THE ETHICS OF MONISM

To say that religious thought is passing to-day through a period of peculiar stress is to utter a commonplace so threadbare that one apologises for repeating it. Even the man in the street or perhaps we ought to say even the man in the pew, the average member of a Christian Church is aware that certain potent forces have been for some time past directing a series of sustained assaults upon what were until recently all but unquestioned beliefs; nor, if he is capable of appreciating facts, will he deny though he may deplore it that to all seeming these attacks have been attended by a considerable measure of success. If, however, our man in the pew were asked to specify what forces he had in his mind, he would probably in nine cases out of ten point to two such, and two alone, viz., natural science and Biblical criticism, which, he would tell us, had between them created an atmosphere in which the old views of Scriptural authority found it more and more difficult to maintain themselves.

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Such an estimate of the situation would be true so far as it went; yet it would omit to take account of a third factor, a solvent far less obvious in its workings, but far more disintegrating in its effects. The factor to which we are referring is philosophy; while science and criticism have overthrown certain traditional ramparts, a type of philosophy has sprung up, slowly undermining the very foundations; or, to vary the simile, while the former two have captured certain outworks, the latter has made its way to within striking distance of the citadel, and that the more unobserved because attention has been focussed almost exclusively upon the more imposing performances of the critic and the biologist.

As a matter of fact, religion never had, nor could have, anything to fear from these two quarters, which as we can now see could not in any way touch the essence of religious faith, as distinguished from some of its temporary forms; on the other hand, that very essence might be imperilled by a false but plausible philosophy, and grave practical consequences in the domain of conduct might arise from its spread. For if it is accurate to say that behind every ethic there stands whether avowed or unavowed a certain metaphysic, the converse holds true no less; every philosophy, in the exact proportion in which it is ex animo accepted, will tend to produce its ethical counterpart. What we {55] submit in all seriousness is that the only real danger to religion that is to be apprehended to-day a danger to which it is impossible to blind ourselves is that involved in a certain metaphysical outlook, whose continued growth in popularity cannot but ere long produce its own results in the field of practice.

The philosophy in question is intimately related to that Pantheism at some of whose implications we were glancing in our last chapter; if we refer to it here and subsequently by the name of Monism, under which it has of late obtained a considerable vogue in this country, it must be understood that we do not mean what Dr. Ballard calls Theomonism, but a far less carefully thought-out and tested theory of life, which at the present time is making a successful appeal to multitudes of inexact thinkers. The fundamental idea common to this school is that the universe, including our individualities or what we think such, constitutes only one being, and manifests only one will, which all its phenomena express. Separateness of existence, according to such a view which, after all, represents only the extreme logic of Pantheism is, of course, a chimaera, and so, a fortiori, must separate volition be. The only real will i.e., the will of the universe is regarded as good and right; and since there is no other will but that one, and seeing that none resists or inhibits it, it is ever being carried out, continuously operative. {56] To call this will even “prevailing” would be a misuse of language, since there is no other will for it to prevail against.

Now, regarded merely in the abstract, this conception might be treated as a harmless eccentricity or speculative aberration, and is likely to be so treated by the ordinary “practical” man, with his contempt for “theories,” and his pathetic conviction that speculation does not matter; let us, however, see what is implied in this particular speculative theory. From the primary assumption of this philosophy it follows with an irresistible cogency that there is no such thing as real, objective evil. Sin, if the term be retained at all, can at most be only a blunder. Evil is only an inexact description of a lesser good, or good in the making. Indeed, properly considered i.e., from the monistic standpoint evil is a mere negation, a shadow where light should be; or to be quite logical, evil is that which is not in other words, there is no evil, except to deluded minds, whose business is to get quit of their delusion. The one and only cosmic will being declared good, it follows that for the monist “all’s right with the world,” in a sense scarcely contemplated by Browning when he penned that most dubious aphorism. We propose briefly to show how this creed works out what is its ethical counterpart or issue not by arguing in vacuo what it must be, but by presenting to the reader three {57] selected illustrations taken from the writings of as many exponents of this type of Monism.

In his volume First and Last Things a work which he significantly calls “a confession of faith and rule of life” Mr. H. G. Wells avows himself a believer in the “Being of the Species,” and, prospectively at least, in “the eternally conscious Being of all things.” The individual as such is merely an “experiment of the species for the species,” and without significance per se; we are “episodes in an experience greater than ourselves,” “incidental experiments in the growing knowledge and consciousness of the race.” Mr. Wells’s fundamental act of faith is a firm belief in “the ultimate rightness and significance of things,” including “the wheel-smashed frog on the road, and the fly drowning in the milk.” In other words, all is just as it has to be; regrets, remorses and discontents exist only for the “unbeliever” in this truth, while, speaking for himself, the author frankly says, “I believe . . . that my defects and uglinesses and failures, just as much as my powers and successes, are things that are necessary and important.” “In the last resort,” he concludes his book, “I do not care whether I am seated on a throne, or drunk, or dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right, and all things mine.”

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Certainly, this is uncompromising candour; but it is also, though Mr. Wells, strangely enough, calls himself a believer in freewill the most uncompromising Determinism conceivable. And this Determinism follows quite inevitably from Mr. Wells’s monistic premises belief in a cosmic “scheme” every part of which is ultimately right. An end in the gutter or on the gallows may be as necessary to that scheme’s perfection as a life spent in strenuous goodness. Whatever is, is right. It can be hardly necessary to point out that such a belief, consistently entertained, puts an end to all moral effort; we “follow our leading” i.e., we do not drive, but drift. Arguing from his own premises, it is absolutely vain for Mr. Wells to wax indignantly eloquent over social abuses, as when he says:

I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial production; I see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and some leading lives of shame and indignity; . . . I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate desire to end waste, to create order. .)

But why, we ask, should Mr. Wells feel this passionate desire, if all the failures and uglinesses of life are “necessary and important”? How, on this assumption, are existing social ills to be remedied nay, why should they be remedied, why should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that “everything is right”? Let {59] Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark of “unbelief.”

Mr. Wells, however, while his influence is a very considerable one, utters his teaching from outside the Christian Church, and very properly disavows the Christian name; what must give us pause is to find the monistic ethics being preached and taught by official exponents of the Christian religion. What, e.g., can we think of a statement like the following, which we quote from the columns of a religious journal?

There are people who think it is an evidence of superior Culture to show themselves pained by certain things; but it is not really that; they are pained because they are not cultured enough, or in the right way. . .

Nothing is good or ill
But thinking makes it so.

They think it desirable to dislike things because they dislike them; if they thought it desirable not to dislike them, they would not dislike them.

Again, no one will accuse this writer of want of frankness; according to him, there is simply no such thing as objective evil acts and individuals have no moral qualities or characters, but are such as we think them, and our business is so to think of them that they will not pain us. {60] If we only knew aright, we should not regard anything as bad. If we are pained by the thought of fifty thousand hungry children in London elementary schools, or by the condition of Regent Street at night, it is because we are not “cultured” enough we have not the right gnosis. When we reflect that anyone who consistently believes that “nothing is good or ill, but thinking makes it so,” will inevitably, first or last, apply that comforting maxim to his own acts, we can see in what direction the ethics of Monism in reality a return to the ultra-subjectivism of the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things are likely to lead men. And yet, if the monistic presuppositions are valid if the universe in all its phases expresses only one will we do not see how these conclusions can be repelled.

But it is, perhaps, our last illustration, drawn from yet another writer of the same school, which will exhibit both the teaching under discussion and its practical dangers in the clearest light. We are told that

There is no will that is not God’s will. I do not mean that yours is not real, or that any man’s is not real, but I do mean that nothing can happen to any of God’s children no matter how evil the intention of the person who does it, or how seemingly meaningless the calamity that causes it which is not in some way the sacrament of God’s love to us, and His call upon our highest energies. In a true and real sense, therefore, it is God’s own doing and meant for our greater glory; . . . I believe in the infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else.

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Those who will take the moderate trouble of translating these words from the abstract into the concrete will need no further demonstration of the moral implications of this type of Monism. “There is no will” not even the most brutalised or the most debauched “that is not God’s will.” “Nothing can happen to any of God’s children” say, to the natives of the Congo or to a Jewish community during a Russian pogrom but is God’s call upon their highest energies: wherefore they ought, assuredly, to be thankful to King Leopold’s emissaries and the Tsar’s faithful Black Hundreds! But let us apply this thesis to yet another case, which will bring out its full character: if an English girl one of God’s children is snared away by a ruffian, under pretext of honest employment, to some Continental hell, then we are to understand that the physical and moral ruin which awaits the victim is “in some way the sacrament of God’s love” to her “in a true and real sense it is God’s own doing,” and meant for her greater glory! We have no hesitation in saying that such teaching strikes us as fraught with infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God’s will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase “I believe in the {62] infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else” the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else sin, and shame, and remorse, and heartbreak, and despair; against the first of which we need to be warned, in order that we may escape the rest.

We are quite prepared to be told that our anxieties are groundless, because “no one will ever draw such inferences as these.” To this we reply, firstly, that these are the logical and legitimate inferences from the principles enunciated; and secondly, that we do not at all share the particular kind of optimism which trusts that good luck will prevent the application of these theories to practical life. We are living in an age of wide-spread intellectual unsettlement, an age presenting the difficult problem of a vast half-educated public, ready to fall an easy prey to all manner of specious sophistries, especially when they are dressed up in the garb of a pseudo-mysticism; we must above all remember that human nature is habitually prone to welcome whatever will serve as an excuse for throwing off the irksome restraints of moral discipline. That is why we repeat that the one real danger religion has to face to-day is the danger arising from the spread of a false philosophy, whose tenets are ultimately incompatible with Christian morals. The worst hérésies are moral {63] hérésies; and of the views we have been discussing we say roundly that their falseness is sufficiently proved by their ethical implications. “A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; therefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” Against all the insidious attempts that are made to-day to minimise or explain away moral evil attempts with which we shall deal in greater detail at a later stage we have to reaffirm the reality and exceeding sinfulness of sin; more particularly, in combating the preposterous notion of man’s oneness with God as something already realised, we have to insist with renewed emphasis that salvation, so far from being self-understood, is a prize only to be won by a hard struggle, nor shut the door upon the dread possibility of that prize being missed. There are perhaps few truths to which it is more desirable that we should pay renewed attention than that expressed in the saying, “When belief waxes unsound, practice becomes uncertain.” Certainly, the ethics of Monism supply a case in point.