon all to be helped in the effort after a perfect life could thus be rendered into a language intelligible to all who had assimilated the moral culture of the Graeco-Roman world. For them conscious membership of a society founded CH. v] THE MORAL IDEAL 339 on the acknowledgement of this claim became a definite possibility. And as the possibility was realised, as conscious membership of such a society became an accomplished spiritual fact, men became aware of manifold relations, un- thought of by the philosophers, in which the virtues of courage, temperance and justice were to be exercised, and from the recognition of which it resulted that, while the prin- ciple of those virtues remained as the philosophers had con- ceived it, the range of action understood to be implied in being thus virtuous became (as we have seen) so much wider. 286. It will be well here to recall the main points to which our enquiry in its later stages has been directed. Our theory has been that the development of morality is founded on the action in man of an idea of true or absolute good, consisting in the full realisation of the capabilities of the human soul. This idea, however, according to our view, 1 acts in man, to begin with, only as a demand unconscious of the full nature, of its object. The demand is indeed from the outset quite different from a desire for pleasure. It is at its lowest a demand for some well-being which shall be common to the individual desiring it with others ; and only as such does it yield those institutions of the family, the tribe, and the state, which further determine the morality of the individual. The formation of more adequate con- ceptions of the end to which the demand is directed we have traced to two influences, separable for purposes of abstract thought but not in fact : one, the natural develop- ment, under favouring conditions, of the institutions, just mentioned, to which the demand gives rise; the other, reflection alike upon these institutions and upon those well- reputed habits of action which have been formed in their maintenance and as their effect. Under these influences there has arisen, through a process of which we have en- deavoured to trace the outline, on the one hand an ever- widening conception of the range of persons between whom the common good is common, on the other a conception of z 3 340 MORAL IDEAL AND MORAL PROGRESS [bk. Ill I the nature of the common good itself, consistent with its [being the object of a universal society co-extensive with mankind. The good has come to be conceived with in- creasing clearness, not as anything which one man or set of men can gain or enjoy to the exclusion of others, but as a spiritual activity in which all may partake, and in which all imust partake, if it is to amount to a full realisation of the jfaculties of the human soul. And the progress of thought in individuals, by which the conception of the good has been thus freed from material limitations, has gone along with a progress in social unification which has made it possible for men practically to conceive a claim of all upon I all for freedom and support in the pursuit of a common end. Thus the ideal of virtue whi ch_our conscien ces acknowled ge has come to be th e devotion of character and life, in >v hat- eveT'cha nnel the idiosyncrasy and circumstances oJ Llbe indivrdual may determi ne, to a perfecting of m an , whii ;h is itselTconceived noFa s an e xtern al end to W a ttfij"p'^ by. goodnesiTTjut asc onsisting in such a life of self-devoted activity on the part o f all persons. From the difficulty of presenting to ourselves in any positive form what a society, ' perfected in this sense, would be, we may take refuge in ' describing the object of the devotion, which our consciences demand, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; and until we puzzle ourselves with analysis, such an account >may be sufficient for practical purposes. But our theory becomes false to the real demand of conscience, if it inter- prets this happiness except as including and dependent upon the unimpeded exercise by the greatest number of a will, the same in principle with that which conscience calls upon the individual to aim at in himself. 287. No sooner, however, has such a statement been made in regard to the end of moral effort than one becomes aware how liable it is to be understood in an abstract sense, wholly inadequate to the meaning which it is intended to convey. It seems to reduce the life of thoroughly realised spiritual capacity, in which we must suppose all that is now CH. v] THE MORAL IDEAL 341 inchoate in the way of art and knowledge, no less than of moral efforts, to have reached completion, to a level with that effort as we know it under those conditions of impeded activity which alone (as it might seem) give a meaning to such phrases as 'self-sacrifice' or a 'devoted will.' The student of Aristotle will naturally recall his saying, aaxoKov- fifdn Li/a v nparrei 6 to hiov npaTTuti) ; The former is the sense in which the question is asked, when it is not one of a self-examining conscience, but of perplexity between different directions in which duty seems to call. The latter is the sense in which a man asks it when he is comparing his practice with his ideal. We reckon the latter sense the fuller, because a man cannot properly decide whether, in respect of character and motives, he is acting as he ought, without considering the effects of the course of action which he is pursuing, as compared with the effects of other courses of action which it is open to him to pursue ' ; while he can compare the value of one set of effects with another without considering the nature of the motives which might prompt him to the adoption of the several courses of ' [This statement should be taken in connection with § 304 and foil.] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 347 action leading to the several effects. Thus, whereas the question in the latter sense includes the question as asked in the former sense, the question can be dealt with in the former sense without raising it in the latter. 292. It is clear, however, that in whichever of these dis- tinguishable senses we ask the question. What ought to be done ? the answ^er to it must be regulated by one and the same conception of the good. If we hold, according to the explanation previously given, that the one unconditional good is the good will, this must be the end by reference to which we estimate the effects of an action. The circumstances in which the question is raised, whether such or such an action ought to be done, may be of a kind, as we shall see presently, which prevent any reference to the character of an agent, and shut us up in our moral judgment of the act to a considera- tion of its effects ; but the effects which we look to, accord- ing to our theory, must still be effects bearing on that perfection of human character which we take to be the good. In like manner the consistent Utilitarian will answer the question of ' ought or ought not ' in both the distinguished senses upon one and the same principle. He decides what ought to be done under any given circumstances by con- sidering what will be the effects, in the way of producing pleasure or pain, of the several courses of action possible under the circumstances ; and for the same reasons upon which he decides what the action, as measured by its effects, should be, he will hold that it should be done — will be of more value, according to the same standard, if done — in a state of mind which itself involves pleasure ; cheerfully and ' disinterestedly,' not under any kind of constraint. But it will only be indirectly, according to him, that the question of the motive — of the ultimate object which the man sets before himself in doing the act — will come into account- The act will not depend for its goodness or moral value, for being such an act as ought to be done, upon this motive or object. For this it depends simply, according to the Utili- tarian view, upon its pleasure-giving effects. The question 348 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV whether the motive from which the act proceeds is good or bad, a motive which a man ought or ought not to have, is a separate question, and one to which the answer depends on that given to the question whether the actions to which such a motive ordinarily incites are or are not actions which, on the ground of their pleasure-giving effects, ought to be done. The motives which we ought to have, the dispositions which we ought to cultivate (if indeed the term 'ought,' according to the Utilitarian view, can be applied in this con- nection at all), will be so because they lead to actions pro- ductive of preponderating pleasure '. 293. Upon the view of the moral end or good adopt.ed in this treatise, the question of motive and the question of effects hold quite a different relative position to that which they hold in the Utilitarian systerii. If the good is a per- fection of mankind, of which the vital bond must be a will on the part of all men, having some mode of that perfection for its object, it will only be in relation to a state of will, either as expressing it or as tending to promote it, or as doing both, that an action can have moral value at all. The actions which ought to be done, in the fullest sense of the word, are actions expressive of a good will, in the sense that they represent a character of which the dominant interest is in conduct contributory to the perfection of mankind^ in doing that which so contributes for the sake of doing it. We cannot say with complete truth of any action which has ' Cf. Mill's Utilitarianism, p. 26, note. ' The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention — that is, upon what the agent aii7/s to do' (as distinct from the end which he seelcs in doing it). ' But the motiv6, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, when it makes l>o diiference in the act, makes none in the morality : though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or a bad habitual disposition — a bent of character from which useful or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise." ' Useful ' of course here means pleasure-giving. ' When it makes no difference in the act ' means, when it makes no difference in the act as measured by its outward effects. That the motive should make no difference to an act, in its true or full nature, we should pronounce, according to the view stated in the text, to be an impossibility. CH.l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 349 been done, that it has been what it ought to have been, un- less it represents such a character, or of any action contem- plated as possible, that it will be what it ought to be, except on supposition that it will fulfil the same condition. But it is clear that even among past actions it is only of his ownj if of them, that a man has really the means of judg- ing whether they represent such a character. Of prospective actions for which we are not personally and immediately responsible, we could never say that they are such as ought to be done, if we considered them to depend for being so on the disposition of the agent ; since we cannot foresee what the disposition with which any agent will do them will be. When we say that restraints ought to be put upon the liquor- traffic, or that a mistress ought to look carefully after her servants, or that our neighbour ought to give his children a better education, we are not making any reference in thought to any motive or disposition from which we suppose that the. obligatory act will proceed. In such cases, as in all where we apply the predicates ' ought ' and ' ought not ' other- wise than in reflection upon our own acts, or in some inter- pretation of the acts of others founded on an ascription to them of motives which we think their acts evidence, we are not contemplating the acts in their full nature. The full nature, for instance, of a father's act in providing for the education of his children depends on the character or state of will which it represents; and what this is in any particular case no one can tell. But the action has a nature, though not its whole nature, in respect of its effect upon the children, and through them upon others; and we can abstract this nature from its nature in relation to the will of the father, without error resulting in our judgment as to the former, just as we can judge correctly of the mechanical relations of a muscular effort without taking account of the organic processes on which the effort really depends. It is an abstraction of this kind that we have to make in all cases where we judge, without reference to ourselves, that a certain sort of action, not yet dpnej is one. that .ought 350 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV to be done ; and it might be well if we could make up our minds that we are not warranted in going further when we judge the actions of others. Histories, no doubt, would be much shortened, and would be found much duller, if specu- lations about the motives (as distinct from the intentions) of the chief historical agents were omitted ; nor shall we soon cease to criticise the actions of contemporaries on the strength of inferences from act to motive. But in all this we are on very uncertain ground. It is clearly quite right in judging either of historical or contemporary actions to take account, so far as possible, of all the circumstances — to appreciate the bearings of any act as presented to those who were or are concerned in doing it, to consider what the effects of it, as probably contemplated by them, were or are. But this is a different thing from trying to ascertain the state of character on the part of the agents which the actions represent, and in ignorance of which the full moral nature of the acts is not known. It is wiser not to make guesses where we can do no more than guess, and to confine ourselves, where no quei- tion of self-condemnation or self-approval is involved, to measur- ing the value of actions by their effects without reference to the character of the agents : as we must do (subject to a re- servation to be stated below) where the question is whether an action, not yet done, ought to be done or not. 294. After this statement we shall naturally be called on to explain in what cases and in what way, according to our theory, a man should endeavour, when it is an action which he has himself done, or thinks of doing, that is in question, to consider it in what we have called its full moral nature, i.e, with reference not merely to effects which it has had or is likely to have, but to the state of mind on the part of the agent which it expresses or would express. Before doing so, however, let us make sure that the reader is under no misapprehension as to the points at issue with the Utilitarians, with whom we agree in holding that ordinary judgments upon the moral value of actions must be founded on consideration of their effects alone. To the Utilitarian CH. l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 351 the virtuous character is good simply as a means to an end quite diflferent from itself, namely a maximum of possible pleasure. An action is good, or has moral value, or is one that ought to be done, upon the same ground. If two actions, done by different men, are alike in their production of pleasure, they are alike in moral value, though the doer of one is of virtuous character and the doer of the other is not so. In our view the virtuous character is good, not as a means to a ' summum bonum ' other than itself, but as in principle identical with the ' summum bonum ' ; and ac- cordingly, if two actions could be alike in their moral effects (as they very well may be in production of pleasure) which represent, the one a more virtuous, the other a less virtuous character, they would still be quite different in moral value. The one would be more, the other less, of a good, according to the kind of character which they severally represent. But it is only an action done by himself that a man has the means of estimating in relation to the character repre- sented by it. Actions done by others, if similar outwardly or in effect, can only be referred to similar states of character, though the states which they represent may in fact be most different; and in regard to actions simply contemplated as possible the question of the character represented by them cannot be raised at all. When from the nature of the case, however, a consideration of effects can alone enter into the moral valuation of an act, the effects to be con- sidered, according to our view, will be different from those of which the Utilitarian, according to his principles, would take account. They will be effects, not in the way of producing pleasure, but in the way of contributing to that perfection of mankind, of which the essence is a good will on the part of all persons. These are the effects which, in our view, an action must in fact tend to produce, if it is one that ougAt to be done, according to the most limited sense of that phrase ; just as these are the effects for tfie sake of which it must be done, if it is done as it ought to be done. 352 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MODERN THEORY [bk. IV 295. For an omniscient being, indeed, the distinction^ unavoidable for us — between the judgment that an action ought to be done, and the judgment that an action is done as it ought to be done, would not exist. It is occasioned by a separation in the moral judgment of act from motive, only possible for an imperfect intelligence. An omniscient being could not contemplate a future action as merely pos- sible, or apart from the motive which must really cause it when it comes to be done, any more than it could fail to know the motive of every act that has been done. Knowing the state of will from which every future act will proceed, as well as that from which every past act has proceeded, it would not regard any act as being what it should be, unless the character expressed by it were what it should be. It would trace the effect of any fault on the part of the character in the actual consequences of the action. For it is only to our limited vision that there can seem to be such a thing as good effects from an action that is bad in respect of the will which it represents, and that in conse- quence the question becomes possible, whether the morality of an action is determined by its motive or by its con- sequences. There is no real reason to doubt that the good or evil in the motive of an action is exactly measured by the good or evil in its consequences, as rightly estimated — estimated, that is, in their bearing on the production of a good will or the perfecting of mankind. The contrary only appears to be the case on account of the limited view we take both of action and consequences. We notice, for instance, that selfish motives lead an able man to head a- movement of political reform which has beneficent conse- quences. Here, we say, is an action bad in itself, accord- ing to the morality of the ' good will,' but which has good effects; is it to be judged according to its motive, or ac- cording to its effects ? But, in fact, if we look a little more closely, we shall find that the selfish political leader was himself much more of an instrument than of an originating cause, and that his action was but a trifling element in the CH. l] MOTIVE AND CONSEQUENCES 353 sum or series of actions which yielded the political move- ment. The good in the effect of the movement will really ' correspond to the degree of good will which has been ex- erted in bringing it about ; and the effects of any selfish- ness in its promoters will appear in some limitation to the good which it brings to society. It is seldom indeed that the most conspicuous actors on the world's stage are known to us enough from the inside, or that the movements in which they take part can be con- templated with sufficient completeness, to enable us very certainly to verify this assurance in regard to them. But the more we learn of such a person, for instance, as Napo- leon, and of the work which seemed to be his, the more clearly does it appear how what was evil in it arose out of his personal selfishness and that of his contemporaries, while what was good in it was due to higher and purer influences of which he and they were but the medium. And within the more limited range of affairs which each of us can observe for himself a like lesson is being con- stantly learnt. If the ' best motives ' seem sometimes to ^ lead to actions which are mischievous in results, it is be- cause these 'best motives' have not been good enough., If there has been no other taint of selfishness about them, , yet they have been acted on inconsiderately ; which means that the agent has been too selfish to take the trouble duly to think of what his action brings with it to others. It is only, in short, the unavoidably abstract nature of our judg- ments upon conduct that leads to distinction between good in motive and good in effect. We infer a motive from the action of another ; but, if the inference be correct so far as it goes, we still do not know the motive in its full reality, — in its. relation, so to speak, to the universe of a character, and to the influences which have made and are making that character. The effects of the action, again, we only con- template in a like fragmentary way. With the whole spir- itual history of the action before us on the one side, with the whole sum and series of its effects before us on the A a 354 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV other, we should presumably see that just so far as a good will, i.e. a will determined by interest in objects contribu- tory to human perfection, has had more or less to do with bringing the action about, there is more or less good, i.e. more or less contribution to human perfection, in its effects. 296. Granting, then, that the moral value of an action really depends on the motives or character which it repre- sents, the question remains whether for us the consideration of motives can be of any avail in deciding whether an action ought to be done or to have been done. It must be ad- mitted at once that, in judging of another's action, we have not enough insight into motive (as distinct from intention) to be warranted in founding our moral estimate on anything but the effects of the action. At the same time we are bound to remember that an estimate so founded is neces- sarily imperfect, and to be cautious in our personal criticism accordingly. Only if the agent himself describes his mo- tives, as interesting persons are apt to do, are we warranted in judging them, and then only as described by him. Again, when the question is whether an action ought to be done, which we are not ourselves responsible for doing or pre- venting, a consideration of motives can plainly have no bearing on it. There remain the cases (r) of reflection on past actions of our own, (2) of consideration whether an act should be presently done, which it rests with ourselves to do or not to do. In both these cases the question of the character or state of will which an action represents may be raised with a possibility of being answered. Given an ideal of virtue, such as has been delineated above, a man may ask himself. Was I, in doing so and so, acting as a good' man should, with a pure heart, with a will set on the objects on which it should be set? — or again^ Shall I, in doing so and so, be acting as a good man should, goodness being understood in the same sense ? The question may be reasonably asked, and there is nothing in the nature of the case to prevent a true answer being given to it. It remains CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 355 to be considered, however, whether it can be raised with advantage ; whether our ideal of virtue can in this way be practically applied with the result of giving men either truer views of what in particular they ought to do, or a better disposition to do it. 297. The habit in a man of raising such questions about himself as those just indicated, is what we have mainly in view when we call him conscientious. Now it must certainly be admitted that there have been men, great in service to their kind, to whom we should not naturally apply this epithet ; and again that although, in most cases where a man is complained of as 'over-conscientious,' the complaint merely indicates his superiority to the level of moral practice about him, it may sometimes indicate a real fault. There is a kind of devotion to great objects or to public service, which seems to leave a man no leisure and to afford no occasion for the question about himself, whether he has been as good as he should have been, whether a better man would not have acted otherwise than he has done. And again there is a sense in which to be always fingering one's motives is a sign rather of an unwholesome preoccupation with self than of the eagerness in disinterested service which helps forward mankind. A man's approach to the ideal of virtue is by no means to be measured by the clearness or constancy of his reflection upon the ideal. A prevalent interest in some work which tends to make men what they should be may be found in those who seldom entertain the question whether they are themselves what they should be, and who in those regions of their life which lie off the line of the prevailing interest — perhaps also in their choice of means by which to give effect to that interest — are the worse for not entertaining it. With all their sins of omission and commission such men may be nearer the ideal of virtue than others, who pride themselves on conformity to a standard of virtue (which cannot be the highest, or they would not credit themselves with conforming to it), and who so hug A a 2 356 PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV their reputation with themselves for acting conscientiously that in difficult situations they will not act at all. 298. This admission made, it remains true that the com- parison of our own practice, as we know it on the inner side in relation to the motives and character which it expresses, with an ideal of virtue, is the spring from which morality perpetually renews its life. It is thus that we ' lift up our hearts, and lift them up unto the Lord.' It is thus alone, however insufficient, however ' dimly charactered and slight,' the ideal, that the initiative is given in the individual — and it can be given nowhere else — to any movement which really contributes to the bettering of man. It is thus that he is roused from acquiescence in the standard of mere respectability. No one, indeed, who recognises in their full extent the results of disinterested spiritual effort on the part of a forgotten multitude, which the respectability of any civilised age embodies, or who asks himself what any of us would be but for a sense of what respectability requires, will be disposed to depreciate its value. But the standard of respectability by which any age or country is influenced could never have been attained, if the temper which ac- quiesces in it had been universal — if no one had been lifted above that acquiescence — in the past. It has been reached through the action of men who, each in his time and turn, have refused to accept the way of living which they found about them, and to which, upon the principle of seeking the greater pleasure and avoiding the greater pain, they would naturally have conformed. The conception of a better way of living may have been on a larger or a smaller scale. It may have related to some general reformation of society, or to the change of some particular practice in which the pro- testing individual had been concerned. But if it has taken effect in any actual elevation of morality, it is because certain men have brought it home to themselves in a contrast be- tween what they should be and what they are, which has awakened the sense of a personal responsibility for improve- ment. CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 357 In so doing they may not have raised the question of personal goodness, in the form in which it presents itself to the self-examining conscience of one who lives among a highly moralised society and conforms as a matter of course to its standards. They may not have asked themselves, Have we, in doing what was expected of us, been doing it from the right rriotives? In that form the question pre- supposes the establishment of a definite standard of con- ventional morality. In the days when such morality was still in making, and in the minds of the forgotten enthusiasts to whom we owe it, this would scarcely be the way in which the contrast between an ideal of virtue and current practice would present itself. Under such conditions it would pre- sent itself less as a challenge to purify the heart than as a call to new courses of overt action, the relation of which to motives and character it would not occur to any one to consider. But in principle it is the same operation in the individual of an idea of a perfect life, with which his own is contrasted, whether it take the form of a consciousness of personal responsibility for putting an end to some practice which, to a mind awakening to the claims of the human soul, seems unjust or unworthy, or the form of self-interro- gation as to the purity of the heart from which a walk and conduct, outwardly correct, proceeds. 299. It may be objected, however, that in thus identifying the motive power at work in the practical reformer of morality with that which sets the introspective conscience upon the enquiry whether the heart is as pure as it should be, we are obscuring the real question as to the practical value of the latter. No one doubts that a man who improves the current morality of his time must be something of an Idealist. He must have an idea, which moves him to seek its realisation, of a better order of life than he finds about him. That idea cannot represent any experienced reality. If it did, the reformer's labour would be superfluous ; the order of life which he seeks to bring about would be already in existence. It is an idea to which nothing real as yet 358 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk.'IV corresponds, but which, as actuating the reformer, tends to bring into being a reality corresponding to itself. It is in this sense that the reformer must be an Idealist. But the idea which he seeks to realise is an idea of definite institu- tions and arrangements of life, of courses of action, each producing their outward sensible effects. What real identity is there between the influence of such an idea — an ideal of virtue, if we like to call it so — producing a visible alteration in man's life, and that of an ideal which sets a man upon asking, not what there is which he ought to do and is not doing, but whether, in that which he has been doing and will (as he ought) continue to do, his heart has been suffi- ciently pure ? The identity will appear, when we reflect that it is not a ' mere idea ' of a better order of life that ever set any one upon a work of disinterested moral reform, in that sense of the term in which one of us might have 'an idea' of the Lord Mayor's show, or of a debate in Parliament, without having been present at them. The idea which moves the reformer is one that he feels a personal responsibility for realising. This feeling of personal responsibility for its execution is part and parcel of the practical idea itself, of I the form of consciousness which we so describe. It is that which distinguishes it as a practical idea. The reformer cannot bear to think of himself except as giving effect, so far as may be, to his project of reform ; and thus, instead of merely contemplating a possible work, he does it. He presents himself to himself on the one hand as achieving, so far as in him lies, the contemplated work, on the other hand as neglecting it for some less worthy object ; and he turns with contempt and aversion from the latter presentation. Now it is because, to the real reformer, the thought of some- thing which should be done is thus always at the same time the thought of something which he should be and seeks to be, but would not be if he did not do the work, that there is a real unity between the spiritual principle which animates him, and that which appears in the self-questioning of the CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 359 man who, without charging himself with the neglect of any outward duty, without contemplating any particular good work which he might do but has not done, still asks himself whether he has been what he should be in doing what he has done. 300. But, granted the unity of the spiritual principle at work in the two supposed cases, is there any real unity in the effects which it produces in the person of the moral reformer and in the person of the self-questioning ' saint ' ? In the one case the effect is the recognition and fulfilment of certain specific duties, previously not recognised or not fulfilled, by the moral reformer and those whom he in- fluences. He and they come to deal differently with their fellow-men. But in the other case, if we enquire what specific performance follows from the self-questioning as to purity of heart, we find it difficult to answer. Among the respectable classes of a well-regulated society there is little in outward walk and conduct to distinguish the merely respectable from the most anxiously conscientious. As a rule, it will only be to a man already pretty thoroughly moralised by the best social influences that it will occur to reproach himself with having unworthy motives even in irreproachable conduct ; and, as a rule, when such a man comes thus to reproach himself in presence of some ideal of a perfect Will, he will already have been fulfiUing, under the feeling that it is expected of him, all the particular duties which the consciousness of such an ideal might otherwise challenge him to fulfil. Unless he has leisure for philan- thropy, or a gift of utterance, there will be little in outward act to distinguish his converted state — if we may so describe the state in which he learns to contrast his personal un- worthiness with an ideal of holiness — from that of moral self-complacency, in which he may have previously been living, and which is the state of most of the dutiful citizens about him. 301. If we could watch him closely enough, indeed, even in outward conduct there would appear to be a difference. Doing the work expected of him ' not with eye-seuvice, as 360 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV a man-pleaser, but in singleness of heart, as unto the Lord,' he will rise to a higher standard of doing it. Into the duties which he is expected to fulfil he will put much more meaning than is put by those who claim their fulfilment, and will always be on the look-out for duties which no one would think the worse of him for not recognising. But in so doing, he probably will not seem to himself to be acting according to a higher standard than those about him. And in fact, although in a certain sense he transcends the ' law of opinion,' of social expectation, he only does so by inter- preting it according to its higher spirit. That law, being, as we have seen, the result of the past action in human con- sciousness of an ideal of conduct, will yield different rules according as it is or is not interpreted by a consciousness under the same influence. It speaks with many voices according as men have ears to hear, and the spirit of the conscientious man shows itself in catching the purest of them. . He is like a judge who is perpetually making new law in ostensibly interpreting the old. He extracts the higher meaning out of the recognised social code, giving' reality to some requirements which it has hitherto only contained potentially. He feels the necessity of rules of conduct which, though they necessarily arise out of that effort to make human life perfect which has brought con- ventional morality into existence, are not yet a recognised part of that morality, and thus have no authority with those whose highest motive is a sense of what is expected of them. 302. This is true ; but it is not merely on this account — not merely on account of certain effects in outward conduct which, upon sufificient scrutiny, it might be found to yield — that we claim for the temper of genuine self-abasement in presence of an ideal of holiness an intrinsic value, the same in kind with that which all would ascribe to a zeal for moral reform. We claim such a value for it — a value independent of any that it might possess as a means to a good other than itself — on the ground that it is a component influence in the perfect human life; on the ground that, whatever CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 361 the universe of activities in which that life displays itself may prove to be, the self-abasing, which is also the aspiring or God-seeking, spirit, must always be their source and spring. The character exhibited by the moral reformer has a like value, in so far as it is not merely a means -to the perfect life, but a phase of the same spiritual principle as must govern that life. But whereas we cannot but suppose that, if the perfect life of mankind were attained, this spiritual principle must have passed out of the phase in which it can appear as a reforming zeal — for in that event there could no longer be wrongs to redress, or indulged vices to eradicate — on the other hand we cannot suppose that, while human life remains human life, it can even in its most perfect form be superior to the call for self-abasement before an ideal of holiness. There is no contradiction in the supposition of a human life purged of vices and with no wrongs left to set right. It is indeed merely the supposition of human life with all its capacities realised. In such a life the question of the reformer. What ought to be done in the way of overt action that is not being done? would no longer be significant. But so long as it is the life of men, t. e. of beings who are born and grow and die ; in whom an animal nature is the vehicle through which the divine self-realising spirit works ; in whom virtue is not born ready-made but has to be formed (however unfailing the process may come to be) through habit and education in conflict with opposing tendencies; so long the contrast must remain for the human soul between itself and the infinite spirit, of whom it must be conscious, as present to itself but other than itself, or it would not be the human soul. The more complete the realisation of its capacities, the clearer will be its apprehen- sion at once of its own infinity in respect of its conscious- ness of there being an infinite spirit— a consciousness which only a self-communication of that spirit could convey — and of its finiteness as an outcome of natural conditions; a finiteness in consequence of which the infinite spirit is for 362 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV ever something beyond it, still longed for, never reached. Towards an infinite spirit, to whom he is thus related, the attitude of man at his highest and completest could still be only that which we have described as self-abasement before an ide"hl of holiness; not the attitude of knowledge, for knowledge is of matters of fact or relations, and the infinite spirit is neither fact nor relation ; not the attitude of full and conscious union, for that the limitation of human nature prevents ; but the same attitude of awe and aspiration which belongs to all the upward stages of the moral life. He must think of the infinite spirit as better than the best that he can himself attain to, but (just for that reason) as having an assential community with his own best. And, as his own best rests upon a self-devoted will, so it must be as a will, good not under the limitations of opposing tendencies but in some more excellent, though not by us positively conceiv- able, way, that he will set before himself the infinite spirit. 303. The spiritual act, then, which in different aspects may be described either as self-abasement or self-exaltation — the act in which the heart is lifted up to God, in which the whole inner man goes forth after an ideal of personal holi- ness — this act, while it is in principle one with the whole course of man's moral endeavour, may be deemed in a certain sense its most final form, because, in that rest from the labour of baffled and disappointed endeavour which a perfectly ordered society might be supposed to bring, it would still not be superseded. Its value is an intrinsic value, not derived from any result beyond itself to which it contributes. In this respect, indeed, it does not differ from any other expression of the good will. If it differs apparently from the more obviously practical expressions of such a will, the reason is that these, while sharing its intrinsic value, have also a further value, as means, which it does not seem to possess. They issue in sensible ameliora- tions of human society. But these very ameliorations are relative to that intrinsic good, the perfection of the human soul, of which the heart at once self-abased and aspiring is CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 363 itself a lasting mode. Whether such a heart, in this person or that, itself issues in outward 'transient' action of a noticeably beneficent kind, will depend mainly on the social surroundings, and on the intellectual and other qualifica- tions of the particular person. If these in any case are such as to call for and to favour a large amount of useful social activity, we are apt under the impression of the out- ward elfect to overlook the spiritual principle which yields it, and which may be the same in another person otherwise circumstanced and gifted, by whom no such apparent effect is produced. We praise the successful reformer, and forget that he is but what the man of unnoticed conscientious goodness might be in another situation and with other opportunities. If the end by reference to which moral values are to be judged were anything but the perfect life itself, as resting on a devoted will, it would be right to depreciate the obscure saint by the side of the man to whose work we can point in the redress of wrongs and the purging of social vices. But if the supreme value for man is what we take it to be — man himself in his perfection — then it is idle to contrast the more observably practical type of goodness with the more self-questioning or consciously God-seeking type. The value of each is intrinsic and identical ; for each rests on a heart or character or will which, however differently it may come to be exhibited as human capacities come to be more fulfilled, must still be that of the perfect man. The distinction between them, as looked at from the point of view from which moral values are properly estimated, is mainly accidental. It is a distinction of the circumstances under which the same principle of action is exercised. Under certain conditions of society, of individual temperament and ability, it takes the one form, under other conditions the other. In neither form is it barren Of effects ; but in one form its effects are more overt and ' transient,' in the other more impalpable and 'immanent.' But the one order of effects no less than the other has its value as a means to that perfect life, to which the obscure saint and 364 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV the true social reformer alike are not merely related as a means, but which each in his own person, under whatever limitations, represents. 304. From these considerations we return to the enquiry out of which they have arisen. Having distinguished the question, What ought to be done ? — a question to be answered in detail by examination of the probable effects of contemplated action — from the question, What should I be? — a question of motives and character — we pointed out that the latter question might properly be raised by a man with reference to his own actions, past or prospective. In regard to others he cannot fully know what the motives and char- acter represented by any particular action have been or will be, and in the absence of such knowledge he certainly can- not be blamable for declining to guess. But as to himself any one may ask, Was I what I should have been in doing so and so? or, Shall I in doing so and so be what I should be ? He may ask such a question reasonably, because it does not depend on the amount of his information, or on his skill in analysis, but on his honesty with himself, whether the answer shall be virtually a true one. But will he for raising such questions, and raising them with such an ideal of virtue before him as has been above indicated, be any the wiser as to what he ought to do, or any the more disposed to do it? 305. Now it is obvious that, though he put such questions to himself with all possible earnestness, he will not for doing so, directly at any rate, be the better judge of what he should do, so far as the judgment depends on correct information or inference as to matters of facts, or on a correct analysis of circumstances. But a man's doubts as to his own con- duct may be of a kind which such information and analysis are principally needed to resolve. He may be asking him- self such questions as these : Was I right in relieving that beggar yesterday ? Was I right in making the declaration required on taking orders ? Was I right in voting against the Coercion Act last session? And he may be asking CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 365 these questions about himself in the same sense in which he might ask them about the actions of any one else, or in which they might be discussed by a debating society, with- out any reference to the rnotives or character represented by the acts in question. The supposition that any one should ask such questions about his own conduct solely in this sense, is no doubt an extreme one. He could not really detach himself from the consideration of the state of mind, better or worse, which led him to act as he did. In relieving the beggar was he not merely compounding with his conscience for his self-indulgence in shirking the trouble which a more judicious exercise of benevolence would have cost him ; or merely giving himself the pleasure of momen. tarily pleasing another, or of being applauded for generosity, at the cost of encouraging a mischievous practice? In making the declaration referred to, was his motive a pure desire to do good and teach the truth, or was he affected by any desire to lead a comfortable life, combining a maximum of reputation for usefulness with a minimum of wear and tear? In voting against the Coercion Act was he at all influenced by the wish to please an important fraction of his constituents, or by a pique against ministers ? It is scarcely possible that any one, at all honest with himself, should consider his own conduct in the cases supposed without testing it by some such questions of motive as these. But when the fullest and most honest consideration has been given them, they do not supersede the questions of fact and circumstance which the supposed cases necessarily involve. The man could not measure the value of his con- duct in almsgiving, in taking orders, in voting against Coercion, without taking account of the effect of almsgiving in general and in the particular case ; of the circumstances on which the usefulness of the Church, and the relative truth of the declarations required by it, depend ; of those conditions of social life in general, and in Ireland specially, which make Coercion a necessity or a political evil. For though he may do what is good in result without being 366 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV good, he cannot have been good unless he has done what is good in result. The question whether he has done what he ought in any particular case may be answered in the affirmative without its following that he has been what he ought to be in doing it ; but unless it can be so answered he may not assume that he has been what he ought to be. And in order to answer it in such cases as we have been supposing, with due reference to circumstances and effects, that sort of knowledge and penetration is required which the most anxious self-interrogation, the most genuine self- abasement, will not directly supply. 306. But, it will be objected, this admission is incon- sistent with the statement just now made, that a true answer to the question, Was I what I should have been in doing so and so ? depends not on the amount of a man's information, but on his honesty with himself. It now appears that a man cannot have been what he should have been in doing any action, unless the action was of a kind to yield good results, and that the correctness of a man's judgment in certain cases on this latter point depends not on his honesty with himself, but on his knowledge and powers of analysis. How are the two statements to be reconciled ? An explana- tion of this point will bring out the true function and value of the self-questioning conscience. If the function of the conscience in challenging me with the question. Was I what I should have been in doing this or that ? were to arrive at a precise estimate of the worth of my conduct in the particular case, the consideration of the effects of the action could be as little dispensed with as that of its motives. To make my conduct perfectly good, it would be necessary that the effects of the act should be purely for good, according to the true standard of good, as well as that my interest in doing it should be purely an interest in that good. It is obvious, however, that the exact measure in which my conduct has fallen short of this unattainable perfection, till we can see all moral effects in their causes, cannot be speculatively ascertained.; CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 367 nor is it of practical importance to attempt its ascertainment. What is of importance is that I should keep alive that kind of sense of shortcoming in my motives and character, which is the condition of aspiration and progress towards higher goodness. And to this end, while the question whether I have been duly patient and considerate and unbiassed by passion or self-interest in taking account of the probable consequences of my act, is an essential question — a question which it only needs that I should be honest with myself, not clever or well-informed, to answer— the question how the action has turned out in respect of consequences which I had not the requisite knowledge or ability to foresee, may be left aside without practical harm. If indeed the question as to motives and character, honestly dealt with, could leave me under the impression that in doing so and so, I was all thati should have been, it would be important for me to be reminded that the action may have had evil consequences which I did not foresee — perhaps in my dulness and ignor- ance could not foresee — but which yet are part of my act. But just because the question of motives and character, honestly dealt with, is incompatible with self-complacency in the contemplation of any piece of past conduct, its moral function is fully served without supplementary enquiry into unforeseen consequences of the conduct. It is a sufficient spring for the endeavour after a higher goodness that I should be ashamed of my selfishness, indolence, or im- patience, without being ashamed also of my ignorance and want of foresight. Without the former sort of shame, the latter, if it could be engendered, would be morally barren ; while, given that personal endeavour after the highest which is the other side of self-abasement, this will turn the pro- ducts of intellectual enlightenment and scientific discovery, as they come, to account in the way of contribution to human perfection. It will do this, and nothing else will. 307. If we are called on to say, then, whether a man will .be any the wiser as to what he ought to do, or aiiy the more disposed to do it, for applying an ideal of virtue to his o^^^n 368 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV conduct in the form of the question, Was I in this or that piece of conduct what I should be ? we must point out that this question itself expresses the source of all wisdom as to what we ought to do. It expresses the aspiration, the effort, in man to be the best that he has it in him to be, from which is ultimately derived the thought that there is something which ought to be done, and the enquiry what in particular it is. It represents the quest for right conduct, as carried on by the individual under that sense of personal responsi- bility for doing the best, for attaining the highest, which can alone make him a reformer of his own practice or of the practice of others. It is true indeed that no recognition of an ideal of virtue, however pure and high, no such incite- ment to the reform of oneself and one's neighbour as a com- parison of the ideal with current practice can afford, will enlighten us as to the effect of different kinds of action upon the welfare of society, whether that welfare be estimated with reference to a maximum of possible pleasure, or to an end which the realisation of a good will itself constitutes. As it stands before the mind of any particular person, the ideal will not directly yield an injunction to do anything in particular which is not in his mind already associated with good results, nor to abstain from anything which is not already associated with evil results. But while it will not immediately instruct him as to the physical or social conse- quences of action, and through such instruction yield new commands, it will keep him on the look-out for it, will open his mind to it, will make him ready, as soon as it comes, to interpret the instruction into a personal duty. The agents in imparting the instruction may be analysts and experi- menters, to whom the ideal of virtue is of little apparent concern — who seldom trouble themselves with the question whether they are what they should be — though, uiiless in their intellectual employment they were controlled by an ideal of perfect work, they would not prove the instructors of mankind. But when the instruction has been conveyed, the self-imposed imperative to turn it to account for the CH. l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 369 bettering of life remains to be given ; and it is only from a conscience responsive to an ideal of virtue that it can pro- ceed. The lesson, for instance, of the mischief done by indiscriminate almsgiving, or by the sale of spirits, may have been most plainly taught by social or physical analysis, but it would be practically barren unless certain persons, each under a consciousness of responsibility for making the best of himself as a social being, charged themselves with the task of getting the lesson put into practice by society. 308. The notion that an ideal of virtue must be barren in the suggestion of particular duties previously unrecogr nised, has probably arisen from the necessity of expressing it verbally in the form of a definition or of a general proposition. From such a proposition as 'the true good for man is the realisation of his capabilities, or the perfect- ing of human life,' or ' the good will is a will which has such perfection for its object,' — or, again, from a definition of any particular form of the good will, of any specific virtue — we may be fairly challenged to deduce any particular obligation but such as is already included in the /notions represented by the terms which stand as the subjects of these several propositions. From a knowledge that the true good, the good will, the specific virtues, are as defined, no one will come to be aware of any particular duties of which he was not aware before he arrived at the definitions. The most that can be said (of which more below) will be that such definitions may put him on his guard against gelt sophistications, which might otherwise obscure to him, the clearness of admitted duties. If the practical consciousness; which we name an ideal of virtue, were no more than the speculative judgment embodied in a definition of the ideal, or than speculative reflection upon the ideal, the same admission would have to be made in regard to it. But it is much more than this; .or, rather, it does not primarily in- volve any such speculative judgment at all, but only comes to involve such a judgment as a secondary result of that aspiration in men after a possible best of life and character, Bb 370 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. iY which primarily, constitutes the consciousness of the ideal. Before a definition of the ideal can be possible, this aspi- ration must have taken effect in the ordering of life ; and it is reflection On the product which it has thus yielded that suggests general statements as to the various virtues, and as to some supreme virtue ; ultimately, as intellectual needs increase, formal definitions of virtue and the virtues. But the acquaintance of educated men with such defini- tions, the employment of the analytical intellect upon them, is very different from what we mean by the practical con- sciousness of the moral ideal. This implies the continued action in the individual of the same spiritual principle that has yielded those forms of life and character which form the subject of our moral definitions ; its continued action as at once compelling dissatisfaction with the imperfection of those forms, and creating a sensibility to the suggestions of a further perfecting of life which they contain. A defini- tion of virtue, a theory of the good, is quite a different thing, in presence of such a living inward interpreter, from what it would be as an abstract proposition. A proposition of geometry, from which by mere analysis no truth could be derived which was not already contained in it, becomes fertile of new truth when applied by the geometer to a new construction. A rule of law, barren to mere analysis, yields new rules when interpreted by the judge in application to new cases. And thus a general ethical proposition, which by itself is merely a record of past moral judgments, and from which by mere analysis no rules of conduct could be derived but such as have- been already accepted and em- bodied in it, becomes a source of new practical direction when applied by a conscience, working under a felt necessity of seeking the best, to circumstances previously not existent or not considered, or to some new lesson of experience. 309. Our conclusion, then, is that the state of mind which is now most naturally expressed by the unspoken questions. Have I been what I should be, shall I be what I should be, in doing so and so? is that in which all moral progress CH.l] CONSCIENTIOUSNESS 371 originates. It must have preceded the formation of definite ideals of character, as well as any articulation of the distinc- tion between outward action and its motives. It is no other than the sense of personal responsibility for making the best of themselves in the family, the tribe, or the state, which must have actuated certain persons, many or few, in order to the establishment and recognition of any moral standards whatever. Given such standards, it is the spirit which at once demands from the individual a loyal conformity to them, and disposes him, upon their suggestion, to construct for himself an ideal of virtue, of personal goodness, higher than they explicitly contain. The action of such an ideal, in those stages of moral development with which we are now familiar, is the essential condition of all further better- ing of human life. Its action is of course partial in various degrees of partiality. It may appear as a zeal for public service on the part of some one not careful enough about the correctness of his own life, or on the other hand in the absorbed religious devotion of the saintly recluse. In the average citizen it may appear only as the influence which makes him conscientious in the discharge of work which he would not suffer except in conscience for neglecting, or as the voice, fitfully heard within, which gives meaning to the announcement of a perfect life lived for him and some- how to be made his own. Taking human society together, its action m one mode supplements its action in another, and the whole sum of its action forms the motive power of true moral development ; which means the apprehension on our part, ever widening and ever filling and ever more fully responded to in practice, of our possibilities as men and of the reciprocal claims and duties which those possibilities imply. B b 2 CHAPTER II THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A THEORY OF THE MORAL IDEAL 310. Supposing the considerations with which the last chapter ended to be admitted, we have still only convinced ourselves of the supreme value which belongs to an ideal of personal goodness, as a principle of action. The value of a certain theory of the ideal, of such a doctrine of the good and of goodness as has been previously sketched in this treatise, is a different question. It was this that we undertook to consider, and this we have so far not directly touched. Having taken the ideal to be a devotion of char- acter and life in some form or other to the perfecting of man ; having insisted that this perfection is to be understood as itself consisting in a life of such self-devoted activity on the part of all persons; we undertook to enquire what avail- able criterion of right and wrong such a theory could afford; how, applied to the circumstances of life, it could be con- strued into particular duties, so as to give us some general guide to the line of conduct we should adopt where conven- tional morality fails us. This enquiry, it may be fairly said, is not met by dwelling on the effect of a moral ideal, which need not be, and generally is not, accompanied by any clear theory of itself, in awakening the individual to a recognition of new duties, as new situations arise and new experience is acquired. The most genuine devotion to the highest ideal of goodness will not save a man from occasional perplexity as to the right line of action for him to take. If it seems to do so, it will only be because, not being the highest kind of devotion, it makes him confident in merely traditional or inconsiderate judgments. If the perplexity were one which admitted of being put in the form, Shall I be acting accord- ing to my ideal of virtue, or as a good man should, in doing so and so? a true devotion to the ideal might guide him PRACTICAL VALUE OP MORAL THEORY 373 through it. But in that case, it may be argued, the practical action of the ideal itself is enough. A theory about it, a philosophy of the true good, is superfluous. But if, on the other hand, the conscientious man's perplexity arises either from a conflict between two authorities which seem to have equal claims on his obedience, or from doubt as to the effect of different courses of contemplated action, while mere devotion to the ideal will not clear his path before him, of what avail will be any instruction that we could give him in accordance with our theory of the good and of goodness ? 311. The discussion of this question has been advisedly postponed till we had considered the practical effect of an ideal of goodness, as possessing a man who may as yet be unacquainted with any philosophical theories about it. Any value which a true moral theory may have for the direction of conduct depends on its being applied and interpreted by a mind which the ideal, as a practical principle, already actuates. And it will be as well at once to admit that the value must in any case be rather negative than positive ; rather in the way of deliverance from the moral anarchy which an apparent conflict between duties equally imperative may bring about, or of providing a safeguard against the pretext which in a speculative age some inadequate and mis- applied theory may afford to our selfishness, than in the way of pointing out duties previously ignored. This latter service must always be rendered by the application of a mind, which the ideal possesses, to new situations, to experience newly acquired or newly analysed, rather than by reflection on any theory of the ideal. Whether a mind so possessed and ap- plied is philosophically instructed or no, is in most circum- stances matter of indifference. One is sometimes, indeed, tempted to think that Moral Philo^apfay i& only needed to remedy the evils which it has itself caused; that if men were not constrained by a necessity of their intellectual nature to give abstract expression to their ideals, the particular mis- leading suggestions, against which a true jjhilosophy is needed to guard, would not be forthcoming. 374 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV For these suggestions chiefly arise from the inadequacy of the formulae in which requirements imposed by a really valuable ideal have found intellectual expression. Under influence of such an ideal institutions and rules of life are formed, essential for their time and turn, but not fitted to serve as the foundation of a universally binding prescription. The generalising intellect, however, requires their embodi- ment in universal rules j and when these are found to conflict with each other, or with some demand of the self- realising spirit which has not yet found expression in a recognised rule, the result is an intellectual perplexity, of which our lower nature is quite ready to take advantage. Blind passion is enlisted in the cause of the several rules. Egoistic interests are ready to turn any of them to account, or to find an excuse for indulgence in what seems to be their neutralisation of each other. Meanwhile perhaps some nobler soul takes up that position of self-outlawry which Wordsworth expresses in the words put into Rob Roy's month : — We have a passion— make a law, Too false to guide us or control ! And for the law itself we fight In bitterness of soul. And, puzzled, blinded thus, we lose Distinctions that are plain and few ; These find I graven on my heart ; That tells me what to do. For deliverance from this state of moral anarchy, which in various forms recurs whenever a sufficient liberation of the intellectual faculties has been attained, there is needed a further pursuit of the same speculative processes which have brought it about. As has just been said, no good will come of this, unless under the direction of a genuine interest in the perfecting of man ; but, given this interest, it is only through philosophy that it can be made independent of the tonflicting, because inadequate, formulae in which duties are presented to it, and saved from distraction between rival CH. u] PRACTICAL VALVE OF MORAL THEORY 375 authorities, of which the injunctions seem at once absolute and irreconcilablej because their origin is not understood. 312. But philosophy itself in its results may yield oppor- tunity to a self-excusing egoism. The formulae in which it expresses conceptions of moral ends and virtues must always be liable to proVe misleading, in the absence of that living interest in a practically true ideal which can alone elicit their higher significance. They are generated in intellectual antagonism and must always probably retain the marks of their origin. Those which have served the purpose of enabling men to see behind and beyond their own moral prejudices or some absolute authoritative asser- tion of a merely relative duty, have not themselves conveyed complete and final truth. If they had done so, it would still have been a truth that could only be made instructive for men's guidance in their moral vocation, if applied to the particulars of life by a mind bent on the highest. But in fact the best practical philosophy of any age has never been more than an assertion of partial truths, which had some special present function to fulfil in the deliverance or defence of the human soul. When they have done their work, these truths become insufficient for the expression of the highest practical convictions operating in man, while the speculative intellect, if enlisted in the service of the pleasure-seeking nature, can easily extract excuses from them for evading the cogency of those convictions. But the remedy for this evil is still not to be found in the abandonment of philosophy, but in its further pursuit. The. spring of all moral progress, indeed, can still lie no- where else than in the attraction of heart and will by the ideal of human perfection, and in the practical convictions which arise from it ; but philosophy will still be needed as the interpreter of practical conviction, and it can itself alone provide for the adequacy of the interpretation. 313. This general account of the practical function which a philosophy of conduct has to serve will probably carry more conviction, if we consider some particular forms of 376 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV perplexity as to right conduct in which philosophy might be of service, and again some instances of the oppprtunity which an inadequate philosophy may offer to egoistic ten- dencies. A previous reminder, however, may be needed that a case of perplexity as to right conduct, if it is to be one in which philosophy can serve a useful purpose, must be one of bona fide perplexity of conscience. Now the margin within which such perplexities can arise in a Christian society is not really very large. The effort after an ideal of conduct has so far taken effect in the establishment of a recognised standard of what is due from man to man, that the articulation of the general imperative, ' Do what is best for mankind V into particular duties is sufficiently clear and full for the ordinary occasions of life. In fulfilling the duties which would be recognised as belonging to his station in life by any one who considered the matter dispassionately, without bias by personal inclination — in fulfilling them loyally, without shirking, 'not with eye-service as men- pleasers,' — we can seldom go wrong ; and when we have done this fully, there will seldom be much more that we can do. The function of bringing home these duties to the consciences of men — of helping them to be honest with themselves in their recognition and interpretation of them — is rather that of the preacher than of the philosopher. Speculatively there is much for the philosopher to do in ex- amining how that ordering of life has arisen, to which these duties are relative ; what is the history of their recognition ; what is the rationale of them ; what is the most correct ex- pression for the practical ideas which underlie them. And, as we shall see, there may be circumstances which give this speculative enquiry a practical value. These circumstances, however, must always be exceptional. Ordinarily it will be an impertinence for the philosopher to pretend either to sup- plement or to supersede those practical directions of conduct, ' I use this as a fair popular equivalent of Kant's formula — 'Treat humanity, whether in your person or in that of another, never merely as a means, always at the same time as an end.' CH. II] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 377 which are supplied by the duties of his station to any one who is free from any selfish interest in ignoring them. 314. Perplexity of conscience, properly so called, seems always to arise from conflict between different formulae for expressing the ideal of good in human conduct, or between different institutions for furthering its realisation, which have alike obtained authority over men's minds without being in- trinsically entitled to more than a partial and relative obe- dience ; or from the incompatibility of some such formula or institution, on the one side, with some moral impulse of the individual on the other, which is really an impulse towards the attainment of human perfection, but cannot adjust itself to recognised rules and established institutions. From the perplexities thus occasioned we must distinguish those that arise from difficulty in the analysis of circumstances or in the forecast of the effects of actions. These are to be met, no doubt, by an exercise of the intellect, but by its exercise rather in the investigation of matters of fact than by that reflection upon ideas which is properly called philosophy. From both kinds of practical perplexity again are to be distinguished those self-sophistications which arise from a desire to find excuses for gratifying unworthy inclinations. Such self-sophistications, we know, will often dignify them- selves with the title of cases of conscience ; and the disrepute which has fallen upon ' casuistry ' has been partly due to its having often been employed in their service. A man will pretend to be perplexed with a case of conscience, when really he is wishing to make out that some general rule of conduct does not apply to him, because its fulfilment would cause him trouble, or because it conflicts with some passion which he wishes to indulge. Most cases in which we argue that circumstances modify for us the obligation to veracity are of this kind. When such is the source of the 'perplexity,' it is not the most perfect philosophy, the completest possible theory of the moral ideal, that will be of avail for deliverance from it. Just so far as the character is formed to disinterested loyalty to the moral law, however 378 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV imperfectly the law may be conceived, it will brush aside the fictitious embarrassment. As Kant puts it, that emotion which on one side is ' Achtung ' for the moral law, on the other is ' Verachtung ' for one's selfish inclinations. Such an emotion may not save a man from many concessions to his own weakness, but it will make him refuse with contempt to resort to casuistry for their justification. He may be en- lightened enough to appreciate the relativity of most general rules of conduct, to understand that they admit of exceptions according to circumstances, but he will despise the suggestion of an exception to them in his own favour — an exception in order to save himself pain or gain himself pleasure. This sort of self-contempt affords a short method of settling ques- tions to which the speculative intellect, if once it so far enlists itself in the service of passion as to treat them seriously, will ' find no end, in wandering mazes lost.' 315. There may be cases, however, in which the difficulty felt in adhering to a general rule, such as that of veracity, arises from an impulse entitled in itself to as much respect as the conscientious injunction to adhere to the rule. A famous example is the temptation of Jeannie Deans to give false evidence on a single point for the sake, of saving her sister, of whose substantial innocence she is assured. In such a case would Moral Philosophy, if it could gain a hear- ing, have any direction to give to the perplexed person ? He is asking himself, Shall I in this case be acting as I ought, as a good man should, in adhering to the strict rule of veracity, or in departing from it to save the beloved person from a punishment which I know to be undeserved ? Whatever the principle of our Moral Philosophy, can it help in answer- ing the question ? The Utilitarian theory, which is apt to take credit to itself for special practical availability, can here have no counsel to give. For by what possible calculus could the excess, on the whole, of pleasure over pain or of pain over pleasure, to be expected from adherence to the rule of vera- city, be balanced against the excess of pleasure over pain or of pain over pleasure, to be expected in the particular case CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 379 from its violation ? But if we suppose the question to be dealt with according to the principles advocated in this treatise, we do not escape embarrassment. How shall the perplexed person say whether the motive which suggests adherence to the rule of veracity, or that which suggests departure from it, is the worthier of the two ? A true Moral Philosophy does not recognise any value in conformity to a universal rule, simply as such, but only in that which ordin- arily issues in such conformity, viz. the readiness to sacrifice every lower inclination in the desire to do right for the sake of doing it. But in the case supposed, may not the desire to save the beloved person, known to be substantially inno- cent, claim to be a disinterested desire to do right equally with a determination to adhere to the strict rule of veracity ? 316. If the moral philosopher were called on to answer this question as a matter of general speculation, not for the guidance of a particular person in a particular case, he would have to say that it did not admit of being answered with a simple ' yes ' or ' no.' For purposes of moral valuation neither the desire to save the life of the beloved person, nor the determination at any cost to adhere to the rule of strict veracity, can be detached from the relation which it bears to the whole history of a life, to the universe of a character ; and this relation is not in any case ascer- tainable by us. Of two men, placed in precisely similar perplexities, one might adhere to the rule of veracity at the cost of sacrificing the life of a beloved and innocent person, the other might save the person at the cost of violating the rule of veracity, and it would be impossible for the moral philosopher to say which action were the better or the worse of the two ; because he would not know in regard to either that spiritual history upon which its moral value depends. If on the other hand (an unlikely supposition) he had to assist the perplexed conscience' in deciding between the ' [The expression 'perplexed conscience'' would probably have been modified on revision, in accordance with the distinctions laid down in § 321-] 380 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV alternative actions in such a case as that supposed, he would have to press the question whether it is not at bottom some personal weakness which suggests the departure from the ordinary moral rule ; whether it is really a greater devotion to the beloved person that suggests a falsehood for her sake, and not perhaps a backwardness to serve her in some more difficult and dangerous way, in which she might still be served though she had to bear the consequence of the truth being told. If that consequence should prove to be her painful and undeserved death, ' What are you,' the doubter must be asked, 'what is the victim whom your untruth might save, that the suffering of either should be set against the duty of adherence to a rule, of which the universal observance is a prime condition of the perfect ordering of social life, and therefore morally necessary ? Each of you, no doubt, has an absolute value which no rule, as such, can have. Rules are made for man, not man for rules. But the question is not really between the value of either of you ahd the value of a rule, but between the importance to be attached on the one hand to your pain or deliverance from pain, and that to be attached on the other to the moral life of society which every lie must injure, and to the integrity of your character as a person self subordinated to the require- ments of social good. Let the worst come from your truth- speaking ; still it is not that which is of absolute value, either in you or in the victim of the law, which will suffer loss. Your devotion to the beloved person is indeed truly a good ; but that devotion is not set aside by, but carried on into, the larger devotion which includes it, and which forbids your departure from the rule of veracity. As to the beloved person herself, the question is more dark, for she is passive in the matter ; it is not any action to be done by her that is under consideration, and no one can gain directly in intrinsic worth by the action of another. But it is certain that her deliver- ance from suffering through your wrong-doing could not be really for her good ; it would not make her heart purer, or direct her will to higher objects ; and you may trust on the CH. Il] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 381 other hand (though unable to foresee how such a result should come about) that in taking that consequence of her conduct, which only your wrong-doing could avert, she will gain in that spiritual capability which is alone to her a source of abiding good.' 317. The suggestion of such counsel being offered to any one under such trial as we have supposed, inevitably strikes us as inappropriate. We know that in fact under such circumstances the soul would not be at leisure for philoso- phical reflection. Its conduct must be determined by in- fluences that act more swiftly and decisively ; if in the severe path for which we have supposed the philosopher to be arguing, by an inbred horror of falsehood, which does not •wait to give an account of itself, or by sense of the presence of a divine onlooker, whose disapproval, not for fear of penal consequences but for very shame, cannot be faced. Accord- ing to the distinction previously drawn, it is the action of an ideal of virtue itself, not any theory about the ideal, that can alone be efficient in such a case. Though not in the emer- gency itself, however, yet in preparing the soul for it, a true philosophy may have an important service to render. It will be a service, indeed, rather of the defensive and negative than of the actively inciting kind — a service which in a specula- tive and dialectical age needs to be rendered, lest the hold of the highest moral ideas on the mind should be weakened from apparent lack of intellectual justification. Those ideas, as we have often pointed out, are not abstract conceptions. They actuate men independently of the opera- tions of the discursive intellect. They rather direct those operations than are their result. The idea, in its various forms, of something that human life should be, of a perfect being for whom this ' should be ' already ' is,' cannot pro- ceed from observation of matters of fact or from inference founded on such observation, though in various ways (on which we cannot here dwell) it regulates that observation and inference. Such ideas or principles of action, at work before they are understood, not only give rise to institutions 382 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV and iTipdes of life, but also express themselves in forms ot the imagination. In complication with effects of passion and force, they produce the laws, whether enforced by opinion or by the magistrate, which form the essential and permanent element in the fabric of social obligation; and they also yield the imagination of a supreme invisible but all-seeing ruler, to whom service is due, from whom com- mands proceed as from an earthly superior — the head ot a family or the sovereign of a state— and who punishes the violation of those commands. It is in the form of this imagination that, in the case at least of all ordinary good people, the idea of an absolute duty is so brought to bear on the soul as to yield an awe superior to any personal in- clination. In sudden calls upon the will, when the sustain- ing force of habit is of no avail, when no rewards or penalties, either under the law of the state or the law of opinion, are to be looked for, whatever the course of action adopted, can any of us be sure that, except under the impression of the ' great task-master's eye ' upon him, he would do the work which upon reflection he would admit should be done ? 318. It is a necessity, however, of our rational nature that these forms of imagination, in which our highest prac- tical ideas have found expression, should be subject to criticism. Is there really a divine ruler, who issues com- mands which we can obey or disobey ; who somehow sees and hears us, though not through eye or ear; whom it is possible for us to please or offend ? Now there is undoubt- edly a sense in which these questions, once asked, can only be answered in the negative. The most convinced Theist must admit that God is as unimaginable as He is unper- ceivable,— unimaginable because unperceivable, for that which we imagine (in the proper sense of the term) has the necessary finiteness of that which we perceive ; that state- ments, therefore, which in any strict sense could only be applied to an imaginable finite agent, cannot in any such sense be applied to God. As applied to Him, they must at any rate not be reasoned from as we reason from state- CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 383 ments about matters of fact. The practice of treating them as if they were such statements, with the confusions and contradictions to which it inevitably leads, only enhances doubt as to the reality of the divine Spirit ; of which we must confess that it is inexpressible in its nature by us, though operative in us through those practical ideas of a possible perfect life, of a being for whom this perfect life is already actual, which, acting upon imagination, yield the language of ordinary religion. 319. Now when criticism comes to do its inevitable work upon the language of imagination in which our fundamental moral ideas have found expression, a counter-work is called for from philosophy, which has an important bearing upon conduct. It has to disentangle the operative ideas from their necessarily imperfect expression, and to explain that the validity of the ideas themselves, as principles of action, is not affected by the discovery that the language, in which men under their influence naturally express themselves, has not the sort of truth which belongs to a correct statement of matters of fact. It has to show when and how — these ideas not being matters of fact or obtained by abstraction from matters of fact — the figures of speech employed in expressing the aspirations and endeavours to which they give rise, being derived by metaphor from sensible matters of fact, are liable to mislead us if we argue from them as though they conveyed literal truth. It has to point out what is the sense in which, alone the question as to the truth of such language can be properly asked or answered. If the question is asked, for instance, whether there is truth in the language, habitual to the religious conscience, in which God is represented as giving us certain commands and seeing whether we perform them or no, the philosopher will remind us that to enquire whether such language is true, in the same sense in which it might be true that I ordered my servant to do certain things this morning and took notice whether he did them, is as inappropriate as it would be to enquire (according to an example employed by Locke in 384 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IY -another connection) whether sleep is swift or virtue square. It can only be reasonably asked whether it is true in the sense that it naturally expresses, in terms of imagination, an emotion arising from consciousness of a relation which really subsists between the human soul and God. If the infinite Spirit so communicates itself to the soul of man as to yield the idea of a possible perfect life, and that consequent sense of personal responsibility on the part of the individual for making the best of himself as a social being from which the recognition of particular duties arises, then it is a legitimate expression by means of metaphor — the only possible means, except action, by which the consciousness of spiritual real- ities can express itself — to say that our essential duties are commands of God. If again the self-communication of the infinite Spirit to the soul of man is such that man is con- scious of his relation to a conscious being, who is in eternal perfection all that man has it in him to come to be, then it is a legitimate expression of that conscious relation by means of metaphor to say that God sees whether His commands are fulfilled by us or no, and an appropriate emotion to feel shame as in His presence for omissions or violations of duty incognisable by other men. 320. The above must not be taken to mean that it is to be considered the business of philosophy to justify the lan- guage of religious imagination universally and uncondition- ally. Even . as that language is current in Christendom, there may be much in it that a true moral philosophy will have to condemn as inconsistent with the highest kind of moral conviction. Objection may properly be taken, for instance, to the ordinary representation of God as a source of rewards and penalties; as rewarding goodness with certain pleasures bestowed from without, as punishing wickedness with pains inflicted from without. The objection to it, how- ever, is not that it represents God under a figure which is not a statement of fact (for the same objection would apply equally to all the language of religion), but that the figure is one which interferes with the true idea of goodness as its CH. II ] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 385 own reward, of vice as its own punishment. It is an im- portant function of philosophy to examine the current lan- guage of religious imagination, not with the unreasonable view of testing its speculative truth, as we might test the truth of some doctrine about natural phenomena, but in order to satisfy ourselves whether it worthily expresses the emotions of a soul in which the highest moral ideas have done their perfect work. With such an application of philosophy, however, we are not at present concerned. Our present purpose is merely to point out the service which philosophy may render to practical morality in counteracting the advantage which scepticism may otherwise give to passion against duty. It is true, of course, that when the soul is suddenly called upon to face some awful moment, to which are joined great issues for good or evil in its moral history, it is not by ' going over the theory of virtue in one's mind,' not by any philosophical consideration of the origin and validity of moral ideas, that the right determination can be given. A judgment of the sort we call intuitive — a judgment which in fact represents long courses of habit and imagination founded on ideas — is all that the occasion admits of. But even in such cases it may make a great difference to the issue, whether the inclination to the weaker or less worthy course is or is not assisted by a suggestion from the intellect that the counter-injunction of conscience is illusory. And in such an age as ours this suggestion is likely to be forth- coming, if scepticism has been allowed to pull to pieces the imaginative vesture in which our formative practical ideas have clothed themselves, without a vindication by philo- sophy of the ultimate authority of the ideas themselves, and of so much in the language of religious imagination as is their pure and (to us) necessary expression. 321. We have still, however, to consider the service which philosophy may render in what we distinguished above as iona fide perplexities of conscience ; bona fide perplexities, as distinct from those self-sophistications, born of the pleasure- c c 386 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV seeking impulse, in dealing with which philosophy would be misapplied ; perplexities of conscience, as distinct from cases like that of Jeannie Deans, where conscience speaks without ambiguity but is opposed by an impulse in itself noble and disinterested. In cases of this latter kind philo- sophy may, as we have seen, under special conditions of intellectual culture, have an important service to render; but it will not be in the way of setting aside apparent con- tradictions in the deliverance of conscience. It will rather be in the way of vindicating the real authority of that deliverance against a scepticism which might otherwise take advantage of the discovery that the forms of imagination, in which the deliverance is clothed, are not the same as statements of speculative truth. The kind of practical perplexity which we have now to consider arises not from any doubt as to the authority of conscience, nor from any attempt of selfish inclination to 'dodge' conscience by assuming its disguise, but from the fact that the requirements of conscience seem to be in conflict with each other. However disposed to do what his conscience enjoins, the man finds it difficult to decide what its injunc- tion is. In the crisis, for instance, through which several European states have recently passed, such a difficulty might naturally occur to a good Catholic who was also a loyal subject. His conscience would seem to enjoin equally obedience to the law of the State, and obedience to the law of the Church. But these laws were in conflict. Which then was he to obey ? It is a form of the same difficulty which in earlier days must have occurred to Quakers and Anabaptists, to whom the law derived from Scripture seemed contradictory to that of the State, and to those early Christians for whom the law which they disobeyed in refusing to sacrifice retained any authority. In still earlier times it may have arisen in the form of that conflict between the law of the family and the law of the State, presented in the ' Antigone.' Nor is the case really different when the modern citizen, in his capacity OH. n] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 387 as an ofificial or as a soldier, is called upon to help in putting down some revolutionary movement which yet presents itself to his inmost conviction as the cause of 'God and the People.' This case may indeed appear different from those previously noticed, because, while those were cases of conflict between acknowledged authorities, this may seem rather to be one of conflict between private opinion and authority. But if the private opinion is more than 'a conceit which it is pleasant to air ; if it is a source of really conscientious opposition to an authority which equally appeals to the conscience ; if, in other words, it is an expression which the ideal of human good gives to itself in the mind of the man who entertains it ; then it too rests on a basis of social authority. No in- dividual can make a conscience for himself. He always needs a society to make it for him. A conscientious ' heresy,' religious or political, always represents some gradually maturing conviction as to social good, already implicitly involved in the ideas on which the accepted rules of conduct rest, though it may conflict with the formulae in which those ideas have been hitherto authoritatively expressed, and may lead to the overthrow of institutions which have previously contributed to their realisation. 322. In preparation for the times when conscience is thus liable to be divided against itself, much practical service may be rendered by a philosophy which, without depreciating the authority of conscience as such, can explain the origin of its conflicting deliverances, and, without pronouncing un- conditionally for either, can direct the soul to the true end to which each in some qualified way is relative. In order to illustrate this in more detail, we will suppose a philosopher, holding the doctrines previously stated in this treatise, to be called upon for counsel in difficulties of the kind just noticed. It will of course occur to every one that the counsel given goes too far back in its reasons, and in its conclusions is of too neutral a kind, to command attention in times of social or religious conflict and revolution. But, though this is so, it might have its effect upon the few who lead the many, in c c 2 388 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV preparing the mind through years of meditation for the days when prompt practical decision is required. The philosopher, then, will begin by considering how the seeming contradiction in the deliverances of conscience comes about. He will point out that, though there would be no such thing as conscience at all but for the conscious- ness on the part of the individual that there is an uncon- ditional good which, while independent of his likes and dislikes, is yet his good — though this consciousness is as irremovable as morality — yet it does not follow that all the judgments which arise out of this consciousness are uncon- ditionally valid. The several dicta of conscience have had their history. Passing beyond the stage of mere conformity to custom, of mere obedience to persons and powers that be — a conformity and obedience which themselves arise out of an operative, though inarticulate, idea of common good — men have formed more or less general notions of the customs and powers, as entitled to their conformity and obedience. Certain formulae, expressing the nature of the authorities to which obedience is due, and their most familiar requirements, have become part of 'the a priori furniture' of men's minds, in the sense that they are accepted as valid independently of those lessons of ex- perience which men are conscious of acquiring for them- selves. Such are what are commonly called the ' dicta of conscience.' Certain injunctions of family duty, of obedience to the law of the State, of conformity to a law of honour or opinion, have assumed this character. So too in Christen- dom have certain ordinances of the Church, notwithstanding much variety of opinion as to what constitutes the Church. 323. Now in all such deliverances of conscience the con- tent of the obligation is blended with some conception or imagination of an authority imposing the obligation, in a combination which only the trained analytical intellect cart disentangle. Just as to children the duty of speaking the truth seems inseparable from tlie parental command to do so, so to many a simple Catholic, for instance, the fact that CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 389 the Church commands him to live cleanly and honestly seems the source of the obligation so to live. To give just measure and to go to Mass are to him homogeneous duties ; just as to unenlightened persons in a differently ordered religious community to give just measure and to observe the Sabbath may be so. An abrogation of the authority which imposes the ceremonial obligation would seem to imply a disappear- ance of the moral obligation as well ; because this too in the mind of the individual has become associated with the imagination of an imponent authority, the same as that which enjoins the ceremonial observance. This does not arise from the existence of a Church as a co-ordinate institu- tion with the State. Were there no Church, the difference would only be that, as in the Grseco-Roman world, the State would gather to itself the sentiments of which, as it is, the Church seems the more natural object. Moral duties would still be associated with the imagination of an imponent authority, whose injunctions they would be supposed to be, though the authority might be single instead of twofold. Nor would any considerate member of modern society, even the most enlightened, venture to say that his sense of moral duty was independent of some such imagination of an imponent, however resolutely he might refuse to recognise either the Church or any particular personage as the impo- nent. If he has ceased to describe himself naturally as a good Catholic or good Churchman, he may still attach sig- nificance to the description of himself as a good Christian ; and this probably implies to him the recognition of an im- ponent of obligation in the founder of the Christian society or the author of a Christian revelation. Or if he has ceased to recognise such an imponent, he probably still calls him- self a loyal subject ; and in so doing expresses the fact that he presents to himself some personal external source — some source other than a spirit working in him — of the law which he obeys ; and that he obeys the law, not from fear of pains and penalties, but from reverence for the authority from which he believes it to proceed — as much, therefore, when 39° PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV he might evade it with impunity as when he runs the risk of punishment. Perhaps there may be no ostensible person, no emperor or king, whom he regards as the author of the law which he obeys, and he may accordingly prefer to describe himself as a loyal citizen rather than as a loyal subject, but he is very exceptional if he does not still think of some association of persons, a ' sovereign people,' as the authority from which law proceeds. If he ceased to present such an /authority to himself, having previously discarded the imagi- nation of Church or King or Divine Lawgiver as imponents of duty, he WQuld_bfi_ap);_toj5ild. the obligation, not only of ' what is local and temporary in positive law, but of what is essential in the moral law, slipping away from him. 324. This imagination of an external imponent, however, is not intrinsically necessary to the consciousness of what we call metaphorically' moral law, while it is the source of apparent conflict between different injunctions of conscience. [it is the very essence of moral duty to be imposed by a man Ion himself. The moral duty to obey a positive law, whether a law of the State or oT theT^urch, is imposed not by the author or enforcer of the positive law, but by_that-spirit-nf man — not less divine because the spirit of man — which sets before him the ideal of a perfect life, and pronounces obedi- ence to The^ositiveTawTo'be necessary to its realisation. This actual imposition, however, of duties by man upon him- self precedes and is independent of a true conception of what duty is. Men who are really a law to themselves, in the sense that it is their idea of an absolute ' should be,' of some per- fection to be realised in and by them, that is the source of the general rule of life which they observe, are yet unable to present that rule to themselves as anything else than the in- junction of some external authority. It is this state of mind ' I say ' metaphorically,' because what we primarily understand by ' law ' is some sort of command, given by a superior in power to one whom he is able to punish for disobedience ; whereas it is the essence of moral ' law ' that it is a rule which a man imposes on himself, and from another motive than the fear of punishment. CH. Il] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 391 that renders them liable to the perplexities of conscience described, in which duties appear to conflict with each other. There is no such thing really as a conflict of duties. A man's duty under any particular set of circumstances is always one, though the conditions of the case may be so complicated and obscure as to make it difficult to decide what the duty really is. That which we are apt to call a conflict of duties is really a competition of reverences for imagined imponents of duty, whose injunctions, actual or . supposed, do not agree. A woman perhaps finds herself directed to act in one way by her father, in another by her confessor. A citizen may find himself similarly distracted between the law of the State and that of the Church ; or between the ordinance of an ostensible sovereign and that of a revolutionary committee, claiming to act in the name of God and the People. In such cases, if the conscience were clear of prepossession in favour of this authority or that, and were simply prepared to recognise as duty the course which contributes most to the perfect life, it might yet be difficult enough to ascertain what this course of action would be, though there would be no doubt that the one duty was to pursue that course of action when ascertained. But the actual perplexity of conscience in such cases commonly arises not from this difficulty, but from the habit of identi- fying duty with injunctions given by external authorities, and from the fact that in the supposed case the injunctions so given are inconsistent with each other. 325. Now the task of the moral philosopher in regard to such cases would be a comparatively easy one, if it simply consisted in trying to rid a man of his illusions of conscience; if he had merely to point out the work of imagination in ascribing the essential duties which conscience enjoins to an external imponent, and to show that the apparent conflict of duties is in fact merely a conflict between certain external authorities which are wrongly supposed to impose duties, whereas all that a purely external authority can impose is 392 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV a command enforced by fear. If the philosopher aims at no more than this, he may succeed in his work, but its value will be doubtful. It may prove easier to convince men that duties; in the moral sense, cannot be imposed from without than, when this has been shown, to maintain the conviction that they exist at all. If the result of the philosopher's work is to popularise the notion that the authorities to which men have chiefly looked as imponents of duties, are merely powers able to induce obedience to their commands by threat of punishment for disobedience, without substitution of any new reverence for that which must be withdrawn from the authorities so regarded, we shall have nothing to thank him for. In truth the phrase ' external authority,' as applied to the imagined imponents of duty, involves something of a contradiction. If they were merely external, they would not be authorities, for an authority implies, on the part of the man to whom it is an authority, a conception of its having a claim upon his obedience ; and this again implies that his obedience to it is a self-imposed obedience— an obedience which commends itself to his reason as good, irrespectively of penalties attached to disobedience. The authority, in being recognised as an authority, has ceased to be a mere source of commands, enforced by fear of punish- ment for their violation, and in that sense to be merely external. Its injunctions now commend themselves to the subject of them, not indeed as proceeding from a spirit which is his own or himself, but as directed to the attain- ment of an end in which the subject is interested on his own account ; which is, and is known by him to be, his true good. How the several injunctions in detail contribute to such an end he does not see ; but he trusts the authority from which they proceed to have it more completely in view than he can himself. It is thus that the Church is an au- thority to the good Catholic, the State to the good citizen, the Bible to the orthodox Protestant. In each case the acknowledgment of the authority has become one and the same thing with the individual's presentation to himself of CH. ll] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 393 a true good, at once his own and the good of others, which it is his business to pursue. 326. Now it would be a blundering and reckless proce- dure on the part of the moral philosopher, if he were first to construe too literally the language in which these authori- ties are described, so to speak, from without for rhetorical or logical purposes, — to take it as if it represented their true spiritual import for those who acknowledge them — and then, in his hurry to assert the truth that a moral obligation can- not be imposed from without, were to seek to dethrone them from their place in the moral imagination, and to substitute for them an improvised conscience that should make its own laws de novo from within. It must rather be his object, without setting aside any of the established authorities which have acquired a hold on the conscience, to awaken such an understanding of the impulse after an ideal of conduct which, without being understood, has expressed itself in these authorities, as may gradually render men independent of the mode of its authoritative expression. One who has learnt this lesson will have a rationale of the various duties presented to him in the name of Caesar or of God, which will help him to distinguish what is essential in the duties from the form of their imposition, and to guide himself by looking to the common end to which they are alike relative. Should an occasion arise when the duties seem to conflict, he will be prepared for the discovery that the conflict is not really between duties, but between powers invested by the imagination with the character of imponents of duty. He will be able to stand this discovery without moral deteriora- tion, because he has learnt to fix his eye on the moral end or function — the function in the way of furthering perfec- tion of conduct — served by the authorities which he has been bred to acknowledge. He can thus find in that end, or in the Spirit whose self-communication renders him capable of seeking it, a fit object for all the reverences claimed by those authorities, and which he now discovers to be due to them only by a derived and limited title. 327. It may thus fall to the moral philosopher, under 394 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV certain conditions of society and of intellectual movement, to render an important practical service. But he will render it simply by fulfilling with the utmost possible completeness his proper work of analysis. As a moral philosopher he analyses human conduct; the motives which it expresses, the spiritual endowments implied in it, the history of thought, habits and institutions through which it has come to be what it is. He does not understand his business as a philosopher, if he claims to do more than this. He will not take it for a reproach to be reminded that no philo- sopher can supply a 'moral dynamic' The pretension to do so he would regard as a great impertinence. He finds moral dynamic enough in the actual spiritual nature of man, when that nature is regarded, as it is his business to regard it, not merely in its hitherto performance, but in its intrinsic possibilities. If he cannot help wishing for more, that is an incident of the very aspiration after perfection of conduct which constitutes the dynamic. His immediate business as a philosopher is not to strengthen or heighten this aspira- tion, much less to bring it into existence, but to understand it. As a man and a citizen, indeed, it is his function to serve as its organ ; to give effect to it in his own conduct, to assist in communicating it to others. And since in being a philosopher he does not cease to be a man and a citizen, he will rejoice that the analysis, which alone forms his employment as a philosopher, should incidentally serve a purpose subordinate to the 'moral dynamic' — that it should help to remove any obstacle to the effort of the human soul after a perfect life. The distraction of conscience caused, as we have seen, by competition of reverences for authorities whose injunctions come into conflict with each other, may form such an obstacle. Its outward effect may sometimes be a paralysis of action ; sometimes, on the other hand, hasty and embit- tered action in opposition to one of the causes or authorities between the claims of which conscience is perplexed — action hasty and embittered for the very reason that the agent is afraid to face the consequence of dispassionate enquiry into CH. li] PERPLEXITY OF CONSCIENCE 395 the validity of the claims to which he blindly submits. So far as the impediment to the highest living, to the free development of human capabilities, is of this kind, the phi- losopher by mere thoroughness and completeness of ethical analysis may help to remove it. By giving the most adequate account possible of the moral ideal; by considering the process through which the institutions and rules of life, of which we acknowledge the authority, have arisen out of the effort, however blindly directed, after such an ideal, and have in their several measures contributed to its realisation ; by showing that conscience in the individual, while owing its education to those institutions and rules, is not properly the mere organ of any or all of them, but may freely and in its own right apprehend the ideal of which they are more or less inadequate expressions ; by thus doing his proper work as a philosopher of morals, he may help the soul to rise above the region of distraction between competing authori- ties, or between authorities and an inner law, to a region in which it can harmonise all the authorities by looking to the end to which they, or whatever is really authoritative in them, no less than the inner law, are alike relative. 328. That the soul, however, should derive any such benefit from philosophy implies a previous discipUne, which cannot be derived from philosophy, but only from conduct regulated by the authorities which philosophy teaches it to understand. It is a complaint as old as the time of Plato that, in learning to seek for the rationale of the rules which they are trained to obey — to enquire what is the ideal of human good, which these rules serve and are justified by serving — men come to find excuses for disregarding them. And, no doubt, as Plato saw, till the character is set in the direction of the ideal, a theory of the ideal can be of no value for the improvement of conduct in any sense. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the apparent mischief, which arises in a speculative age from the habit of asking a reason why for the rules of respectability, does more than affect the excuses made for acts of self-indulgence of which men, innocent of criticism or speculation, would equally be 396 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY guilty. But, however this may be, it remains true that the value of the Dialectic which asks and gives such an account of ideal good as at once justifies and limits obedience to practical authorities, is conditional upon its finding in the individual a well-formed habitual morality. When it does so, it may influence life for good, by enlisting in the real service of mankind the zeal which would otherwise become a mis-directed loyalty or a spirit of un- profitable rebellion. It will teach a man to question the absoluteness of the authorities which speak in the name of Csesar and of God — not with a view to shirking the precepts of either in the interest of his own pleasures, but in order that he may not be led by either into a 'conscientious' opposition to the other, obstructive to the work of which the promotion in different ways is the true function of each. When he finds that the requirements of Church or State, the observances of conventional morality or conventional religion, are in conflict with what some plead as their con- scientious convictions, it will make him watchful to ascertain whether these new convictions may not represent a truer effort after the highest ideal than that embodied in the authorities which seek to suppress them. On the other hand, when he finds some conviction of his own in conflict with authority, it will teach him not indeed to conceal it for fear of inconvenient consequences, but to suppress all pride in it as if it were an achievement of his own ; to regard it as proceeding, so far as it is good for anything, from the operation of the same practical reason in society which has given rise to the authorities with which his conviction brings him into collision. So regarding it, he will be respectful of the prejudices which he offends by expressing it ; careful to eschew support which might be due not to an appreciation of what is good in the new conviction, but to mere aversion from the check put upon self-will by the authorities impugned ; patient of opposition, and, in case of failure, ready to admit that there is more wisdom than he understood in the conventions which have been too strong for him. CHAPTER III THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF A HEDONISTIC MORAL PHILOSOPHY 329. The chief theory of conduct which in Modern Europe has afforded the conscientious citizen a vantage- ground for judging of the competing claims on his obedience, and enabled him to substitute a critical and intelligent for a blind and unquestioning conformity, has no doubt been the Utilitarian. What we are now considering, it must be borne in mind, is the practical value of theories in regard to the moral ideal, as distinct from the possession of the character by the ideal itself. It is not to the purpose, there- fore, to notice the work of religious reformers. It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has origi- nated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human con- duct, arrived at by some person or persons ; a conception, perhaps, towards which many men have been silently work- ing, but which finally finds in some one individual the character which can give decisive practical expression to it. But in the initiation of religious reforms the new theory of t^ the ideal, as a theory, always holds a secondary place. It is not absent, but it is, so to speak, absorbed in a character — a character to which the speculative completeness of the theory is of little interest — and it is this character which gives the new conception of the ideal its power in the world. The influence exercised by Utilitarianism, on the other hand, has been specially the influence of a theory. Whatever the errors arising from its Hedonistic psychology, no other theory has been available for the social or political reformer, com- bining so much truth with such ready applicability. No other has offered so commanding a point of view from which to criticise the precepts and institutions presented as authori- tative. When laws of the Church, or of the State, or of 398 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bk. IV ^'opinion,' have become antagonistic to each other; when any of them, again, has been found to conflict with one of those convictions of tender consciences, or of enthusiasts for humanity, which are a ' law of opinion ' in the making, Utilitarianism furnishes a test by which the competing claims of the different laws, or those of law on one side and in- dividual conviction on the other, may be put to the test. 330. All persons having a private interest in the main- tenance of the law or custom which the Utilitarian theory calls in question ; all who shrink from the trouble of having to examine established rules of conduct; others who are rightly persuaded that the service rendered to mankind by rules that have become sacred is not to be measured by any account of their usefulness which the most enlightened observer can make out — these withstand Utilitarian criticism in the name of principle against expediency. Generally, however — at any rate when the question is one, not of con^ duct in private relations, but of laws or institutions, or of political conduct — that view of the right course to take which pleads ' principle,' as against suggestions said to be founded on 'expediency,' really only differs from the latter in respect of the more limited range of consequences which it takes into account. The ' principle ' alleged has originally derived its authority from reference to some social good which it has been found to serve. The ' expediency,' for the sake of which a departure from the established rule is pressed for, is equally founded on a conception of social good, but on the con- ception of a good in which a wider range of persons is con- templated as partaking. The ill-repute which attaches to considerations of expe- diency, so far as it is well founded, is chiefly due to the fact that, when the question of conduct at issue is one which the person debating it has a private interest in deciding one way or the other — when he himself will gain pleasure or avoid pain by either decision — the admission of expediency as the ground of decision is apt to give him an excuse for deciding in his own favour, And, even when this personal bias is not CH.ni] UTILITARIANISM 399 operative, the man who looks to 'expediency' may be apt to trust to some limited view of consequences, which is all that his own vision can command, while if he had 'stuck to prin- ciple' he would really have been guided by a more complete view, gathered from the wisdom of ages. Neither of these mischiefs, however, arises from the Utilitarian principle of practical judgment, as fairly applied, but from that mis- application of it by interested or hasty individuals to which all principles are liable. Nor must it be forgotten that, when private interest affords a motive for deciding a practical question in a particular way, 'principle' will sometimes furnish a more convenient excuse than 'expediency.' Slave- holders, for instance, have never found any difficulty in justifying slavery 'on principle.' 331. On the whole there is no doubt that the theory of an ideal good, consisting in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as the end by reference to which the claim of all laws and powers and rules of action on our obedience is to be tested, has tended to improve human conduct and char- acter. This admission may be made quite as readily by those who consider such conduct and character an end in itself, as by those who hold that its improvement can only be measured by reference to an extraneous end, consisting in the quantity of pleasure produced by it ; perhaps, when due account has been taken of the difficulty of deciding whether quantity of pleasure is really increased by ' social progress,' more readily by the former than by the latter. It is not indeed to be supposed that the Utilitarian theory, any more than any other theory of morals, has brought about the recognition or practice of any virtues that were not recognised and practised independently of it; or that any one, for being a theoretic Utilitarian, has been a better man — i. e. one more habitually governed by desire for human perfection in some of its forms— than he otherwise would have been. But it ,J has helped men, acting under the influence of ideals of conduct and rules of virtuous living, to fill up those ideals and aipply those rules in a manner beneficial to a wider 400 PRACTICAL VALUE OF MORAL THEORY [bK. IV range of persons — beneficial to them in the sense of tending to remove certain obstacles to good living in their favour. It has not given men a more lively sense of their duty to others — no theory can do that — but it has led those in whom that sense has already been awakened to be less partial in * judging who the 'others' are, to consider all men as the ' others,' and, on the ground of the claim of all men to an equal chance of 'happiness,' to secure their political and >promote their social equality. To do this is not indeed directly to advance the highest living among men, but it is to remove obstacles to such living, which in the name of principle and authority have often been maintained. 332. The practical service, however, thus rendered by Utilitarianism has been independent of its analysis of well- being or good. It has been by insisting that it is 'the greatest number' whose highest good is to be taken into account, not by identifying that highest good with a greatest nett quantity of pleasure, that it has improved the organisa- tion of human life. It is thus that it has given a wider and more impartial range to public spirit, to the desire to do good. It is thus that it has made men watchful of customary morality, lest its rules should be conceived in the interest of some particular class of persons, who — probably without be- ing fully aware of it — have been concerned in establishing and maintaining them. It is thus that it has afforded men ground for enquiring, when laws, ahke pleading the highest authority, were found to make conflicting claims on their obedience, whether either claim represented the real good of society, and which represented the good of the largest body of persons. Very often this question may be sufficiently answered without any thorough analysis of what the good of society consists in, and thus the truth of the answer is independent of the truth of the theory which measures good by the quantity of pleasure experienced on the whole. In none of the great struggles between privileged and unprivileged classes, through which modern society has passed, would a man have been helped to a sounder judgment as to the CH. Ill] UTILITARIANISM 401 part which he should take by a more correct definition of the good. The essential thing for his right guidance has been that, whatever might be the definition of good which he would accept, he should admit the equal title of all men to it in the same sense ; that account should be taken of the widest possible range of society that can be brought into view, and that whatever is deemed good for any class or individuals in the society should be deemed good for all its members. In the struggle, for instance, through which the United States of America lately passed, a conscientious Virginian^ divided in his mind between allegiance to his State and allegiance to the Union, could have found no useful direction in the truest possible analysis of the nature of ultimate good. The kind of well-being ostensibly served by the laws of his State for those who had the benefit of the laws, was not a different kind from that served by the main- tenance of the Union. The question was whether secession or maintenance of the Union would promote that well-being most impartially, and for the widest range of society. Again, in most cases where a man has to decide how he may best promote the greatest good of others, it makes little practical difference in regard to the line of action to be taken, whether he considers their greatest good to lie in the possession of a certain character, as an end not a means, or in the enjoyment of the most pleasure of which they are capable. No one can convey a good character to another, t Every one must make his character for himself. All that v one man can do to make another better is to remove ob^ stacles, and supply conditions favourable to the formation of a good character. Now, in a general way and up to a certain point, the line of action directed to this removal of obstacles and supply of conditions favourable to good- ness, will also tend to make existence more pleasant for those whose good is being sought. 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