Function, feeling, and conduct; an attempt to find a natural basis for ethical law

Introduction

Noch Schale,

Alles ist sie mit einemmale.

Goethe.

Protagoras.

OUR thought of nature is a denning and qualifying thought. We speak of nature, it is true, as infinite. And the mind, exploring nature, rests at no given term in its progress, but finds in each phase of the universal revelation, in element, atom, world, or system of worlds, the movement of exhaustless energy, the shifting barriers of interminable being changing through illimitable time. But though the mind's progress were endless it were a process nevertheless of endless delimitation. Thought is thought of a more or less particularised content. Whatever we see, whatever we think, is, in the very fact that we think or see, qualified and so far defined.

Nature is thus finite as object of thought, infinite as transcending any given process of thought. It is the function of thought to define; to seek for the source, essence, office, or end of its object. But the defining thought, impatient of the iv Introduction

limits of each several object, and searching for an ultimate term in the aim, origin, or heart of nature as object in general, finds no such term, and confesses in the concept of the Infinite the abandonment of its search.

But the mind finds no less interest in its task because its task is interminable. The thought that there is no bound to its activity is, rather, its most inspiring thought. The mind's interest, however, is everywhere specific. It looks into the maze of being and change through human eyes ; human feeling prompts its attitude, human aims direct its activity. In contemplation as in action its interest is determined by its own constitution.

In this constitution is found much that is common to all sentient life. Man, with his intellectual being, shares with other animals certain animal impulses. He has appetites which crave satisfaction, he shrinks from pain and injury, and he is commonly ruled by the strong instinct of self-preservation. But if, abstracting from these common impulses, we consider only what is characteristic of man, his reflective and creative intelligence, we find him taking two main attitudes in the presence of nature or universal being as the means and medium of his peculiar activities.

Of these two main attitudes, one is exemplified in the sciences, or methods of knowing; the other, in art, morals, and religion, through which man gives expression to what he conceives to be

Introduction v

the more perfect forms of being. Science, the product of the cognitive interest, is content, as science, to explore facts, or to discover laws which embody systems of facts ; that is, to take nature as it finds her. Art, morals, and religion, on the other hand , bring with them a measure or standard, and search the facts for illustration of their own exemplars; or, failing the search, re-form the facts in the sense of their several demands. In brief, science, as descriptive or explanatory, rests, with all its abstractions, in the actual; art, morals, and religion, as normative, seek an ideal, or that which, rarely exemplified in the real, shall, on demand of the imperious interests which they represent, give finer form or tendency to the real.

This distinction, however, may not be taken too strictly. The mind is not a mere cluster of separable faculties or powers, but tends as an organic whole to press all its functions into the service of any main end. The cognising subject is not content simply to know, indifferent to what it finds ; the field which science selects for its scrutiny is taken on suggestion of some human aspiration or need, and the truth which it most affects is the truth which has the profoundest human interest. On the other hand, there can be no art or religion or morals without knowledge. Their standards are not grasped out of the air. Art which is not natural is grotesque; religion which in its deep vi Introduction

discontent with the world flies to worlds unknown fades into a vision; morality, flouting at experience, unenlightened by self-knowledge, becomes an erratic and mischievous habit, a vice. Even our ideals are in relation with experience, and may be proven just or sane only by the test of experience. In fine, the difference between the actual and the ideal marks but a difference in the attitude of the same subject or soul dealing with various material and looking to different ends. Here the matter of our thought is that which now is; there, that which we seek, which we will to be, which ought to be. The actual interests us as in relation to the ideal; the ideal is but the actual shaped, or to be shaped, into the real which we demand. And what we know of this formative process may possibly itself become a science.

Meantime, as between that which is and that which ought to be, philosophy, the anticipatory and generalising science, must mediate. Human life is a craving, a tendency, a system of activities moving continually, if inconstantly, to their several ends. Science discloses the actual trend of such movements; philosophy must define, if possible, their rational issue. In science we keep close to the sensuous fact, the experiential grounds of thought. But experience awakens aspiration, achievement suggests a finer achievement, and philosophy, surveying the field of the known and searching with speculative eye the

Introduction vii

boundaries of knowledge, mediates between the truth clearly seen and the better truth obscurelydivined. Pressing into its service biology, history, sociology, psychology, it searches for the true relation between the untoward fact and that burning human impulse which, spurning the fact and impatient of the world as we find it, too often prompts us, wanting the guidance of knowledge, to the creation of insubstantial worlds from the stuff of our dreams.

Warned by the errors into which this impulse has led us, philosophy has leaned of late towards natural science as offering assured methods, and assumes to have established by means of its new lore a solid footing in the real. The eternal flux of things in which our human destiny is caught appears at length as something more than mere eddying and wash. In the animate world at least, in the long sweep of biological change, and notably in the development of human manners and thought, there is evidence of melioration: history is written as a progress, and, as some would have it, a necessary progress. Our current evolutional theories, in fact, are in a sense fatalistic. Whatever man may do or may leave undone, they seem to maintain, the race must advance. But human progress cannot be independent of human activity. Man is a factor in his own destiny, is himself a cosmic force, and if he is fated to advance he is fated also viii Introduction

to make adequate effort. His advance is conditioned by his effort.

What we will to have or to be, to know or to do, is thus matter of more than present or personal moment. Through the solidarity of human interests it bears on the problem of human destiny. And moral philosophy, born of our interest in this problem and strengthened now by discipline in the methods of natural science, returns with fresh interest to the study of human needs, and with fresh hope of discerning the true direction of human effort or the rational human end.

Our attempt here is in fact to throw a little light on the nature of this rational end. The need or the utility of any such attempt is sometimes disputed. The moral life, it is said, is independent of the philosophy of morals : mankind needs but the instinct to choose its immediate ends and the ultimate end will take care of itself ; conscience, the moral instinct, suffices. But life, we may be reminded, grows continually more complex. The simplicity of manners for which "a few strong instincts and a few plain rules" were enough we are now fast forsaking, and situations arise in which instinctive morality or the common moral sense is at fault. In fact the part played by instinct in morals is much overrated. The moral habit is mainly an acquired habit. It may assume some of the characters of an instinct, but it is, strictly speaking,

Introduction ix

a tradition rather than an instinct that runs with the blood. It is learned by each generation with infinite pains from the generation which went before; and that which is directly transmitted is at most a more sensitive moral tissue, so to speak, or a growing responsiveness to moral discipline and to the suggestion of moral ideas. The necessity for the serious and systematic treatment of moral ideas remains.

And in the discipline upon which society relies for the formation of the moral habit this necessity, it may be admitted, is in some sense recognised. Efforts are not wanting to justify the moral demand by some theory or some certain shreds of theory. But though there is in the common-sense of mankind a strong inkling of the rational grounds of this demand, which lie bedded in the structure of society and the form of human nature, it occurs to but few that there is need to work out a sustained moral theory. And men find the effort to construct or to understand such a theory fatiguing. We see them constantly falling back, in their speculative indolence and their dread of change, on the dogmas of tradition. But dogma is fast losing its force as mere dogma, and its instability weakens the force of the moral obligation which it was invoked to support. Even hoary tradition must submit to scrutiny. The modern spirit, stimulated by the success of free inquiry in the domain of natural science, searches boldly x Introduction

in every domain, and not even the moral tradition is allowed to pass unchallenged. Error is as old as truth, and we demand some other voucher than age.

With reason, then, we return to the old problem of conduct, and search once more for the ground and unifying principle of our moral judgments. The course of humanity, we may admit, is in the more civilised communities fairly set forwards. But so far its advance is more evidently materialistic than moral, and there are races, we should remember, which are apparently stationary or declining. 1 Even the higher types of our species are never quite free from peril of reversion to the animalism of the lower. Instance the arbitrament of war. The moral habit indeed sits but insecurely on the mass of mankind. It is, we may say, the last great gain of human nature, and is not yet ingrained or organic; and its supremacy is perpetually menaced by those older habits which were generated in the long brute struggle for existence, and which are in fact instinctive, hereditary, and organic.

To check the violence of the brutish habits thus entailed on the race, society itself resorts to violence. Organised as the state and armed

» It is indisputable that much the greater part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved since the moment when external completeness was first given to them by their embodiment in some permanent record. — H. Maine: Ancient Law, chap. li.

Introduction xi

with irresistible force, it applies this force steadily and systematically to the repression of crime' — that is, of acts which threaten the peace and dignity of the state. And few will question the need or the right of such repression. But as we cannot, on the one hand, leave the formation of the moral habit and the development of moral feeling to tradition and dogma, so, on the other hand, we cannot be content simply to support the strong arm of the state. The effect of force on the control of conduct is mainly restrictive or negative, and it reaches no farther than the prescription or rule. Or if by continuous imposition of the rule force does at length induce a habit, the habit is mechanical rather than vital. A true moral principle, on the contrary, works as an affirmative impulsion of the will, appearing in the free expression of the nature of the volitional subject rather than in the curtailment of its freedom. It is, in a word, a principle of life.

Our attempt in the following pages is to trace out the constitution and general working of such a principle, or to undertake, in other words, a fresh statement of the philosophy or general basis of morals as grounded in human nature. If there be a science of morals it must of course rest on such a basis. It need hardly be said, however, that in an attempt of this kind little that is new can be offered. Our doctrine is at least as xii Introduction

old as Aristotle. All that is undertaken, in fact, is to set forth old truths in newer phrase, to piece out certain half-truths with rounder statement, and to pave the way for a comprehensive theory of morals, based on psychological and naturalistic grounds, by means of which some at least of the old feuds may be appeased and a firmer and more intelligent moral habit may be made possible. But to accomplish even so little were much.

SECTION I. Organisation, Causation, and Finality in Nature

PAGE

I. The General Unity of Nature . i

II. The Systematic Unity of Body and

Mind 10

III. Organisms and their Ends . . 22

SECTION II. Basis and Form of Volitional Choice

IV. The Conscious Choice of Ends and

its Relation to Pleasure and Pain 30

V. Functional Conditions of Pleasure

and Pain ..... 44

VI. Determination of Conscious Functions by Volitional Ends . . 57

SECTION III Organisation of Volitional Ends

VII. Principles of Organisation Examined: Harmony; Reason; the Moral Sense; Self-Development 69 xiv Contents

VIII. Pleasure as an Organising Principle 86

IX. Comparison and Estimate of Pleasurable Functions . . .96

X. The General or Rationalised Volitional End . . . .108

SECTION IV. The Associative Life and the Moral End

XI. Social Union Necessary to Human

Development . . . .116

XII. Independent Origin of the Social

Instincts . . . . .124

XIII. Principles of the Social Union . 134

XIV. Morality the Basis of the Social Union 143

XV. Progressive Character of the Moral

XVI. Prescriptive Morality and the Moral

SECTION V. Moral Discipline

XVII. The State's Right to Punish . . 168

XVIII. Punishment and Responsibility . 178

XIX. Responsibility as Related to Freedom and Causation in Willing . 188

Contents xv

PAGE

XX. Freedom as Related to the Volitional

XXI. Moral Freedom and Moral Responsibility ..... 209

SECTION VI. Relation of Morality to Happiness

XXII. General Considerations . . .219

XXIII. Query: Does Morality Demand of

the Individual Uncompensated Sacrifice? . . . . .228

XXIV. Question Discussed: Unconscious

Effects of Morality and Immorality . . . . .232

XXV. Discussion Continued: Conscious

Morality; Conscience . . .239

XXVI. Discussion Continued: Value of Moral Principles Seen only in Life as a Whole. . . .249

XXVII. Discussion Concluded: The More Complete the Virtue the More Completely is Virtue its Own Reward . . . . .257 xvi Contents

PAGE

SECTION VII. Scope of Morality

XXVIII. Moral Discipline Presupposes Other Disciplines. All Merged in Religion . . . . .264

SECTION I Organisation, Causation, and Finality in

Nature

Chapter I The General Unity Of Nature

NATURE is apprehended by the knowing subject as a cosmos or system. Nowhere is unreason, caprice, or chance; everywhere we find order, character or persistent quality, law. We mean, in fact, by the nature of a thing the essential law or method of its being, assuming as of course that it has such a nature or law. The fruit tree we see yielding fruit after his kind. Gold has a specific gravity of 19.33 and fuses at a temperature of 1250 degrees, Centigrade. Such is the nature of these things. And in the general term Nature we express our conviction that being in general is a being in accordance with law.

But the order of nature is no mere mechanic order. The mechanic view of nature follows from the conception of matter, the stuff of which nature is assumed to be compounded, as inert, uninformed, moved only by alien influence. But chemistry and physics have banished this conception. There is no dead matter. Matter in its minutest divisions as in its most ponderous masses is vitalised by an immanent principle, reacts to all agency by inner determination, and asserts through all change its own elemental quality or nature. By abstraction we dissociate matter so-called from this animating principle and conceive of it then as the mere lifeless residue. Such dissociation, however, is but the act of the mind. In all matter, as real, this principle perdures, yielding up nothing of its own even to preponderant force, but expressing itself in every resultant with its measure of power and in its own peculiar mode. Matter is in fact only as its principle is, or finds characteristic expression. And this is true whether we contemplate an atom, a world, or the whole breadth of the apprehensible universe. Wide as we may range we find an inner principle always at work, and as the eye at length wearies or thought droops on flagging pinion, we are brought to the conclusion that all things are related to all, and that in all things the moving principle is one.

We are thus led to regard the activity of nature as the movement of life, and the union of her elements, masses, and systems as an organic union. Inasmuch, however, as nature is never viewed as a finished system, no end can be assigned,

Unity of Nature 3

no distinctive character can be imputed, to nature as a systematised whole. Ends are assigned, mechanisms and organisms are defined, by comparison from without. Nature is never seen from without. All being, all qualities, all ends, and the means to all ends fall within the being of nature, which thus eludes all real definition. That which we do indeed apprehend or define is some determinate tendency or aspect of nature: her elemental affinities, the gravitation of her masses, the evolution of suns and systems, the development of man. And the terms by which we are fain to characterise that which is in being and character exhaustless, terms such as Nature, God, the Absolute, the Infinite, the Universe, the All-Real, the One, are but symbols which define no more than the mode by which we arrive at the limit of definition. 1

When therefore we say that universal nature subsists in vital or organic union we shall not be understood as imputing to nature the specific characters of man or of any of the organisms which we know. We mean no more than that natural processes show such interdependence and

1 Perhaps we know only some of the elements of which existence, considered as a whole, is composed. At all events, it is here impossible to verify the use of analogy, because the whole is never given. . . . Neither matter nor spirit, neither multiplicity nor unity, neither being nor becoming, are fit to be ultimate expressions of existence. — Harald Hoffding: Mind, April, 1905.

interrelation and yield such clear proof of inner direction that they cannot be adequately conceived as lifeless or mechanical processes controlled wholly from without. Each thing is in itself a centre and origin of influence. But through this influence which by nature it exerts, and the influence to which by nature it responds, it is related to all. As it acts or reacts it is ; and each thing is just what it is because all else, being what it is, evokes from each thing its characteristic activity. The needle of the compass varies with the variations in the constitution of the earth's crust. The light of suns incalculably remote flecks the plate on which the astronomer maps the heavens. Hence the universe of nature, uniting all elements in sensitive and constant interaction, each and all moved by an immanent principle, may be called a living universe.

And this universe, in virtue of its principle, is one. Not that we can shut in the illimitable by a term. Nature's universal being has no assignable bounds and is therefore no mere arithmetical unit. And as inclusive of all that is real it cannot be adequately expressed by such terms as Power, Wisdom, Goodness, or any mere abstraction. It is as including no insulated content, as nowhere disparted by any absolute line, as centred at each point of its being, that the universe is one.

Nature, we say then, though eluding definition, offers to our apprehension a certain unity in

Unity of Nature 5

difference: a unity of system with ineffaceable distinctions in quality and mode. And the familiar law in which this unity in difference is implied is the law of causation. Nothing, we say, stands unsupported, or in its own right alone; nothing happens without a cause. 1 And we refer each cause to an antecedent cause in infinite series.

But every effect demands, in strictness, a universe of causes. A spark may start a conflagration. We assume, however, in collaboration with the spark, an indefinite number of causal agents. We assume, for instance, the properties of oxygen and of certain elements with which at a certain temperature it combines. But inasmuch as the collaborating causes, which in so far as they are constants may be taken for granted, are not the causes in which for the time being any practical interest centres, they are commonly relegated to the uncertain rank of conditions. Yet the conditions are part of the cause. An event may be termed, in fact, either condition or cause as a shifting interest shifts the line of inquiry. And as we may trace back from the event an indefinite chain of causes, so we may diverge at any link in the chain and from the point of divergence trace

Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for nothing can be created without a cause. (Jowett's tr.)

a new causal series or an indefinite number of such series.

And the multiplication of effects is as well recognised as the plurality of causes. Any member of a causal series may be regarded, in fact, as either end or origin of an infinite number of converging lines of causation whose distal extremities are infinitely remote. That is, the universal activity is represented in every event. As between causes and effects any given event thus stands like the common vertex of a double cone. And as the modes of causal influence may be expressed, wherever we have adequate knowledge, under the form of unvarying laws, the causal event, conceived in its full significance, implies not only an infinite series but an infinite system. Latent in the conception of cause is the conception of the systematic unity of nature. Nothing is real but as the universal reality is. All fugitive and finite being is relative to that for which the Infinite or the Absolute is our symbol. 1

But we note in certain groups of phenomena a stricter and more obvious unity than that which binds all things to all in causal or systematic union. What we call vital phenomena are vital in a more special sense. Where such phenomena appear we find a definite organism or body within

* The Absolute is its appearances, it really is all and every one of them. — F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, p. 486.

Unity of Nature 7

which the lines of causal influence all converge to a definite end, namely, the conservation of the body in the discharge of its functions. We define life in fact, provisionally at least, as the principle which effects this convergence or appears in the tendency to this end.

Every vital system is therefore, even when unconscious, in a sense teleological. It presents a synergy of functions tending in their discharge to the conservation of the system and, as incident to this office, to the production of other systems in type like itself. So far as we can see, however, no physical or chemical law is suspended in the accomplishment of the vital end. The living body is still incorporated in the body of nature. The force of gravitation, for instance, is exerted on every particle of organised matter; and it appears, if we allow for the influence of organic conditions, that the chemical elements in any organism show their characteristic chemical reactions. But while the specific forms of energy follow within the organism their own specific laws, they are all made subordinate to the vital end. Or perhaps it were more accurate to say, since subordination of a law might seem to imply infraction or suspension of the law, that the interaction of the elements under the conditions presented in the living body constitutes in itself the vital principle which dominates the body. 1 Without

1 Compare Kant's suggestion: Es als unausgemacht dahinproof, therefore, of such infraction or suspension, we may reasonably infer from the general validity of the elemental laws as disclosed by physiological research, that organic causation is but a special case of common causation, or of undiscovered activities which work within the sphere of such causation.

The doctrine of finality in nature then, a doctrine of which philosophy is coy as in some way subversive of natural law, need not alarm the most thorough-going naturalist. It is, as we regard it, but an exemplification of such law. The philosophical objection is valid, no doubt, as against the assumption of conscious prevision in all natural tendency to an end. But there is finality in nature before consciousness appears. It is characteristic of all vital systems. It is most obvious, however, in the activities of animal organisms, the structures of which are deemed to be intelligible only when their office or end is understood. Physiology, as a science of functions, has indeed little to tell us but of adaptations to an end. The heart, it appears, is formed with reference to the circulation of the blood; the stomach anticipates the food which it must gestellt wird, ob nicht in dem uns tmbekannten inneren Grande der Natur selbst die physisch-mechanische und die Zweckverbindung an denselben Dingen in einem Prinzip zusammenhangen mogen. — Kant: Krit. der Urtheilskraft, zweiter theil, sec. 70.

Unity of Nature 9

assimilate 5 and no instrument consciously devised for an end is comparable with the brain in the delicacy and completeness with which it is adapted to conserve and develop the organism in which it has its seat.

And one might apply the concept of an end to the action of nature wherever we see a system of causes steadily converging to a common result. But there is risk of making the concept useless by over-expansion. It suffices to note that nature is, in any aspect, a process; that the principles by which the process is guided are definite and stable ; that the thing which is tends in a determinate manner to become the thing which shall be. And we may add that among all natural processes there is interaction and communion. Nature's common theme is the systematic or organic unity of nature.

Chapter II The Systematic Unity Of Body And Mind

WHEN we come to deal with consciousness, however, and especially with the rational self-consciousness of man, we discover what appears to be a break in the system of nature. The lines of causation here seem to be interrupted. We ha ve " thought ' ' on the one side and ' ' matter ' ' on the other, and, finding it hard to understand how the movement of matter may be transmuted into the activity of thought, we rest, though uneasily, in a sort of dualism. Here apparently are two separate realms, the realm of body and the realm of mind. And the gap which divides them, it is urged, is no mere gap in our knowledge, but is one which cannot be stopped by any conceivable extension of our knowledge; the chasm is and must remain impassable. 1

> Pour ce que d'un c6t6 j'ai une claire et distincte idee de moi-meme en tant que je suis seulement une chose qui pense et non 6tendue, et que d'un autre j'ai une idee distircte du corps en tant qu'il est seulement une chose 6tendue et qui ne pense point, il est certain que moi, c'est-a-dire mon ame, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entierement et verita-

To the naive consciousness this problem in causation does not occur. For the plain man pain is without question the effect of a blow, and it is the will which as cause nerves the arm to strike in retaliation of the blow.

And even cultivated minds glide over the problem with easy assumption. Certain evolutionists, ignoring, it would seem, the question of the commensurability of physical and psychical terms, class consciousness as a specific kind of force. It is simply the equivalent of so much physical force from which, or into which, it is converted. Feeling or idea or will ranks thus, without more ado, in its place in the vast scheme of forces to which the universe is by our physical philosophies commonly reduced; and consciousness, as a refined kind of force, is brought under the general doctrine of the conservation of energy, or, as the phrase once ran, the persistence of force. 1 blement distincte de mon corps, et qu'elle peut §tre cm exister sans lui. — Descartes: Med. Sixieme.

Nee corpus mentem ad cogitandum, nee mens corpus ad motum, neque ad quietem, nee ad aliquid (si quid est) aliud determinare potest.— Spinoza: Ethices, pars iii., prop. ii.

1 Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the Unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought: these in their turns being