Part 20

For this reason we did well, I conceive, to begin a consideration of progress with some account of the skeptics. Science itself cannot quarrel with those who meet its advances with the question, What is the good of you? But it can only begin its answer by asking another, What do you take to be good?

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What do you take to be good? Evidently there cannot be two minds, one of which points to the advance of civilization with every confidence that it means the world’s betterment, the other conceiving that men may grow wiser and none the better for that, unless the good is understood by them in different senses. What are these two meanings tangled in the single word,--the good?

It is this question that Immanuel Kant has studied with peculiar care and thoughtfulness in his ethical writings, and there he has made a distinction between two such meanings that seems very much to our purpose. The first, in his stiff academic way, he calls the hypothetical use. Thus, if you were to enquire what would be the best thing to do in order to attain a certain object, your answer would recommend a certain procedure as “good,” certainly, but good only on the hypothesis that such and such is your end. Your hypothetical good washes its hands of any responsibility for what, if anything, of some other kind of good or evil may attach to your purpose; it only places its wits at your disposal in devising the best means to this end. Is your purpose to rob a bank?--Then will science set itself to think out for you the best way of robbing a bank. After that, let who will complain that bank-robbing is not a good thing to set about, he cannot deny that you have set about it in a good way.

But it seemed to Kant, as I suppose it would to anyone, that we do not restrict ourselves to this hypothetical use of the term good. There seems to us to be a distinction between a good way of thieving and a way of being good. If so, must there not be a good that is sought for its own sake and not merely for the sake of what it may lead to? Is there not a categorical, an absolute good? And surely Kant was not very far from the thought of all of us when he sought to identify this absolute good with the moral good and with the object of virtue. Plainly we see that however good a thief a man may become, he does not increase in virtue as he advances in science. And have we not here come upon the ultimate meaning of those who contend that, let the world advance never so in its science, it grows no whit better? Its increase is altogether measured in those hypothetical goods thanks to which the thieves of today are indeed better thieves than the crude ones that used to be; but as little as ever do they know, and still less do they care, for that absolute good, that moral world, to have progressed away from which is to have gone backward indeed.

What, we asked of the critics of civilization, do you take to be good? And setting aside those who have idly answered, It was good when the world was young, before Onor “bound in nets the tresses Zephyr used to scatter,”--setting aside “licentious poesy” we have found the answer of serious men to be, The world will only be good when it has become moral. Not the growth of science, but the increase in morality is real progress, progress toward the absolute good. We have then only to make plain morality’s meaning to have found what progress is.

Morality no doubt first presents itself to most of us as a set of laws or maxims of conduct to follow which is virtue. These laws we may think of as delivered unto man in God’s own voice, and carved upon tables of stone. Or, if our image of their origin and authority be not so definite, we may still find moral peace in the thought that what words the still small voice of conscience whispers to us are no less God’s words. They are what Antigone took them to be--

The immutable unwritten law of Heaven. They were not born today or yesterday; They die not, and none knoweth whence they sprang.

If many have been unable to keep the sweet moral confidence of childhood until the end, it is because riper experience has not confirmed to them Antigone’s premises, nor mature reflection born out her conclusions. Do they not die, these unwritten laws: are new ones, indeed, never born? For a little searching we may find that not a precept marks a virtue for one people at one time, but that elsewhere or elsewhen its ordinance is taken to be vicious. And conversely, we do not have to travel far to find vice turning into virtue. Antigone’s own people are not so remote from us as the Mingrelians and Topinamboues; we owe them much that we prize most in our culture, and would be proud to match them in more ways than one. And yet, consider their admiration in the way of a man, which, if it was any one, was surely the Wise Ulysses. Now, if there are any two principles of Christian morals more firmly planted in our souls than others, they are the maxims, Be truthful, and, Be kind. But was Ulysses truthful? was Ulysses kind? To leave for one’s unconquered enemies a wooden horse as it were a parting token may be an innocent enough thing to do, however pagan. But to make of this wooden horse a disguised troop ship is not within the strict letter of truthfulness; and to sally forth therefrom to slay your quondam foes while they sleep in the security of your peace does not show a kindly spirit. Yet it does not appear that the Greek gods resented any more than did the Greek people Ulysses’ cruel craft: all of which would lead one to suspect that the unwritten law of peoples, if indeed it come from Heaven, must come from only that part of it which is directly overhead at the time.

But let time and place be never so circumscribed, and men never so in accord as to their moral maxims, are these maxims at least consistent with one another? Does one bid us be truthful?--then another bids us be kind! But how in this vale of perplexities is one always to be truthful yet never unkind? “Yes I know,” writes an old gossip of mine and fellow philosopher, “I know. Morality; Duty. But how hard it is to discover what is duty! I assure you that for three quarters of my time I do not know where duty lies. It is like the hedgehog that belonged to our English governess at Joinville. We used to spend the evening looking for it under the furniture, and when we had found it, it was time to go to bed.”

For these reasons, most have abandoned the attempt to define the moral good in terms of maxims, which they take rather to be hypothetical goods in disguise. They are rules indeed, but only rules of thumb holding “for the most part.” If they vary with the time and place, if within the most circumscribed communities they contradict one another, this is because they cannot pretend to be good in themselves, but are only the means which the community accepting them has found by experience to be best fitted for attaining a certain end. It is indeed the end that justifies the means, it alone is the categorical good, and the whole meaning of morality is to be sought in its purpose.

But those who, like David Hume, have sought the purpose common to all the discordant moral maxims of history, have found it not in some quality this purpose might be assumed to have, without question of him whose purpose it was. No, the moral purpose founds its right to have all other purposes bow to it on nothing but the authoritative position of the one that has chosen this purpose as his. Suppose, with Hume, we found no harmony in the moral ordinances of all the many peoples of history save that each maxim at the time and under the conditions of its acceptance was held to serve the well-being of the community. Now communities are not so different from particular men but that they must, like men, hold their well-being to lie in having the objects of their desire accorded to them. From which it follows that to act virtuously is to make your will conform to the will of the community to which you belong. Descartes has somewhere said that God did not choose this world because it was good, but the world is good because God chose it. Just so, a community does not choose its purpose because it is good, but that purpose is good which the community chooses. We might say that, not the good will, but the Good Willer is morality’s last word on the subject of the categorical good.

Thus it would seem that all virtues melt into one, and that one is what the late Professor Royce was fond of calling “loyalty,” the devotion of my will to the will of another. I am aware that not just any other-will, whosesoever it may be, is contemplated by moralists as a fit object of loyalty’s devotion. The Other to whom my will should bow, if I would be moral, is generally conceived to be more numerous than I (e.g. the majority), or more inclusive (the family, the state, the cause), or in some sense higher (God). In short, the Other-will is taken to be, in one way or another, an Over-will, and moralists may differ widely as to which one of several conceivable Over-wills should be recognized as the Absolute. But for the purpose of this discussion, one illustration of moral loyalty is as good as another, for the difficulty that morality has found in making good its claim to have laid hold on the absolute good lies not, I conceive, in deciding which Other-will is sovereign, but in convincing a man that he ought to acknowledge as sovereign any other will than his own. One who is told that it is not good for him to remain captain of his soul is bound to ask, Why not? It is morality’s way of dealing with this why that I would consider in an example which, for being simple, loses nothing that I can think essential to the issue.

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In Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” one finds an account, clear, legalistic, unsentimental, of the meaning of duty interpreted as the obligation of your will and mine to bow to a Sovereign-will. The title-page of the first edition (1651) of this work bears the image of a man of heroic size whose body is made up of little men. The little men stand for you and me, the big man is Leviathan. The story of the generation of the living giant made up of living men is in this wise:

“Nature it seems hath made men so equal ... as though there be found one man manifestly stronger in body or quicker in mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can therefore claim to himself any benefit to which another man may not pretend as well as he.... From this equality of ability arises equality of hope in attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, they become enemies, and in the way to their end ... endeavor to destroy or subdue one another.... From this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation; that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all the men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him....

“Hereby is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of all against all.... In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, ... no arts, no letters, no society, and, what is worst of all, continued fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short....

“And consequently, it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.... From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commended to endeavor peace, is derived this second law; that a man be willing when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.”

Thus “the final cause, end, or design of men, who naturally love liberty and dominion over others, in the introduction of restraint upon themselves in which we see them live in commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from the condition of war, which is necessarily consequent to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants.”

Now “the only way to erect such a common power ... is to confer all their power and strength upon one man or upon an assembly of men that may reduce all their wills ... unto one will, ... which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or an assembly of men to bear their person, and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act ... in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein submit their wills every one to his will, and their judgments to his judgment.... This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a Commonwealth, in Latin, Civitas. This is the generation of that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god to which we owe under immortal God our peace and defence.”

Seldom has the “generation” of an Absolute been so clearly set forth. We do not suppose, any more than Hobbes himself did, that this word “generation” has any historical significance. Men never lived in the state of nature here defined, they never foregathered to reason out in this way the advisability of organizing themselves into commonwealths. Instead of “generation,” read, if you will, “justification,” i.e., the justification in reason for the commonwealth’s existence and dominion. Then observe that not only does this great loyalist (the whole Leviathan is one of the loyalist documents of the Civil Wars)--not only does he demand a reason for the loyal faith that is in him, but in the development of this reason it turns out that the absolute is not another will at all, but only one’s own will thoughtfully dealing with others to win for itself a “more contented life.”

Now of course it is an absurdity to try to give a reason why any will whatever should be taken for absolute and expect to keep it so; for the very function of this reason is to show what more ultimate end is served by acknowledging this will as master. But if we do follow Hobbes’s reason for bowing as deep as we do bow to Leviathan, this reason is that our own deepest desire--or what Hobbes takes to be such--is thereby best served. “For it is,” says he, “a voluntary act; and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.”

Why then, that morality which promised to give us a meaning of the good that would enable us to understand how the progress of science with its hypothetical goods might let us stray from or even lead us away from the good, has turned out to be itself offering us a hypothetical good, to be itself an effort of science,--the science of many wills meeting in presence of but a single world. And this I take to be the fate, not only of Hobbes’s but of all moralities: differ as they may respecting that Other-will they take to be absolute, they all alike recommend a sacrifice of my will to another will, not indeed for the sacrifice’ sake, nor yet for that other will’s sake when all is said, but that my own will may find “a more contented life thereby.”

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Most of us have let our thoughts respecting the good of life stop with the acceptance of those moral goods that the opinion of our time takes to be absolute. These standard objects of loyalty, the state, the hearth, the cause, we serve with devotion and to them make our sacrifice. It is natural we should look with distrust, even with hostility, upon those who have let their thought go further and have asked, How in serving these Other-wills is our own deeper desire the better fulfilled? And yet, if our analysis is so far correct, this is the most intelligent, the most dignified of questions; for no historic morality has really meant to present itself as a system of sacrifices with no corresponding satisfactions.

But if we ask of the current morality of loyalty, What is the greater contentment bought by each of us at the price of the sacrifices we make in loyalty’s name? we come upon serious matters for reflection. There have been those who maintain that current morality cannot meet the demands of intelligence, and as there are two ways in which in buying a thing for a price one may drive an unprofitable bargain, so there are two critics of current morality. The one thinks the price morality asks too high; the other esteems the thing bought of no value. Let me call the one the Reforming Moralist; the other the Amoralist.

Now the reward morality holds out to all who make sacrifice to it is some ideal of peace, whether it be peace on earth and good will among men, or that peace which passeth understanding. Our reforming moralist then holds fast to the ideal of peace as the deepest of human desires, but questions whether current morality in its uncritical acceptance of traditional loyalties has found the most intelligent, i.e., the least sacrificial way of peace. Thus if he is not blind to the citizen-peace that comes from living in Commonwealths to whose Over-will we particular men make our loyal sacrifices, neither will he accept such nationalism as refuses to sanction covenants of nation with nation to the establishment of their more peaceful, if less autonomous, relations. He sees in that group-will we call the national-will but an historic device for improving the conditions of private life. He sees nothing but unreformed, that is, atavistic and stupid morality in such nationalism as would make the autonomy of the state an end in itself to which private life must forever yield its contentment. There is a sense in which he would say with Remy de Gourmont--

“The life of nations, of groups, of individuals is one struggle against morality. Man pushes on toward liberty, and can accept only such discipline as assures him at the cost of temporary subjection a more agreeable and more complete exercise of this supreme good. All discipline that is not founded in liberty is caduque, and it is for this reason that civilization has always succeeded in surmounting systems of morals.”