Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

incurring the imputation of discourtesy-his opinions seldom seem to me worth the trouble of refuting. But before I go on, I may observe upon the passage which I have just cited, that it does not give one a very exalted impression of Mr. Morley's capacity for philosophical inquiry. If men be not free, what right have we to punish those who cannot help committing bad actions, or to reward others who cannot help committing good actions? That is the question. Holbach's answer is in effect: We may praise or blame a machine according as it gives us pleasure or pain; and if the machine is intelligent, our praise or blame will supply motives for its acts. This answer Mr. Morley commends as proper, and perfectly adequate." It is true, he adds, that Holbach thus" empties the notions of praise and blame of the very essence of their old contents.” Of course this is true. And that although Mr. Morley quite fails to perceive it is a sufficient answer to Holbach. An ethical element is of the essence of what we mean by praise or blame. And for that element there is no room in the philosophy of the Revolution as authoritatively expounded by Holbach and by Mr. Morley. Hence they are under the necessity of denying it, or of explaining it away, as Mr. Morley seeks to do when he grotesquely tells us that "a machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results"-a "patent self-guiding perambulator," for example — must -must be an object of

[ocr errors]

respect, and affection, and gratitude." No. The moral element in praise or blame is not artificial. It is in the nature of men, and no fork of determinism will expel it thence. "I have a right to do my best, by praise and blame, by reward and punishment, to strengthen or to weaken, to prolong or to divert, the motives that are the antecedents of the action; exactly as I have a right to dam up a stream, or to divert its course, or otherwise deal with it, to suit my own convenience." Surely this is what Sir Toby Belch would call "exceeding good senseless." Right! Why every one has a right to do what he cannot help doing. The word "right" implies moral quality. But if our actions, good or bad, are simply the necessitated outcome of machinery, moral quality does not exist in them. "As if we could stay our hands from action, if our feelings were trained to proper sensibility and sympathy!" But if they are not so trained, the reason is that they cannot be trained, and it is no one's fault, but arises from the nature of the machine: "velle non discitur" is an axiom of determinism. "As if it were possible for a man of tender disposition not to interest himself keenly in all that concerns the lot of his fellow creatures." But men are not, as a rule, of tender disposition. Nor assuredly does the philosophy of the Revolution make them such. Empty men of the notion of God, which you denounce, with Mr. Morley, as hateful and ridiculous; abolish the old volitional

[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

morality, as "the pedantic requirements of unreal ethics," and substitute for it "usage and the requirements of social self-preservation; " teach man that his true dignity lies in this-that he is "one weak spring" in the vast machine of nature, and, in point of fact, you hand over the human mammal, helpless and impotent, to the blind impulses of egoism, to the terrible heritage of savage instincts, accumulated in his nervous system, and now barely held in check by religion and philosophy. The work of civilisation is undone, and "homo homini lupus " is again the true account of the human race.

human race

Sensibility," and "sympathy," and "tender disposition!" I confess this cant sickens me. The image of Joseph Surface rises before my mind, and I incline to say with old Sir Peter Teazle, "Oh! damn your sentiment." One knows very well what the issue of it really is; and how these rosewater revolutionists who set out with affirming that all is good in man's nature, end by finding the suspect." Mr. Morley, as we have seen, professes to go by the facts. He glorifies "the great positive principle" that "we can only know phenomena, and can know them only experientially." Let him keep to the phenomena of human life, and assuredly the optimistic haze in which he views it will soon fade away. As assuredly, experience will certify to him the fact that our motives can be within our power. "Sir, we know that our will is free, and there's an end of it," said Dr. Johnson. Of course this dictum

requires to be limited and guarded, and thrown into scientific shape, before a metaphysician can accept it.* But it is a rough-and-ready expression of a truth overwhelmingly demonstrated by the every-day experience of life, to which alone Mr. Morley, upon his own principles, has a right to refer. As to the argument from inanimate nature, where we all admit that necessity rules, to that which happens in what-pace Mr. Morley-is another province altogether, the human spirit, it is altogether irrational. It is like saying that sight is impossible because we have no eyes in the stomach. For the rest, the practical consequences to human society of the ethics, or unethics, taught by the new religion, appear to me to be abundantly clear. With what is called metaphysical liberty, with freedom of volition, merit and demerit disappear too. Human causality, human spontaneity, human responsibility, all die before the "uncreating word" of the Revolution. Its doctrine of absolute irresponsibility makes an end of ethics; its criminal legislation can be nothing but vanæ sine moribus leges. For the sting of punishment is not the actual fact— "stone walls do not a prison make”—but the moral disapprobation of which the fact is evidence. But how visit with moral disapprobation those who were incapable of doing anything but what they did? Poor victims of temperament, of heredity, of en

I may refer those of my readers who desire to see a really philosophical discussion of this question to Lotze's Microcosmus, Book. ii. c. 5-Book vii. c. 3.

III.]

THE OLD BASIS OF SOCIAL LIFE.

91

vironment, they are to be pitied, not blamed; while, indeed, we seclude them for the protection of our persons and pockets; for we are the numerical majority, we can appeal to the ultima ratio of force, if to nothing higher. It is no fancy picture which I am now drawing. Fifty years ago Balzac wrote: "Crime has been made poetical; tears are drivelled over assassins." True as his words were then, they are even truer now. The idea of law as the embodied conscience of a nation of persons, the belief in justice, in the old sense, as something quite transcending mere expediency-fiat justitia pereat mundus the conception of the civil magistrate as a minister of the retribution ordained by that justice as the other half of crime"-these things have well-nigh died out from the popular mind, where, in place of the old spiritual principles of ethics, the Revolution has substituted natural history.

[ocr errors]

Such is the necessary, the inevitable effect, upon the public order of that determinism which is a primary dogma of the revolutionary religion. The bond of civil society is obedience to law, fenced round with penalties. But legislation rests upon the doctrine of human responsibility. To that doctrine necessarianism is fatal. And if law, with penal sanctions, be the bond of civil society, the family is certainly its foundation. Where wedlock and legal paternity are unknown, and complete promiscuity prevails in the relations of the sexes-as among the aborigines of Australia and Fiji-civilisation

« ZurückWeiter »