Morals and the Evolution of Man Part 7

Theological thought is faced with a problem in ethics which presents the greatest difficulties. It is the problem of Free Will.

Is man who perceives, judges, has volition and acts, a free being inwardly? Can he, guided only by his own reasonable thoughts and conclusions, determined entirely by his own inner impulses and uninfluenced by outer circ.u.mstances, choose one or the other of two conflicting possibilities? When he has to make a decision, is he always like Hercules at the cross-roads who has to make up his mind alone as to which path he shall take, whether he is to follow quiet, modest virtue, or alluring, voluptuous vice? Does he do evil because he willed to do so and not otherwise, although it was in his power to avoid it? Does he decide for the good, because after due investigation and consideration he recognized it as preferable, though he might have rejected it? Or is man always subject to coercion from which at no time and no place he can escape? Are all his actions determined by the law of Nature which regulates every one of his movements just as mechanically as the course of the stars or the fall of a body to our earth when its support is removed? Is he an automaton, set going by cosmic forces, who possesses the doubtful privilege consciously to be able to follow the turning of his wheels, the action of his levers, rods and indicators and to listen to their humming and knocking without being allowed to interfere in their movements or to change the least thing in their functions or work?

Is he fettered by the chain of causes which have existed eternally and continue to act immutably to all eternity?

Theological thought is condemned to find an answer to the question of freedom or determinism, as it is the necessary condition for the essential concepts of the theological doctrine of Morality, that is, the concept of responsibility and those consequent upon this, namely, sin, reward and punishment. For the true believer G.o.d is the source of Morality. He Himself is Morality. What He ordains is good in itself and cannot be otherwise, for there is no room for evil in His nature, since if He could be conceived to do evil, it would by the very fact of His doing it become good. A man, to be moral, must approximate to the nature of G.o.d as nearly as it is granted to mortals to do. The moral law is revealed by G.o.d's mercy to give man a light which shows him the right path and lights him on his way. Thanks to Him the poor mortal is relieved of the incert.i.tude due to his limited mental powers and is endowed with the priceless possession of a certain precept which he need only obey in order to be sure of salvation.

However, granted the correctness of this a.s.sumption, it is not comprehensible how evil came into the world. It contradicts all attributes with which faith has endowed the deity. It cannot appear without G.o.d's knowledge, for He is omniscient and nothing is hidden from Him. It cannot occur against His will, for He is omnipotent and nothing resists His bidding. But least of all can it rage with His knowledge and consent, for He is infinitely good and therefore does not permit his creatures to fall victims to evil. But experience teaches us that evil has a permanent place in human life, and this forces one to the conclusion that either G.o.d is hard and cruel, and therefore not infinitely good and not Morality itself, or that He has no knowledge of evil and therefore is not omniscient, but, on the contrary, blind as well as stupid, or that He sees the evil but cannot prevent it, and therefore is not omnipotent and must recognize the existence of higher powers than Himself against whom He is impotent.

These terrifying conclusions have not escaped the notice of the devout, and they have always made the most desperate efforts to evade them. Some have chosen the easiest way out of the difficulty; they close their eyes before the yawning abyss, fold their hands devoutly and invent pious phrases about the inscrutable ways of Providence and its infinite wisdom, which the weak intelligence of mortals cannot grasp. Others take infinite pains; in the sweat of their brow they with difficulty evolve tortuous and hypocritical explanations, which in reality explain nothing, but in a mind which lends itself willingly to them give rise to the illusion that the contradiction has been solved. Perhaps the most astounding piece of work accomplished by this miserable juggling, or this delusion of self by means of an exuberant flow of words, is presented in the four volumes of the "Theodicee," by which Leibnitz made himself a laughing-stock. Mazdeism has invented an alluring but at the same time risky expedient. It lightly a.s.sumes that two principles obtain in the universe, a good one and a bad one, the creator and the destroyer, the merciful G.o.d and the cruel demon, Ormuzd and Ahriman. In this way everything is easy to understand. Good is the work of radiant Ormuzd, evil the deed of dark Ahriman. The two fight together with very nearly equal forces, but this doctrine reveals the comforting prospect of a distant future in which Ormuzd shall finally triumph over Ahriman, and fills the trembling believer with elation at the thought that after aeons of the tragic struggle between good and evil, at the end of the world the curtain will fall on the victory of good. By this victory Mazdeism, which claims to be monotheistic, rescues its single G.o.d, although the introduction of a second principle of very nearly equal power, which holds the one G.o.d in check for an immeasurable period of time, brings this system perilously close to polytheism.

To the purer monotheism of Christianity there is indeed something repugnant in the a.s.sumption of a second, opposite principle of almost equal power, but yet it has admitted the existence of the devil, who is undoubtedly reminiscent of Ahriman. Only he lacks the independence of the Mazdean demon. He is not on a footing of equality with G.o.d, but is subject to Him as is every creature. He is not strong enough to oppose G.o.d and can only do evil because G.o.d allows it. But why does He allow it? Why does He tolerate the devil? Why can the latter proceed with his evil work with G.o.d's consent? To this theology gives a crafty answer which Goethe has clothed in the glorious beauty of inimitable poetry.

G.o.d has a.s.signed to the devil the task of tempting man with all the arts of seduction in order to give him the opportunity of testing and developing his moral strength in resistance, of purging himself, of attaining purity and salvation by his own efforts. In short, he exists in order to give man a sort of Swedish gymnastics in virtue. The struggle is not quite fair, for the devil is held by a halter and is pulled up if he gets too big an advantage, and man is always a.s.sisted by redeeming mercy, a hand being stretched out to him from the clouds which sets him on his feet as often as he stumbles. But theology is not bound by rules of sport. That is how the picture of the universe is presented in "_Faust_." But he who painted it is the same Goethe who on another occasion angrily complains: "You allow man to become guilty--and then leave him to his suffering." Does the divinity allow man to fall a victim to evil without turning it aside from him? Does he only try him in order mercifully to rescue him at the moment when he is about to succ.u.mb? Goethe does not answer this question without ambiguity. That is not his business either. He may contradict himself. He is a poet who is allowed to express contradictory views. He is not a theologian whose duty it is, by means of a definite dogma, to support those who totter in doubt.

All these attempts to reconcile the attributes of the deity with the fact that there is evil in the world which continually leads man into danger, emanate from the explicit or tacit a.s.sumption that man possesses Free Will. For if his will is not free and he does evil, then he does it because he must and because he cannot do otherwise. But this must can only come from the deity who is almighty; it is the deity who condemns man, who forces him to do evil. Man therefore does evil as G.o.d's tool without volition; therefore, as a matter of fact, it is G.o.d Himself who does evil. But if G.o.d is capable of doing evil He is not Morality itself, or every distinction between good and evil is destroyed, and we must recognize what seems evil to us to be just as moral as what seems good, because the one is as much the work of G.o.d as the other. But if this is admitted, and it is logically impossible not to admit it, then the whole foundation of transcendental, that is, of theological, ethics breaks down. The latter is therefore forced, on pain of suicide, to maintain that man has Free Will.

But with this a.s.sertion theological ethics by no means disarms all the objections which threaten its life. Renouvier's book on Free Will is probably the most thorough and exhaustive work on this subject which has been treated by thousands of thinkers and not a few babblers since the time of the ancient Greeks, and he describes it as follows: "Will is free and spontaneous if Reason cannot foretell its untrammelled action at any time other than that at which it actually takes place." Renouvier makes no limitation and no reservation. He does not say, "if human reason cannot foretell its action," and this omission of the particularizing adjective is not carelessness or a mistake on his part, it is duly considered; for the prudent dialectician knows very well that he would ruin his theory of Free Will if he only maintained that human reason alone should be able to foretell its action. There are many happenings which human reason cannot foretell, and which nevertheless obey immutable laws and take place according to absolutely fixed rules without the exercise of any inner freedom or authority on the part of the individual. If human reason cannot foretell these happenings, it is not because no external force of the universe determines them and they are entirely spontaneous, but simply because the laws controlling them are unknown. Therefore the impossibility of foretelling them is no proof of their freedom, it is only a proof of the ignorance of the human mind.

There was a time when no human intellect could foretell the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse. Was that because the heavenly bodies act freely and are eclipsed only at their own spontaneous desire, when and how they please? No, because man had not discovered and comprehended their movements. To this very day we are unable to foretell the weather on a particular day next year, or the result of the next harvest, or an earthquake. Does this prove the freedom, the absolute independence of these occurrences? No; it only proves the inadequacy of our knowledge.

Renouvier therefore would achieve nothing for his theory of Free Will, if only human understanding were to be unable to foretell the actions of the Will. That is why he does not say "human reason," but simply "Reason." The essence of Free Will is that its actions altogether shall be incapable of being foreseen; it is not in its nature to act in accordance with some predetermination which must necessarily reckon with outer circ.u.mstances and given forces; and the impossibility of foretelling its actions exists not only for human Reason but for every Reason--for Reason in general.

For every Reason and therefore for the divine Reason as well. And now theological ethics must find a way out of this dilemma: either G.o.d does not foresee the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of his omniscience, that is, of one of His essential attributes; or G.o.d foresees the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of the Freedom of the Will, the essence of which, according to Renouvier, lies in the fact that it cannot be foreseen. For this impossibility of being foreseen is indeed the quality by which Free Will stands or falls. Let us realize the significance of this concept. Nothing can be foreseen which will not with certainty occur. But whatever at some future time will become a reality, must even now be virtually a reality for an omniscient Reason not bound by the human categories of time and s.p.a.ce, since for this Reason neither proximity nor distance exists, but everything is on one plane, and there is no future or past, but everything is present. So if the divine Reason foresees now how the free Will of man will act in the future, that is equivalent to saying that this free Will is forced to act in the particular way which G.o.d foresees and not otherwise. Therefore the Will is not free but, on the contrary, strictly bound. It is obliged to make the event foreseen by G.o.d a fact, as G.o.d can only foresee what must certainly come to pa.s.s, and a foreseen event that does not happen would mean a mistake, a false a.s.sumption, of which one cannot believe G.o.d capable without denying Him. This apparent free Will is coercion at sight. As its action is foreseen by G.o.d, the Will is subject to the law of fate, but a period of delay is granted.

Every movement of the supposedly free Will becomes a part of the order of the universe which has been unalterably laid down from eternity, and which the human Will cannot upset without burying G.o.d in the ruins. Man may imagine that his Will is free. But that is self-deception, and he can only indulge in it because what G.o.d sees clearly is hidden from him, namely, the goal towards which, though he does not realize it, he is inevitably led along strictly defined paths by the iron hand of fate.

It would be unjust towards theology to say that it has never seen the incompatibility of Free Will with divine omniscience. This has not escaped its notice, but it has attempted by the use of familiar formulae to get out of the difficulty. In his book _De libero Arbitrio_ Saint Augustine stoutly maintains that the human Will is free, but he tries to rescue the attributes of the deity by reserving to it the right or the power to intervene by its mercy in the actions of the Will, if in its freedom it comes to a decision which endangers the salvation of the soul. Saint Thomas Aquinas takes good care not to differ in opinion from the Bishop of Hippo. The reformers, Calvin, Luther and Bishop Jansen, too, were better logicians than the patristic writers, and unhesitatingly denied the freedom of the Will, but they did not notice that they made G.o.d responsible for all the misdeeds of man, lacking freedom and acting with G.o.d's foreknowledge and at His behest. The Council of Trent scorned all these contradictions and unintelligible points, and declared with infallible authority that man's Will is free and that at the same time G.o.d is omniscient. The Catholic Church at the time was in some countries still in a position to meet Reason, if it raised objections, with an unanswerable argument: the stake.

That is the peculiarity of theological as distinguished from scientific thought, the purest form of which is mathematics. The former never follows a train of thought to its strictly logical conclusion, but only follows a certain distance, to a point where it loses itself in an impenetrable black fog, or in a cloud of glory which dazzles the beholder. Mathematical thought, on the contrary, develops the train of thought to the bitter end, to its ultimate conclusions. These are necessarily absurd if the premises are erroneous, and their absurdity is so clear that it convincingly proves the mistake in the point of departure. Such a scrupulous confutation of self is to be expected as little from mystic visions as from arrogant dogmatism. The former obey the laws of dreams, in which the a.s.sociation of ideas, unfettered by logic, holds sway and strings together the most incompatible ideas to form an apparently connected series; the latter demands the privilege of being independent of the judgment of Reason, and of being tried by Faith, a judge who always decides in its favour.

Those who believe in Free Will adduce a proof of it which they derive by the method of introspection. Man, they say, will never be convinced that he is not free, that his actions are not determined by his own will alone, for he has the incontrovertible consciousness of the contrary. He is quite clear on the point that he does a thing because it is his will to do so, that he had the choice of doing it or not, that he does what he wants, that he comes to his decision owing to considerations, inclinations, moods or intentions which are perfectly known to him, if to him only. At the Sorbonne in Paris they still remember the professor--when the anecdote was told me Victor Cousin was named as the hero, but I cannot guarantee that it was he and no other--who used to say in his lecture on Free Will: "Man's will is free. There is no need to prove this by giving reasons. We feel it immediately as a truth. I will show you. I will raise my right arm. I raise it"--here he raised his right arm with a commanding gesture, kept it for a short time in this position, and added triumphantly: "You see that my will is free."

His hearers broke into enthusiastic applause at this triumphant demonstration. To-day they would receive it with loud laughter.

We have learnt to seek the roots of most, perhaps of all, human actions in the subconsciousness. There they are worked out under influences which cannot be perceived by introspection and in which inborn and acquired inclinations, experiences, organic conditions at the time, instincts, attractions and repulsions play a decisive part. They rise ready made into consciousness, and the latter, not having seen them being formed, persuades itself that it has produced them spontaneously, and imagines reasons why it willed to do actions that were determined outside its sphere. The professor who authoritatively states, "I wish to raise my right arm and therefore I do it," certainly says this in all good faith, but equally certainly he is ignorant. He is not aware of the play of forces which end in his gesture. He raises his right arm, which he believes he chooses with complete freedom, because he is in the habit of using his right arm by preference; if he had been left-handed he would have announced his wish to raise his left arm, and would have been equally convinced that he had decided, with complete freedom, for his left arm. If he suffered from chronic muscular rheumatism in one of his arms, so that it would trouble him or hurt him to move it, he would unconsciously choose the other, sound arm, and maintain just as positively that he had done so with complete freedom. I have mentioned as instances two particularly crude and therefore very obvious reasons which may determine the action of this simple-minded professor without his being aware of it. But each one of our more complicated, and even of our simplest, movements is the outcome of numberless subtle causes which are partly due to the organized experiences and habits of our individual life, partly a necessary consequence of our inherited qualities, our bodily and intellectual const.i.tution, and their origin goes back to the far distant past of our species, to the beginnings of life, we may even say to eternity. Our consciousness can tell nothing of these causes.

They elude our observation and investigation and remain ever unknown to us. Renouvier is quite right when he says no understanding--and I say without his ambiguity no human understanding of the present time--can foretell the actions of another, nor indeed his own, but not because they come to pa.s.s independently of inevitable causes, but simply because these causes cannot be descried by our ignorance.

It is vain labour to try and derive the solution of the question of Free Will, or even a contribution towards it, from introspection.

It is a method unsuitable for this purpose. The Greek sage well knew what a great and difficult task he set man when he admonished him: "[Greek: gnothi seauton]." That is easy to say but difficult if not impossible to do. Spinoza very happily characterized the self-deception in which the individual is plunged with regard to the part played in determining his actions by his conscious Will aided by Reason; he says that if a stone, flung by some hand, had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own free will; and in another place he points out without any ill.u.s.trative metaphor, that a drunk man and a child, who certainly do not act on their own initiative, also believe in the freedom of their will. It has been possible to prove experimentally how ignorant of the real motives of his actions the individual may be. It is suggested to a person who has been hypnotized that on awakening he is to carry out a certain action, something particularly absurd, unjustified and aimless being intentionally chosen. The subject of the experiment on awaking faithfully carries out the suggestion, and as he has no memory of what happened while he was in the hypnotic state, he is convinced that he is yielding to a sudden idea, a whim, but that in any case his action is determined by his own will. But since he must realize the absurdity of what he is doing, he seeks for some sufficient motive to explain it, and always finds one to his own satisfaction.

All the efforts of anguished sophists to prove their thesis of the Freedom of the Will from data supplied by introspection have failed miserably. But they were forced to undertake them, for theology cannot give up the contention that man acts with free Will. It is an important part of the religious conception of the universe and of the relation in which, according to this, man stands to G.o.d.

To put it shortly, religion sees in man's life on earth a preparation for eternity. It gives him the opportunity of coming nearer to G.o.d by his own efforts and thus making himself worthy of the salvation which secures him a place in the sight of G.o.d to the end of time. Thus the life of the flesh is made a method of selection by which the sheep are sundered from the goats. G.o.d provides man with free Will for this special purpose, so that he may make use of it to choose good of his own accord and to avoid evil. This undoubtedly wearisome task is made much easier for him, because G.o.d in His goodness has given him laws, doctrines of Morality and examples which point out the way of salvation.

If man makes proper use of his gifts, if in pursuance of divine admonition, he treads of his own free will the path of virtue, he acquires merit which gives him a legitimate claim to the reward of finding favour in G.o.d's eyes and to be admitted to the company of the just and pure. But if man purposely turns to evil, of which he is warned by revelation and which he has been given the power to avoid, then he is a sinner and deserves the punishment of d.a.m.nation, which, however, he may yet escape if G.o.d in His mercy forgives him his sin. Therefore man holds in his hand the fate of his immortal soul. It depends on him whether this fate be salvation or d.a.m.nation. He is responsible for directing it to the former or the latter. Of course, G.o.d has the power to force him to virtue and to stop him from vice. But it is not His plan to condemn man to be the slave of virtue. He wants man to choose virtue of his own accord, He wants n.o.ble souls about Him who by freedom have attained Morality.

This religious view of the universe, which deals in a.s.sertions and disdains on principle to prove even one of them to Reason by facts that can be tested, contrasts with the scientific view of the universe which a.s.serts nothing but what can be objectively ascertained to be true, which distinguishes sharply between the account of what has been observed and can be tested by everyone and hypotheses for which it demands no belief, but only the recognition of their possibility or probability, and which it discards as soon as an ascertained fact definitely disproves them. No compromise is possible between these two views of the universe. Nothing can bridge the chasm between them. It would be superficial to say that the theme of the scientific view is realities and that of the religious one imagination. Imagination is also a reality, only of a different order to that which is called so in common parlance. It is a subjective reality; it exists only in the mind that conceives it. Reality itself is for the thinking mind only a state of consciousness, but it is an image of conditions which have an objective existence, though in another form, outside the consciousness.

The supporters of religion maintain that there is an objective reality corresponding to their concepts, but this cannot be ascertained by any of the senses which the living organism has developed in order to establish a relation between the world, of which it is a part, and itself. It is perfectly useless for supporters of the one view of the universe to try and convince those of the other. Each of them moves on a different plane and is unapproachable to the other. All that can be done is to define both the one and the other as clearly as possible and prove their incompatibility.

For the scientific view of the Universe the problem of Free Will does not exist and cannot exist. All facts that science has observed force it to the a.s.sumption of causation, which does not only mean that every phenomenon is produced by a cause, is the effect of a cause and could never have occurred but for this cause, but also means that the effect represents the exact equivalent of the energy which was its cause. Thus the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the total energy in the universe is an essential part of the concept of causation, the fundamental hypothesis without which the phenomenon of the universe and the things which occur in it are simply unintelligible to Reason; and everything in and outside ourselves, everything that we perceive, becomes chaos, chance, lawless whim or miracle in the theological sense of the word.

It is inconceivable that an effect should be anything other than the reappearance in a different form of the exact quant.i.ty of energy that caused it; for if the energy of the effect exceeded that of its cause, then part of the effect would have been produced without cause; and if the energy of the effect fell short of that of the cause, then part of the energy of the cause would have been expended without producing an effect. That, however, would be the negation of causation, it would be an admission that part of the effect (i.e. an effect) could be produced without sufficient cause, i.e. out of nothing, and that a part of the cause (i.e. energy) could disappear (into nothing) without producing an equivalent effect, which is obviously absurd.

The human Will manifests itself by an action or the prevention of an action according to the impulse felt by our organism. Both these are an exercise of force, the amount of which can be measured. Indeed, inhibition, too, is a dynamical effort which represents the exact equivalent of the force with which the impulse which it has checked acted on the motory centres. The Will, therefore, expends energy which does work that can be measured. But the Will must derive this energy from some source. It therefore also only converts energy derived from the energy of the universe, the total amount of which can neither be augmented nor diminished; the Will consequently is a part of the dynamic energy of the universe, and must necessarily be subject to its mechanical law; that is, to the law of causation. It is therefore not free, but dependent, as is every phenomenon in the universe. Whoever maintains its freedom maintains that it is independent, that it is not subject to the law of causation, that it has no cause of which the elements, if they could be fully known to us, would be measurable, that it expends energy which it derives from nowhere, that it produces energy out of nothing. Whoever maintains this contradicts all experience from which the knowledge of Nature and her laws has been built up; it is obviously hopeless to expect a reasonable discussion with such a person.

Now the supporters of free Will may reply that they do not deny that the Will derives its energy from the organism and therefore from the universal source of cosmic energy, and that it makes use of it according to the laws of mechanics; but they a.s.sert that the direction in which energy is expended by the Will is freely determined by it; further, that the direction does not affect the amount of energy used, and consequently the Will can act absolutely in accordance with the mechanical laws of the universe and yet can, independently of outside causes, determine the manner in which the energy shall be expended; that is to say, the Will can be free. But this objection is pure sophistry, for the determination of the direction, in so far as it is not mere imagination and therefore ineffective and sterile, but really controls the action, is an expenditure of energy. The controlling power uses up energy and obeys a cause, so we have arrived at the same dilemma again--either the controlling Will is subject to the law of causation, then it is not free; or it is free and is determined by no outside cause, then we must ascribe to it motion without driving power and energy derived from nothing--which is absurd.

No. There is no such thing as Free Will. The concept of freedom itself is an illusion of thought which cannot survey sufficiently extensive connexions. Nothing in the universe is free; all things mutually determine each other. All are cause and effect, and they fit into one another like cog wheels. Everything is linked up and dovetailed. The philosopher's phrase, "Everything is in flux," is the description of the outward appearance of things. Against it we must set the reality which is: "Everything is eternally at rest." For a circ.u.mscribed system of motion without beginning or end may mean motion for every individual point which describes the course, but is, as a whole, virtually at rest.

Everything that exists, or ever will exist, has its necessary and sufficient cause in that which has always been; the sequence of phenomena has been unalterably determined since all eternity for all eternity; what we call chance is an occurrence for which our ignorance cannot perceive the necessary causes and conditions; past and future would be in the same plane, therefore would be present for an omniscience, which knew and understood the machine of the universe down to its smallest wheel and pin.

One of the logical consequences of this is that, without any miracle or the a.s.sumption of any supernatural influences, it would be possible to foretell the most distant events in all their smallest details. An intelligence sufficiently wide and penetrating would, following the strict law of causation, be able to produce all lines of the present with absolute certainty immeasurably far into the future. As everything that ever will be necessarily must be, it virtually exists at present and has always existed; therefore it is only a question of clarity of vision, which however, is denied to man, to see it at any time and to any extent.

The illusion of flux is explicable. Life, which like all world processes is a cyclical motion, is pa.s.sed in an endless alternation between the shining forth and extinction of consciousness, the bearers of which are an everlasting series of organisms following one another. Every organism lasts a limited time, during which it is carried along an inconceivably small fraction of the tremendous cycle. It sees all the points of this short stretch but once, and does not learn that they are eternally the same. It gathers the false impression that they fly past it, whereas they are at rest and it pa.s.ses them, until it ceases to be a suitable bearer of consciousness and disappears, making room for a successor.

This rigid immutability of the whole Universe is certainly intolerably gruesome to the imagination, but then, every time we look beyond the narrow confines of life and human circ.u.mstances, to peep into the infinity and eternity which surrounds us, do not terrifying vistas open up before us?

Not only the religious minded, but many free thinkers, too, have Free Will at heart, though the latter are otherwise guiltless of any mysticism. They claim it in the name of man's dignity, which would be deeply humiliated if we had to confess ourselves the slaves of outside influences, automata moved by universal causation without our having any say in the matter. We are not ent.i.tled to such trumpery pride. Let us seek our dignity in our striving for knowledge, in the subjection of our own instincts to the control of our Reason, but not in an imaginary independence of the laws of Nature, whose commands we should oppose in vain.

With Free Will responsibility also disappears. That is obvious. But that means a collapse only for theological Morality. Scientific ethics can manage very well without responsibility. Nay, more; there is no room in it for this concept. In the system of theological Morality responsibility has a transcendental significance. To sum up once more shortly what has been dealt with in detail above: according to this system Morality is a divine command, obedience to, or disregard of which results in salvation or d.a.m.nation; in order that reward and punishment may be just, one as well as the other must be merited; that implies the a.s.sumption that virtue is practised or vice chosen intentionally and with forethought; but this mode of action must be freely willed if man is to be responsible for it before his divine Judge.

Scientific ethics knows nothing of this supernatural dream. In its view Morality is an immanent phenomenon which occurs only within humanity--or to define it more accurately, within humanity organized as a society.

It arose from a definite necessity; from the undeniable need of men to unite, so as to be able, in company with one another, shoulder to shoulder, to succeed more easily, or indeed to succeed at all, in the struggle for existence which is too hard for the solitary individual. It has a clearly recognizable aim: to teach man to curb his selfish instincts and to practise consideration for his neighbour, by which means alone peaceable life in common and productive co-operation are possible. The instinct of self-preservation supplies society with the laws of Morality which it imperiously imposes on all its members, and unconditional obedience to which it demands. Society does not dream of saying to the individual: "You are free; you must yourself decide whether you will follow the path of virtue or that of vice." On the contrary, it says to him: "Whether you wish it or not, you must do that which my doctrine of Morality indicates as good and eschew that which it declares to be evil. You have no choice. I tolerate you in my midst only if you submit to the laws of Morality. If you transgress them I shall draw your teeth and claws or destroy you altogether." By discipline lasting many thousands of years society has developed in the individual, though not in all, an organ that watches that his conduct is moral, and this is the conscience. But this is only supplementary to, and representative of, society, which in the main exercises police supervision itself, and sees that in general the moral law is obeyed. It judges all the actions of the individual that come to its knowledge.

Conscience only is the competent authority where occurrences are concerned which take place simply in the consciousness of the individual, and which he alone is aware of. Conscience is only too often a lenient judge who acquits the individual too easily and nearly always admits extenuating circ.u.mstances. Society does not let him off so lightly; his punishment is certain if he cannot prevent his sin from becoming known.

Responsibility therefore also exists in Morality as understood by sociologists. As far as his intentions are concerned the individual must come to terms with his conscience, which, as a rule, he does not find difficult. For his deeds he must account to society, and it does not ask what took place in his consciousness, but only how his spiritual impulses were manifested. For his deeds, then, he is summoned before society's court of justice and must answer for them without having recourse to the excuse that he acted as he was forced to do by his disposition and the pressure of circ.u.mstances, and that he had no choice and could not act otherwise. Though Morality has always been necessary for the life of the community, and though the latter has, under the pressure of the law of self-preservation, always had to make its members strictly subservient to Morality, it has ever had a dim idea that the responsibility of the individual for his actions is only of practical, not of fundamental or ideal significance. It has never pushed investigation as to how far the individual acted freely or not to any great lengths, never attempted to trace it to the foundations of his consciousness, to the inception of the impulses of his Will. Where the lack of freedom was obvious, for instance, where every layman could see there was insanity, the Moral law has been disregarded ever since ancient times, and society has contented itself with protecting itself from the intolerable actions of the lunatic by rendering him harmless.

Since positive Law, made concrete in the laws with penal sanctions, was evolved from the universal Moral law, it has admitted the plea of irresponsibility and refrained from exercising its coercive powers where such irresponsibility has been established. In addition to madness, demonstrable coercion and self-defence relieve the individual from responsibility for the crime and render him immune from punishment.

In the course of evolution society has conceded still further limitations of individual responsibility. It willingly admits new knowledge gained by scientific psychology and concedes limited responsibility, not only in case of madness, but in such cases, too, where experts can convincingly prove to the judges, the guardians of its Law, that the individual was in an abnormal condition and affected by morbid influences at the time of the crime. Farther society cannot go, if it does not want to put an end to Moral law and do away altogether with positive law. Concern for its continued existence forbids this. It must leave it to the philosophers to continue the investigation. They must show that the Will is never free, always fettered, not only in the extreme cases of madness or when under the influence of suggestion. They must make it clear that there is only a difference of degree and not of kind between the determining influences under which the individual is constrained to act, and that the causation which binds him proceeds by imperceptible degrees from the delirium of the maniac and the obsession of the abnormal man to the pa.s.sion, l.u.s.t and desire of the man with strongly developed instincts, and to the slight stimulus of habits, the colourless judgment and shallow considerations of the ordinary man with a deformed character and no definite features. Society can draw no practical conclusion from the theoretical recognition of the lasting limitation and lack of freedom of the Will, because moral law by its very nature implies coercion, and therefore excludes freedom. Whether the individual submits to the Moral law of his own accord, or because he is forced thereto by the community's powers of coercion, is of no account to society. It deals only with the visible results.

But it is not merely a matter of flat utilitarianism, it is not even unjust, if society, without inquiring whether the Will is free or not, makes the individual responsible for his actions and only makes an exception from this universal rule in extreme cases. Even though his will is subject to the law of causation, and the individual always acts as he must, he nevertheless has a means of keeping within the moral law despite inner impulses and outer pressure, and that is by his judgment and its instrument, inhibition. Like every organic function which is not purely vegetative and therefore beyond the influence of the Will, judgment and inhibition can be strengthened and perfected by methodical exercise, while total neglect of them will weaken and finally atrophy them. The community may demand that each of its members shall devote attention to the development of the natural functions which permit him to discriminate and to suppress any inclination to evil which may appear. It facilitates this duty towards itself and himself for the individual--for it is a question of the increase of his organic efficiency and of his personal worth--by the inst.i.tutions it founds for the education of youth, by schools which not only impart knowledge, but also form the character, by instruction after the school age, by the honours with which it distinguishes especially excellent persons, thereby holding them up to example. The community prescribes that everyone should acquire a certain minimum of knowledge, and for this purpose forces each individual by law to go to school for a certain number of years. It may and ought to force him also to render himself more capable of obeying the moral law by methodical exercise of his will. Every citizen is responsible to the state for being able to read and write. In this sense the individual is also responsible for sufficiently strengthening his faculty of inhibition to be able to control his selfish, anti-social and immoral desires.

The particular purpose for which he is to employ his faculty of inhibition depends on the current moral law of the age, which is determined not by the individual, but by the community. The individual does quite enough and is free of blame if he strives with all his might to approximate his actions to the ideal which the community demands at a given time for the life of its members in common and for their mutual relations. To alter and perfect this ideal is the business of a few select men with wider judgment, stronger will and warmer sympathies than the average. In these exceptional cases it is not the community which imposes its ideal on the individual, but, on the contrary, the individual who works out a new ideal for the community, and, so to speak, thanks to his personal qualities, establishes a new record in the gymnastic of the Will which beats all earlier ones.

Finally, it is true, the individual is dependent on his natural disposition. To say that he can be, and is to be, raised above himself is a very impressive, but really nonsensical, phrase. He can get out of himself only what is in him by nature, and however hard he may try to reach out beyond the boundaries drawn by his organic disposition, he finds it impossible to overstep them. But, as a rule, they are far wider than the individual has any idea of until he attempts to reach them, and he will find many surprises if he labours untiringly to develop to their fullest extent all the possibilities latent in him. Even a born weakling can, by dint of methodical practice, harden his flaccid muscles sufficiently to become a gymnast of average skill, though he is hardly likely to become a first-cla.s.s athlete.

In just the same way a weak-willed or simple person can by earnest endeavours rise to a consistent morality; if, nevertheless, there appear in him, continually or occasionally, organic impulses which carry him away, it is not his fault but his misfortune. In that case he is subjectively not responsible for his immorality. But the community can, all the same, not liberate him from responsibility, because the law of self-preservation forces it to insist on observance of the moral law, and it has no means of accurately measuring how strong the pressure of instincts and the power of inhibition is in any individual, and to what extent he has fulfilled the duty of exercising and strengthening the latter. The phrase "To understand everything is to forgive everything"

shows insight, but is only true in the sense that one must not blame an individual for his natural imperfection. It comprehends recognition of the Will's lack of freedom, and the inadmissibility, from the philosophical point of view, of the concept of responsibility, but it does not affect the right and the duty of the community to demand moral conduct regardless of this lack of freedom. It is not permitted to forgive because it understands. Moreover, there would be no sense in forgiveness by the community, for the concept of forgiveness implies feeling and kindly forgetfulness of an injury inflicted of malice prepense; but insult and offence play no part in the punishment by society of transgressions of the moral law, and indulgence due to sensibility would endanger its existence.

The certainty possessed by the individual that his evil deeds, if they become known, will have evil consequences for him is one of the determining factors which is indispensable in helping him to make a decision. It is an inadmissible affectation to condemn the fear of punishment as a motive for moral action, because it ought to be the result of the conviction that it is absolutely right. It is a powerful aid to self-discipline, as also are the thought and the foretaste of the satisfaction upon which self-respect may count if general respect and praise are to be the reward of exemplary conduct.

The great weakness of the Kantian doctrine of Morality lies in the fact that it retains Free Will, even though it gives it another name. It is called autonomy of Will and is contrasted with heteronomy. This doctrine demands, and considers it possible, that the Will should be its own lawgiver and should not allow others to lay down laws for it; but it fails to examine how the Will comes to make laws for itself, of what hypothesis these laws are the necessary conclusions, by what means the Will secures respect for its law, and whether this seemingly self-imposed law is not really the inner realization of a ready-made law of extraneous origin. The dogma of the autonomy of the Will is a consequence of the preliminary error of excluding utility from Morality and of declaring its imperative to be categorical, that is, not dependent on the aim, but independent and regardless of any aim. The whole tomfoolery of the categorical imperative and of the autonomy of the Will is transcendental mysticism, and is all the more surprising as it is the result of an investigation which claims to be the work of pure Reason. It is the shadow of the ghostly bogies of religious conceptions in the daylight of "pure Reason."

From the point of view of the community we may speak of merit and sin, but not from the subjective point of view. For the community the moral conduct of the individual is useful, immoral conduct is disadvantageous, therefore it praises the one and condemns and punishes the other. That is opportunism, but not moral philosophy. Considered subjectively, moral conduct is just as little meritorious as beauty, great stature, muscular strength, keen intelligence, health, a good memory, prompt reactions of consciousness and all other advantages that the individual has received without his personal intervention as a gift of nature. And immoral conduct is just as little blameworthy as ugliness, stupidity, sickness and other misfortunes which the individual is burdened with by heredity or which a hard fate has imposed on him. Happy is the favoured man!

Pitiable the unfortunate one! Both are the work of forces which are absolutely beyond the control of their wills. In the same way the good man acts morally because he possesses insight and restraining will-power, and the bad man acts immorally because these perfections have been denied him, and neither the one nor the other can do anything in the matter.

That does not relieve man of the duty of labouring a.s.siduously at his moral development, but it does relieve him of responsibility for the result of his efforts. On one point the sociological, the biological and the theological moralists agree: they all bow down humbly before Grace.

CHAPTER VII

MORALITY AND PROGRESS