Characteristics.

A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought, during the last century would have to lay stress upon one characteristic feature. It was limited in range, limited, one may say, by its regard for the importance of the facts with which it had to deal. The thought of the period was certainly not without controversy; it was indeed controversial almost to a fault. But the controversies of the time centred almost exclusively round two questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question of the criterion of moral value. These questions were of course traditional in the schools of philosophy; and for more than a century English moralists were mainly occupied with inherited topics of debate. They gave precision to the questions under discussion; and their controversies defined the traditional opposition of ethical opinion, and separated moralists into two hostile schools known as Utilitarian and Intuitionist.

As regards the former question that of the origin of moral ideas the Utilitarian School held that they could be traced to experience; and by ‘experience’ they meant in the last resort sense-perceptions and the feelings of pleasure and of pain which accompany or follow sense-perception. All the facts of our moral consciousness, therefore, the knowledge of right and wrong, the judgments of conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation, all these could be traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany or follow them.

With regard to the criterion or standard of morality, the second question to which I have to call attention, they held that the distinction between right and wrong depended upon the consequences of an action in the way of pleasure and pain. That action was right which on the whole and in the long run would bring pleasure or happiness to those whom it affected: that action was wrong which on the whole and in the long run would bring pain rather than pleasure to those whom it affected.

From their view as to the origin of moral ideas, the school might more properly be called the Empirical School. It is from their views on the question of the standard of value, or the criterion of morality, that it claimed, and that it received, the name Utilitarian. On both these points the Utilitarian School was opposed by an energetic but less compact body of writers, known as Intuitionists.

The Intuitionists maintained to put the matter briefly that the moral consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and origin, to the constitution of man’s mind. On this ground, therefore, the school was properly called Intuitional: they held that moral ideas were received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, not by a process of induction from particular facts.

And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality, that also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the way of happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised. On the contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by any consequences in which action resulted: belonging as they did to the essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the conduct of man’s life.

Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely about these two points and between these two opposed schools. No doubt the two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the whole matter. They pointed to the consideration of the question of man’s place in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it was his to play in the world. They suggested, if they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued. But the larger issues suggested were not followed out. Common consent seemed to limit the discussion to the two questions described; and this limitation of the controversy tended to a precision and clearness in method, which is often wanting in the ethical thought of the present day, disturbed as it is by new and more far-reaching problems.

This limitation of scope, which I venture to select as the leading characteristic of last century’s ethical enquiries, may be further seen in the large amount of agreement between the two schools regarding the content of morality. The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional as we may call it the Christian morality of modern civilisation. They both adopted and defended the well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of temperance and benevolence, which have been accepted by the common tradition of ages as the expression of man’s moral consciousness. The Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded they may indeed have sometimes regarded themselves as in a peculiar way the guardians of the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents in defending a view in harmony with man’s spiritual essence and inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content of morality by the Utilitarian writers. On the contrary, they were interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional morality. This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle of last century. “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth,” he says, “we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."

No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the accepted code. He says that “the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness." He would even take this point the modifiability of the ordinary moral code as a sort of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that “the contest between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and government."

A passage such as this leads us to ask, What exactly is the extent of the modifications which Mill seeks to make in the ordinary scale of values? Does he, for instance, wish to invert any ordinary moral rules? Would he do away with, or in any important respect modify, the duties of truth or justice, temperance or benevolence? Far from it He only suggests, as many moralists of both parties have suggested, that in the application of moral law to the details of experience certain modifications are required. How far he goes in this direction may be seen from his own instance, that of truth. He would admit certain exceptions to the law of truth; he would give the less rigorous answers to the time-honoured questions as to whether one should tell the truth to an invalid in a dangerous illness or to a would-be criminal. But Mill always asserts the sanctity of the general principle; and, on this account, he holds that “in order that the exception may not extend itself beyond the need, and may have the least possible effect in weakening reliance on veracity, it ought to be recognised and, if possible, its limits defined; and if the principle of utility is good for anything, it must be good for weighing these conflicting utilities against one another, and marking out the region within which one or the other preponderates.” He holds that there are such limits to veracity. He even thinks though here he is not quite correct that such limits have been acknowledged by all moralists. He would have been correct if he had said that they had been acknowledged by moralists of all schools: the admission of these limits is not peculiar to Utilitarians. But he vigorously defends the validity of the general rule, and maintains that, in considering any possible exception, we have to take account not merely of the present utility of the falsehood, but of its effect upon the sanctity of the general principle in the minds of men. The Utilitarian doctrine is expressly used by him to confirm the ordinary general laws of the moral consciousness. Nay, these rules such as the duties of being temperate and just and benevolent were, according to Mill, themselves the result of experiences of utility on the part of our predecessors, and from them handed down to us by the tradition of the race. No doubt in this Mill is applying a theoretical view too easily to a question of history. It is one thing to maintain, as he does, that utility is the correct test of morality; it is another thing altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or expressions of earlier judgments of utility. The former statement is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it. The latter statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former if everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of morality. But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the ordinary conscience.

The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists sought to make any fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as acknowledged by modern society. Their controversies were almost entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided, would have little effect upon a man’s practical attitude. But it would not be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the ethical controversies of the present day. We have no longer the same common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate criterion. Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it will go deeper and it will spread its results wider: it appears as if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong. One school at any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the extravagance of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting adherents.

It is on this ground, therefore, because I believe that the ethical question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day, that I have selected the topic for these lectures. It is not merely that many modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of right and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct is right according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness is relative to its tendency to produce happiness. But a much greater importance may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals when one couples that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the indefinitely great changes which the progress of the race brings about, not only in the social order but also in the structure and faculties of man himself.

Hence it is not surprising to find that there are at the present day some writers who ask for nothing less than a revision of the whole traditional morality, and in whose minds that demand is connected with the dominant doctrine of progress as it is expressed in the theory of evolution.

Perhaps we might trace the beginnings of this controversy as to the content of what is right and what is wrong to an older opposition in ethical thought, an opposition which especially affects the utilitarian doctrine the controversy of Egoism and Altruism. If we look at these two conceptions of egoism and altruism as the Utilitarians did, if we regard the conception of egoism as having to do with one’s own personal happiness, and that of altruism as describing the general happiness, the happiness of others rather than of oneself, then obviously the questions arise whether the conduct which produces the greatest happiness of others will or will not also produce the greatest happiness of the individual agent, and which should be chosen in the event of their disagreement. Is my happiness and that which will tend to it always to be got on the same lines of conduct as those which will bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number?

The Utilitarian writers of last century were of course conscious of this problem, conscious that there was a possible discrepancy between egoistic conduct and altruistic conduct; but they agreed to lay stress upon altruistic results as determining moral quality. Their tendency was to minimise the difference between the egoistic and the altruistic effects of action, and in so far as a difference had to be allowed to emphasise the importance of the claims of the community at large, that is, roughly speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and more careful investigators have brought out more exactly the extent and significance of the divergence. In particular this was done with perfect clearness and precision by the late Professor Sidgwick. He showed that the difference although it might be easily exaggerated was yet real and important, that the two systems did not mean the same thing, that we could not rely upon altruistic conduct always being for individual benefit, that there was no ’natural identity’ between egoism and altruism. He held that morality, to save it from an unsolved dualism, required a principle capable of reconciling the discrepancy between the conduct in accordance with the axiom of Benevolence and the conduct in accordance with the equally rational axiom of Self-love.

But while this question of egoism and altruism has thus been recognised as a possible source of perplexity, affecting the ethical standard itself, both egoists and orthodox utilitarians have commonly agreed though for different reasons to insist that morality means the same for them both, and to hold with Epicurus that “we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice.” It is only in quite recent days that a thoroughgoing attempt has been made to revalue all the old standards of morality. And the attempt is made from a point of view which is certainly not altruistic. The Utilitarian writers of last generation, if they admitted the conflict of egoism and altruism, weighted every consideration on the side of altruism. They emphasised therefore the agreement between their own utilitarian doctrine and the Christian morality in which altruism is fundamental. On the other hand, the more recent tendency to which I refer emphasises and exalts the egoistic side, and thus accentuates the difference between the new moral code if we may call it moral and the Christian morality.

The boldest and most brilliant exponent of this tendency is Friedrich Nietzsche, already the object of a cult in Germany, and an author to be reckoned with as one of the new forces in European thought. It is true that some of the most characteristic products of his genius are closely akin to the insanity which clouded his later years. Yet it is impossible to read his writings without recognising his penetrating insight as well as his abundance of virile passion. Besides, in spite of all his extravagances or, perhaps, because of them he is symptomatic of certain tendencies of the age. Nietzsche’s demand is for nothing less than a revision of the whole moral code and a reversal of its most characteristic provisions. And he has the rare distinction of being a writer on morality who disclaims the title of ‘moralist.’

The ideas which Nietzsche expresses go to the root of the matter. In the first place, he drew a distinction between what he regarded as two different types of morality. One of these he called the morality of masters or nobles, and he called the other the morality of slaves. Self-reliance and courage may be cited as the qualities typical of the noble morality, for they are the qualities which tend to make the man who possesses them a master over others, to give him a prominent and powerful place in the world, and to help him to subjugate to his will both nature and his fellow-men. On the other hand, there are the qualities which form the characteristic features of Christian morality such as benevolence or love of one’s neighbour, the fundamental precept of the Gospels, and the humility and obedience which have been perhaps unduly emphasised in ecclesiastical ethics. These are the qualities which he means when he speaks of the morality of the slave.

In the second place, therefore, what is distinctive of Nietzsche is this: that he explicitly rejects the Christian morality, in particular the virtues of benevolence, of obedience, of humility: these are regarded by him as belonging to a type of morality which is to be overcome and which he calls the servile morality. He deliberately sets in antithesis to one another what he calls Christian and what he calls noble virtues: meaning by the latter the qualities allied to courage, force of will, and strength of arm, such as were manifested in certain Pagan races, but above all in the heroes of the Roman Republic. He would, therefore, deliberately prefer the older Pagan valuation of conduct to the Christian valuation.

In the third place, he attempts what he calls a transvaluation of all values. Every moral idea needs revision, every moral idea, every suggestion of value or worth in conduct, must be tried and tested afresh, and a new morality substituted for the old. And with this claim for revision is connected his idea that the egoistic principle which underlies the Pagan virtues preferred to the Christian, and the higher development of the self-capacities to which it will lead, will evolve a superior kind of men “Over-men” or “Uebermenschen” to whom, therefore, we may look as setting the tone and giving the rule for subsequent conduct.

Nietzsche is an unsystematic writer, though none the less powerful on that account. He is apt to be perplexing to the reader who looks for system or a definite and reasoned statement of doctrine; but his aphorisms are all the more fitted to impress readers who are not inclined to criticism, and might shirk an elaborate argument. It is difficult, accordingly, to select from him a series of propositions that would give a general idea of the complete transmutation of morality which he demands. So far as I can make out, there is only one point in which he still agrees with the old traditional morality, and that point seems to cause him no little difficulty. No thinker can afford to question the binding nature of the law of Truth, least of all a thinker so obviously in earnest about his own prophetic message as Nietzsche was. All his investigations presuppose the validity of this law for his own thought; all his utterances imply an appeal to it; and his influence depends on the confidence which others have in his veracity. And on this one point only Nietzsche has to confess himself a child of the older morality. “This book,” he says in the preface to one of the least paradoxical of his works, ‘Dawn of Day,’ “This book ... implies a contradiction and is not afraid of it: in it we break with the faith in morals why? In obedience to morality! Or what name shall we give to that which passes therein? We should prefer more modest names. But it is past all doubt that even to us a ’thou shalt’ is still speaking, even we still obey a stern law above us and this is the last moral precept which impresses itself even upon us, which even we obey: in this respect, if in any, we are still conscientious people viz., we do not wish to return to that which we consider outlived and decayed, to something ‘not worthy of belief,’ be it called God, virtue, truth, justice, charity; we do not approve of any deceptive bridges to old ideals, we are radically hostile to all that wants to mediate and to amalgamate with us; hostile to any actual religion and Christianity; hostile to all the vague, romantic, and patriotic feelings; hostile also to the love of pleasure and want of principle of the artists who would fain persuade us to worship when we no longer believe for we are artists; hostile, in short, to the whole European Femininism (or Idealism, if you prefer this name), which is ever ‘elevating’ and consequently ‘degrading.’ Yet, as such conscientious people, we immoralists and atheists of this day still feel subject to the German honesty and piety of thousands of years’ standing, though as their most doubtful and last descendants; nay, in a certain sense, as their heirs, as executors of their inmost will, a pessimist will, as aforesaid, which is not afraid of denying itself, because it delights in taking a negative position. We ourselves are suppose you want a formula the consummate self-dissolution of morals.”

Perhaps it is impossible to understand Nietzsche unless one admits that his writings show traces of the disease which very soon prevented his writing at all. But at the same time, while that is true, there is much more in his work than the ravings of a distempered mind. There may have been little method, but there was a great deal of genius, in his madness. While he always overstates his case, his colossal egoism leads him to exaggerate any doctrine, and while I do not think that the actual doctrines of Nietzsche in the way he puts them will ever gain any general acceptance, while his system of morality may not have any chance of being the moral code of the next generation or even of being regarded as the serious alternative to Christian morality, yet it is not too much to say that he is symptomatic of a new tendency in ethical thought, a tendency of which he is the greatest, if also the most extravagant exponent, but which has its roots in certain new influences which have come to this generation with the ideas and the triumphs, scientific and material, of the preceding generation.

There are two quite different kinds of influence to which the formation of an ethical doctrine may be due. In the first place, there are the moral sentiments and opinions of the community and of the moralist himself; and, in the second place, there are the scientific and philosophical doctrines accepted by the writer or inspiring what is loosely called the spirit of the time. In most ethical movements the two kinds of influence will be found co-operating, though the latter is almost entirely absent in some cases. The incoherence of popular opinions about morality is a potent stimulus to reflexion, and may of itself give rise to systematic ethical enquiry. This is more particularly the case when a change of social conditions, or contact with alien modes of life, force into light the inadequacy of the conventional morality. In such a case the new ethical reflexion may have a disintegrating effect upon the traditional code, and give to the movement the character and importance of a revolution. The reflective activity of the Sophists in ancient Greece a movement of the deepest ethical significance was in the main of this nature. It consisted in a radical sifting and criticism of current moral standards, and was due almost entirely to the first class of influences, being affected only in the slightest degree by scientific or philosophical ideas.

Influences of the same kind combine with science and philosophy in moulding the ethical thought of the present day. Contemporary ethical speculation is by no means exclusively due to the thinkers who attempt to arrive at a consistent interpretation of the nature of reality; and it has features which constantly remind us how closely moral reflexion is connected with the order and changes of social conditions.

Every age is no doubt apt to exaggerate its own claims to mark an epoch. But, after a century of achievements in applied science, there seems little risk of error in asserting that the world is now becoming conscious as it never was before of the vast power given by material resources when under the control of a cool intelligence. And in the competition of nations it is not surprising that there should be an imperious demand for the most alert and well-trained minds to utilise these resources in war and in industry. It is not surprising; nor would it be a fit subject for regret, did not the concentration of the outlook upon material success tend to the neglect of ’things which are more excellent.’ Writing many years ago J.S. Mill remarked that “hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”

There is a further question which ought to be asked of every new advance in material civilisation, Does it foster, or at least does it leave unimpeded, the development of man’s spiritual inheritance? Certainly, the control of nature by mind is not necessarily hostile to the ideals which give dignity to the arts and sciences and to man himself. And yet it does not always favour their presence. The weak nations of the world in arms and commerce have contributed their full share to the higher life of the race; and the triumphs of a country on the battlefield or in business give no security for the presence among its people of the ideals which illumine or of the righteousness which exalts. The history of Germany herself might point the moral. A century ago, when she lay crushed beneath the heel of Napoleon, her poets and philosophers were the prophets of ideals which helped to bind her scattered states into a powerful nation, and which enriched the mind of man. To-day we are forced to ask whether military and industrial success have changed the national bent: for poetry seems to have deserted her, and her philosophy betrays the dominance of material interests.

Material success and the struggle for it are apt to monopolise the attention; and perhaps the greatest danger of the new social order is the growing materialisation of the mental outlook. It would be needless to point to the evidence, amongst all classes in the mercantile nations, of the feverish haste to be rich and to enjoy. For to point to this has been common with the moralists of all ages. This age like others perhaps more than most is strewn with the victims of the struggle. But it can also boast a product largely its own the new race of victors who have emerged triumphant, with wealth beyond the dreams of avarice of the past generation. Their interests make them cosmopolitan; they are unrestrained by the traditional obligations of ancient lineage; and the world seems to lie before them as something to be bought and sold. Neither they nor others have quite realised as yet the power which colossal wealth gives in modern conditions. And it remains to be seen whether the multimillionaire will claim to figure as Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ spurning ordinary moral conventions, and will play the rôle, in future moral discourses, which the ethical dialogues of Plato assign to the ‘tyrant,’

General literature, even in its highest forms, seems to reflect a corresponding change of view as to what is of most worth in life. Already the strong hold on duty and the spiritual world which Tennyson unfalteringly displayed, even the deeper insight into motive and the faith in goodness which are shown by Browning, are read by us as utterances of a past age. We have grown used to a presentment of human life such as Ibsen’s in which the customary morality is regarded as a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal passions, a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does not fail to weary and disgust, or perhaps as only a spectacle in which what men call good and evil are the light and shade of a picture which may serve to produce some artistic emotion. An attitude akin to these becomes an ethical point of view in Nietzsche, the enfant terrible of modern thought, who maintains that man’s life must be interpreted physiologically only and not spiritually, and who would replace philanthropy by a boundless egoism.

Influences of the second kind are usually more prominent than the preceding in the case of the philosophical moralist, and they are not always avoided by the moralist who boasts his independence of philosophy. The former influences are more constantly at work: they supply the facts for all ethical reflexion. Ethical thought is not so uniformly influenced by the conceptions arrived at in science or philosophy. But there are certain periods of history in which conceptions regarding the truth of things whether arrived at by scientific methods or not have had a profound influence upon men’s views of good and evil. At the beginning of our era, for instance, the view of God and man introduced by Christianity, resulted in a deepened and, to some extent, in a distinctive morality. Again, at the time of the Renaissance, the new knowledge and new interests combined with the weakening of the Church’s and of the Empire’s authority to bring about the demand for a revision of the ecclesiastical morality, and led to some not very successful attempts to find a firmer basis for conduct.

At the present day also it is the case that philosophers of different schools are for the most part agreed in claiming ethical importance for their conceptions about reality. In particular, the scientific thought of the last generation has been reformed under the, influence of the group of ideas which constitute the theory of evolution. There is hardly a department of thought which this new doctrine has not touched; and upon morality its influence may seem to be peculiarly important and direct. The theory of evolution, as put forward by Darwin, has established certain positions which have been regarded as of special significance for ethics.

In the first place, it is an assertion of the unity of life. And we must not limit the generality of this proposition. It is not merely a denial of the fixity of species, an assertion that there are no natural kinds so inseparable from one another that each must be the result of a distinct creative act. It is also an assertion that human life must be treated as a part in the larger whole of organic being, that the mind of man is continuous with animal perception, that moral activity is continuous with non-moral impulse. And the assertion of the unity of life is at the same time an assertion of the progress of life. What we call the higher forms are in all cases developments from simpler and lower forms.

Further, the method of this progress has been described. Herein indeed lay Darwin’s most important achievement. He detected and demonstrated the operation of a factor hitherto unsuspected. This new factor to which he drew attention as the chief agent in organic development was called by him ‘natural selection,’ The name has a positive sound and suggests a process of active choice. But Darwin was fully aware that the process to which he gave this name was a negative and not a positive operation; and as such it was clearly recognised by him. The name was, no doubt, chosen simply to bring out the fact that the same kind of results as those which man produces by conscious and artificial selection may be arrived at without conscious purpose by the operation of merely natural forces. Instead of the ‘fit’ being directly chosen or encouraged, what happens is simply that the ‘unfit’ die out or are exterminated, so that room to live and means of life are left for the survivors.

What may be meant by this idea of ’fitness’ which meets us in the famous phrase that the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the struggle for life is the goal of evolution is a question which brings us at once to the consideration of the ethical significance of the theory. For it seems to lay claim to give both an explanation of progress and an interpretation of what constitutes worth in conduct.