Part 8

We have now concluded our proposed survey of the Utilitarian philosophy, and the result may be summarily stated thus:--Utilitarianism generally is a method of thinking which, while professing to clear up dim ideas, brings confusion and disorder into every region of human thought and action; and specially--

1. Which, by deriving thought from mere sensation, by deducing the one from the many, instead of the many from the one, and thus reducing mind to a mere blank impressibility, confounds the essential distinction between necessary and contingent truth, and renders all science impossible.

2. Which, by confounding causation with sequence, pulls up philosophy by the roots, disembowels theology of all substance, and freezes the breath of all natural piety.

3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.

4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of external consequences.

This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it does not by any means follow {334} that Utilitarianism has proved utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted. It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear, in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on the {335} contrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it, for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element of NUMBER is made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also, will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void which {336} its absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair.

FOOTNOTES.

“If there be a God, then man bears relations to Him, and his duties to God are of a private nature, and therefore not of interest to the State, and in no way coming under the jurisdiction of Science. And what the duties are which man owes to God can only be ascertained by a Revelation, for they cannot be discovered experimentally.”

There are two propositions here essentially anti-Socratic, and, in my opinion, essentially false:--(1.) That religion belongs to man only as a private individual, and not as a citizen. This is a favourite idea of the most recent times, and has its only root in the fact that on account of the growth of a certain stout and stubborn individualism in Christian Churches it has been found practically impossible to make Christian men combine socially for the performance of any religious function. This difficulty, however, belongs not to the nature of religion, but to the imperfection of moral culture in our existing ethical associations called Churches. The social recognition of the Supreme Father still remains as much an ideal in modern times as it was a real in ancient times. The ancients sacrificed in this matter the individual to the State; we, for the glorification of the individual, allow the State to sit shorn of one of its greatest glories. Whatsoever a man is bound to do as a moral being individually, he is bound to do socially, if it be possible. The so-called Voluntary system is a mere shift to save the trouble and shirk the difficulty which narrow-minded Christians feel in working together to give a national expression to common religious feelings and common religious convictions.

(2.) The second proposition here is, that religious duties can only be ascertained by Revelation, and come in no way under the jurisdiction of SCIENCE. To this Socrates answers that religious duties are three, reverence, gratitude, and obedience, and that the first two of these have their root in the commonest instincts and most rudimentary notions of reasonable beings, while the third, depending, as it does, partly on general science, partly on special intellectual culture, falls directly under the jurisdiction of Science. For to obey the laws of God we must know them, and we know them, as we know other things, by observation and reflection; for they are not hidden, as some men count hidden, but written everywhere, both within us and without, in the most legible scripture, and pressed upon us daily by the most cogent arguments; and no man can escape from their obligation. If by duties to God Mr. Gould understands only special religious observances as expressive of our religious sentiments and convictions, then no doubt it is quite true that these special forms of expression must either be revealed directly from Heaven, or vary considerably, according to the character and condition of the people who use them; but such a narrowing of the idea of religious duty, confining it to the accidental instead of the essential, depriving it in fact of its soul and vital principle, is most unphilosophical; and I am more willing to suppose that such a thoughtful writer as Mr. Gould should have been led astray by a fashionable phase of modern thought, than that he should be deliberately guilty of the impertinence of giving his readers the shell of a thing as its definition, when they had a right to look for the kernel.