III.] THE NEW FOUNDATION OF ETHICS.

87

proving the lot of man in this life," if you experience misgivings when you recall the direction which his energy took, you are clearly still in the "gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity," you have no dispositions for faith in the new gospel. Let once the bright beams which stream from "the party of illumination" enter your mind, and then assuredly you will perceive, in the light of this great example, that men will be "more likely to have a deeper love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a home with aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their days that the black and horrible grave is indeed the end." *

But let us proceed. The morality of the old religion was bound up with the belief in man's liberty of volition. Human personality it regarded as manifested under the condition of free will, influenced but not coerced by motives, endowed with power of choice between alternative courses. Upon this foundation rested the whole edifice of man's duty, public and private. The human can was the correlative of the divine ought. But if there is no God, the Creator, Sovereign, and Judge of men, and man is a mere machine with no more soul than a steam-engine, we are reduced to determinism, which, indeed, is a primary dogma of the new gospel. And so Mr. Morley pronounces that the

* Rousseau, vol. i. p. 220,

doctrine of free will is "virtually unmeaning" *-as to him it of course must be-and to the fatuous persons who believe it, he opposes "sensible people who accept the scientific account of human action."

Sapientes qui sentiunt mecum.” Still, those of us who are thus under sentence of intellectual reprobation, may find some consolation in the thought that we are in the company of Plato and Aristotle, of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, of Leibnitz and Kant. Let us now see how Mr. Morley proposes to get ethics out of necessarianism:

"This brings us to Holbach's treatment of Morals. The moment had come to France which was reached at an earlier period in English speculation, when the negative course of thought in metaphysics drove men to consider the basis of ethics. How were right and wrong to hold their own against the new mechanical conception of the Universe?

"Holbach begins by a most unflinching exposure of the inconsistency with all that we know of nature, of the mysterious theory of Free Will. This remains one of the most effective parts of the book and perhaps the work has never been done with a firmer hand. The conclusion is expressed with a decisiveness that seems almost crude. There is declared to be no difference between a man who throws himself out of the window and the man whom I throw out, except this, that the impulse acting on the second comes from without, and that the impulse determining the fall of the first comes from within his own mechanism. You have only to get down to the motive, and you will invariably find that the motive is beyond the actor's own power or reach. The inexorable logic with which the author presses the Free-Willer from one retreat to another, and from shift to shift, leaves his adversary at last exactly as naked and defenceless before Holbach's vigorous and thoroughly realised.

*Miscellanies, vol. i. p. 146.

III.] MR. JOHN MORLEY AS A PHILOSOPHER. 89

Naturalism as the same adversary must always be before Jonathan Edwards' vigorous theism. The system of man's liberty,' Holbach says with some pungency,' seems only to have been invented in order to put him in a position to offend his God, and so to justify God in all the evil that he inflicted on man, for having used the freedom which was so disastrously conferred upon him.'

"If man 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? Holbach gives to this and the various other ways of describing fatalism as dangerous to society, the proper and perfectly adequate answer. He turns to the quality of the action, and connects with that the social attitude of praise and blame. Merit and demerit are associated with conduct according as it is thought to affect the common welfare advantageously or the reverse. My indignation and my approval are as necessary as the acts that excite these sentiments. My feelings are neither more nor less spontaneous than the deciding motives of the actor. Whatever be the necessitating cause of our actions, 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. Penal laws, for instance, are ways of offering to men strong motives, to weigh in the scale against the temptation of an immediate personal gratification.

*

*

*

*

*

"Holbach answers effectively enough the common objection that his fatalism would plunge men's souls into apathy. If all is necessary, why should I not let things go, and myself remain quiet? As if we could stay our hands from action, if our feelings were trained to proper sensibility and sympathy. 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. How does our knowledge that death is necessary prevent us from deploring the loss of a beloved one? How does my consciousness that it is the inevitable property of fire to burn, prevent me from using all my efforts to prevent a conflagration?

Finally, when people urge that the doctrine of necessity degrades

man by reducing him to a machine, and likening him to some growth of abject vegetation, they are merely using a kind of language that was invented in ignorance of what constitutes the true dignity of man. What is nature itself but a vast machine, in which our human species is no more than one weak spring? The good man is a machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results for his fellows. How could such an instrument not be an object of respect and affection and gratitude?

"In closing this part of Holbach's book, while not dissenting from his conclusions, we will only remark how little conscious he seems of the degree to which he empties the notions of praise and blame of the very essence of their old contents. It is not a modification, but the substitution of a new meaning under the old names. Praise in its new sense of admiration for useful and pleasure-giving conduct or motive, is as powerful a force and as adequate an incentive to good conduct and good motives, as praise in the old sense of admiration for a deliberate and voluntary exercise of a free-acting will. But the two senses are different. The old ethical association is transformed into something which usage and the requirements of social self-preservation must make equally potent, but which is not the same. If Holbach and others who hold necessarian opinions were to perceive this more frankly, and to work it out fully, they would prevent a confusion that is very unfavourable to them in the minds of most of those whom they wish to persuade. It is easy to see that the work next to be done in the region of morals is the readjustment of the ethical phraseology of the volitional stage, to fit the ideas proper to the stage in which man has become as definitely the object of science as any of the other phenomena of the universe.” *

It has been my object, in this chapter, to allow Mr. Morley himself to expound the new gospel of which he is the most considerable prophet among us. I have not been concerned to refute his opinions. To speak plainly—which I trust I may do without

*Diderot, vol. ii. pp. 178-183.

111.]

L'HOMME-MACHINE.

91

incurring the imputation of discourtesy-his opinions seldom seem to me worth the trouble of refuting. But before I go on, I may Ι 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 "be an object of