The Stoics have a new thought to offer, one that would have been as revolutionary as Christianity it¬ self, if they could but have grasped and taught its full meaning. But that was for them impossible. Their new thought, which gave foundation to their moral ideals, was the thought of the perfect equality of all men in the presence of the universal Reason, to which all alike ought to conform. Everyone, they said, ought to be rational; everyone ought to try to extend the empire of reason. If one’s neighbor is a rational being, one can and must try to realize the rational in him almost as much as in one’s own self. Hence one’s duty to do good to men. This duty, to be sure, commonly did not for the Stoics extend to the point of very great practical self-sacrifice. But at any rate they gave a new foundation for justice. One works not only to conform one’s self to the ideal, but also to realize the ideal here in this world in others as well as in himself. The ideal Reason can be realized in yonder man through my efforts, much as, through my acts, it can be realized in me. All men are in so far brothers, members of one fam¬ ily, children of one Father, and so all alike objects of moral effort for every one of their number.1 1 For a collection of the passages illustrative of this doctrine, see the quotations in Zeller’s Philos, d. Griechen, Th. 3, Abth. I. p. 285, sqq. (3d ed.). Marcus Aurelius is prominent in the list. Epictetus is responsible for the deduction of human brotherhood from the common fatherhood of God. Seneca has frequent expres¬ sions of similar thoughts. Yet for all that the wise man is to be independent and separate. In his respect for humanity, he is not to lose himself.
THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 3t II.
This thought was indeed a deep one, and if the Stoics gave but an imperfect practical realization of it to the world, they prepared thereby the way for the reception of the higher thought of Jesus, when that thought appeared. We may therefore more readily suggest the skeptical criticism of the Stoical thought by first looking at the well known comple¬ tion of the notion of God’s fatherhood in the doc¬ trine of Jesus.
Jesus founded his morality in his theology, yet he did not make moral distinctions dependent on the mere fact of divine reward or vengeance. An act is for him wrong, not because outside the kingdom of heaven there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; rather should we say that because the act is opposed to the very nature of the relation of sonship to God, as Jesus conceives this relation, therefore the doers of such acts cannot be in the kingdom of heaven, all whose citizens are sons of the King. And outside the kingdom there is darkness and weeping, simply because outside is outside. Therefore, if J esus gives us a theological view of the nature of morality, he does not make morality dependent on the bare des¬ potic will of God, but on a peculiar and necessary relation between God and his creatures. So long as God is what he is, and they remain his crea¬ tures, so long must this relation continue. Jesus in fact, as we know, gives us a higher and universal form of the morality of the prophets. They had said, Jahveh has saved his people, has chosen them 40 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY from all the earth, has fed them with his bounty, has treated them as his well-beloved vineyard, has taken the nation as it were to wife. And so, if the people offend against the law of righteousness that is written in their hearts and known through the words of prophecy, they are guilty not alone of dan¬ gerous revolt against irresistible might, but also of something far worse, namely, of the basest ingrati¬ tude. Their sin is unheard of in all the earth. The heathen forsake not their wretched gods, that are yet no gods, and shall Israel turn against the will of its living, almighty lover? The waste vine¬ yard, the unfaithful wife, these are the types of the iniquity of the people. Their sin is a miserable state of utter corruption. What the very beasts do, to know the masters that feed them, Israel forgets, whose master is not only the maker of all things, but also the loving spouse of his chosen nation.
This sanction for morality, not the might so much as the tender love of God, is by Jesus extended in range and deepened in meaning. Every man stands before God as beloved son. If he wanders, the Father would fain seek him as the shepherd would a lost sheep; would fain, like the prodigal’s father, fall upon his neck and kiss him, if he will but re¬ turn; would fain feed and clothe him with the best; would not forget him amid all his sins. And the Father’s rain and sunshine are for just and un¬ just. Deeper and tenderer is this thought than the prophetic idea, because the relation is no political one, but a close personal one. To be conscious of it means, according to Jesus, to wish to live in accord- THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 41 ance with it, so as to return to the Father love for love. Hence, in knowing this relation, one has the highest sanction for all good acts. The ultimate motive that Jesus gives to men for doing right is therefore the wish to be in harmony with God’s love. So the Father in his holiness wills for each of us, and so each son, conscious of the love of the Father, also desires, as soon as he is aware of the Father’s will. One cannot know of this infinite love without wishing to be in union with it. Even with¬ out knowing of the love, the very consciousness of the wretchedness of the lonely, separate life of selfish wickedness must lead one to want to forsake the husks and find the Father, even if he should be but the angry Father. Much more then if one has found the Father, has found him caring for the spar¬ rows, and for the lilies, and for the least and the worst of his children, must one, thus knowing the Father, desire to submit to him. One is lost in the ocean of divine love. Separate existence there is no more. One is anxious to lose his life, to hate all selfish joys, to sell all that one has, to be despised and rejected of all the world, if so be that thereby one can come into accord with the universal life of God’s love, in which everything of lesser worth dis¬ appears.
Duty to one’s neighbor is but a corollary to all this. In the first place one’s neighbor is no longer a mere fact of experience, a rival, a helper, an enemy; but he is, instead of all this, a child of God. Every other aspect of his life is lost in this one. As child then he represents the Father. The highest 42 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY v messenger of God will say in God s name at the last: Inasmuch as yc did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me. And so each brother is the ambassador of God. When Job had spoken of his duty towards the lowly, he had given the sanc¬ tion for it in the thought: Did not one fashion us t Jesus gives a higher sanction: Does not one Father love you all? In the presence of the Father the children are to lose their separateness. They are to feel the oneness of their life. There is no longer any rival or enemy, any master or slave, any debtor or creditor here, for all are in infinite debt to the Infinite One, and all in his sight brethren.
The Stoics had conceived of a common Father. But they regarded him as an impersonal, all-pervad¬ ing Reason. The thought of Jesus gave to his idea of the fatherhood of God a warmth and life unknown to any previous thought. And in this warmth and life he intended the idea of Duty to grow. The high¬ est principle of the doctrine is: Act as one receiv¬ ing and trying to return an Infinite Love. To thy neighbor act as it befits one so beloved to act towards his brother in love. And thus is Duty explained.
For our present skeptical inquiries this doctrine of Jesus in its original form is no longer enough. For one thing, Jesus himself did not intend it as a philos¬ ophy, but always expresses it as an insight. And in our time this insight is clouded by many doubts that cannot be lightly brushed away. This idea of God as a Father, — it is exactly the idea that out philos¬ ophy finds most difficulty, nowadays, in establishing.
THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 43 For many in all the future history of our race this idea will be harder to establish than will be the moral doctrine that was deduced by Jesus from it. For many who with steadfast faith accept the doc¬ trine of God’s fatherhood, their ultimate reason will rather be that, first accepting the morality of Jesus, they find it most natural to accept therewith what they understand to be his theology. His moral doc¬ trine will be to them the insight, the theology will be taken on trust. Many others will accept indeed the morality, but be unable to accept the theology. In ethical faith they will be Christians, in theology Agnostics. And therefore, to the philosophic stu¬ dent, who must prove all things, and hold fast only what he finds sure, it is impossible to take the the¬ ology of Jesus on simple faith, and not profitable to postpone the discussion of the moral problems until he first shall have established a theology. Morality is for us the starting-point of our inquiry. Theol- ogy comes later, if at all. And, as we shall presently see, the theology, if accepted, would not satisfy all the questions of the ethical inquirer.
Yet if the doctrine of Jesus does not belong among the purely idealistic theories of duty, since it gives duty the fact of God’s fatherhood as its foun¬ dation, it has one aspect that would make the recapit¬ ulation of it necessary even in the course of a study of purely ideal ethics. For, while this doctrine founds duty ultimately on the consciousness that God is a Father, and so on a belief in a physical or metaphysical truth, still the immediate ground of the idea of duty to one’s neighbor is the conscious- 44 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ness in each man that his neighbor is his brother. In the teachings of Jesus this latter insight follows from the sense of common sonship that Jesus wants to give to men. But, apart from the theology, the be¬ lief in the brotherhood of men, in case it can be made clear and definite, may have just the relation to the idea of duty that Jesus, in his theological ethics, wished the idea of the common sonship to have.
But it is our present purpose to see how doubt follows the track of the moral idealists. And to carry out even here this purpose, it is very important to note that however much the morality of Jesus seems to rest upon his theology, and did, for him, rest upon that theology, for us that basis would be of it¬ self insufficient, even if we could unhesitatingly ac¬ cept the theology. For the skeptical question might arise in the inquiries of the philosopher, to whom all questions are allowed, Why is it evident that one ought to return the Father’s love? Granting the fact of this love, how does it establish the ideal? And this question, easy as seems the answer of it to a believer, is just the question that the “ almost persuaded ” of all times have been disposed to ask. Any particular individual may believe in the theol¬ ogy of Jesus, and yet fail to feel the force of the moral doctrine. Why does this love constrain me? he may say. In fact the church has always found it necessary to construct for itself a process, or even a series of processes, through which the unbeliever must go, in order to reach the point- of development where he could begin to feel the constraining force of the divine love. It has been recognized as a fact THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 45 that the unregenerate could believe and even trem¬ ble and yet remain unregenerate. The saving faith was seen to be not identical with the mere belief in God as Father. For the saving faith, divine grace was necessary, adding to the unregenerate recogni¬ tion of the bare truth the devotion of the loving child of God. And therefore the church has never been content with the doctrine of Jesus in its unde¬ veloped simplicity.
But if all this is so, then for us the morality of Jesus, considered as morality, is founded, not on the theological theory alone, but also on a peculiar insight that each man is to have into the duty of returning the divine love. That the divine love is real, gives a basis for all duty in case and only in case one first sees that it is one’s duty to return the divine love. And wherein is this insight as such any clearer than the direct insight into the duty of loving one’s neigh¬ bor? If a man loves not his brother whom he has seen, how shall he love God whom he has not seen? Is not the duty of gratitude first evident, if at all, in man’s relations to his fellows? Is not love given first as a duty to one’s companions, and only secondarily as a duty to God, and then only in case one believes in God? In other words, are we not here, as in the discussion with the realist at the outset, led to the view that not a physical doctrine, nor yet even the sublimest metaphysical doctrine, as such, but only an ethical doctrine, can be at the base of a system of ethics? The doctrine that God loves us is a foun¬ dation for duty only by virtue of the recognition of one yet more fundamental moral principle, the doc- 46 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY trine that unearned love ought to be gratefully re¬ turned. And for this principle theology as such gives no foundation. But on the other hand, upon what should the ideal principle itself be founded? Why is unearned love to be gratefully returned? Is this principle founded once more on some doctrine of the constitution of human nature? The same ob¬ jection would again appear. A physical fact is no ideal. So, then, this insight is just an insight, the acceptance of an ideal wholly for its own sake? But then returns the old objection. What is such an unfounded ideal but the individual caprice of some¬ body? Let the faithful be never so devoted; still there are the unregenerate, who are somehow to be convinced of a truth that they do not recognize. And how are they convinced, if at all? Not by showing them the facts, which they have already known with¬ out conviction; but by arousing in them a new feel¬ ing, namely, gratitude. Thus the Christian ideal seems to have for its sole theoretical foundation the physical fact that man often feels gratitude. It is true that no one can accuse Jesus of expressly giving this or any other theoretical foundation to his doctrine. He was necessarily wholly free from the theoretical aim in his dealings with the people. But for us now the point is the theoretical point. If the foundation of Christian ethics as popularly understood be not the physical fact of the Father’s love, then is it not just the physical fact of the frequent existence of gratitude? And is either of these a satisfactory foun¬ dation for an ethical theory as such? Nay, if. Chris¬ tian ethics be the highest from the practical point of THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 47 view, still must we not dig much deeper to find the theoretical foundation on which this glorious struc¬ ture rests?
III.
We have been seeking to illustrate our funda¬ mental difficulty in ethics, — one that is too fre¬ quently concealed by rhetorical devices. The un¬ certainty here illustrated results from the difficulty of giving any reason for the choice of a moral ideal. Single acts are judged by the ideal; but who shall judge the judge himself? Some one, as Plato, or some Stoic, or Jesus, gives us a moral ideal. If we are of his followers, the personal influence of the Master is enough. Then we say: “ I take this to be my guide,” and our moral doctrine is founded. But if we are not of the faithful, then we ask for proof. The doctrine says: “ Behold the perfect Life, or the eternal Ideas, or the course of Nature, or the will of God, or the love of the Father. To look on those realities is to understand our ideal. If you remem¬ ber those truths, you will hesitate not to do as we say.” But still the doubter may be unwilling to submit. He may say to Plato: “ The tyrant is easy to find who will laugh at you when you talk of the peace of philosophic contemplation, who will insist that his life of conflict and of danger is fuller and sweeter in its lurid contrasts and in its ecstasies of sensuous bliss, than are all your pale, stupid joys of blank contemplation. And if the tyrant says so, who shall decide against him? Has not many a man turned with eagerness from the dull life of the 48 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \ thinker, once for a while endured, to the richer joys and sorrows of the man of the world? Have not such men actually held the pleasures of life, however dearly bought, to be better than the superhuman calm of your philosophic ideal? ” Even so to the Stoic, the objector may say: “ Granted that your eternal Reason does pervade all things and is our common Father, why should that cause me, who am one of his creatures, to do otherwise than I like? Who can escape from his presence? Even if I live irrationally, am I not still part of the Universal Reason? The bare fact that there is an Eternal Wisdom does not make clear to me that I must needs be very wise. My destiny may be the destiny of a being made solely to enjoy himself.” And, to the Christian doctrine, the skeptic may oppose the objection that if the truth does not at once spiritu¬ ally convert all who know it, the proof is still lacking that the Christian Ideal actually appeals to all pos¬ sible natures. “ If I feel not the love of God,” the objector will say, “ how prove to me that I ought to feel it? ” Or, as human nature so often questions: “ Why must I be loving and unselfish? ” Now, the simple, practical way of dealing with all such objectors is to anathematize them at once. Of course, from the point of view of any assumed ideal, the anathema may be well founded. “ If you do not as I command,” so says any moral ideal, “I con¬ demn you as an evil-doer.” “ He that believeth not shall be damned.” But anathemas are not argu¬ ments. To resort to them is to give up theoretic ethics. We who are considering, not whom we shall THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 49 practically condemn, but what we can say in favor of any moral theory, must be unwilling to be put off with mere oratorical persuasion, or to mistake prac¬ tical adhesion for theoretical conviction. We want a code that shall seem not only admirable, but, if so it may be, demonstrable.
Such objections, then, blocking the path of our idealist, what is he to do with them? Is there any direction in which he can successfully seek a foun¬ dation for his ideals?
We have, indeed, much seeking yet to do ere we can find the right direction. For, in the next place, we shall have to show how just such objections as we have applied to other ethical doctrines will apply to all those doctrines that put the basis of morals in the often-used mass of instincts called Conscience. Conscience undoubtedly expresses the results of civ¬ ilized ancestry and training. It no doubt must al¬ ways prove an indispensable aid in making practical moral decisions; but if it be used to give a theo¬ retical basis to ethics, one can say of it what has been already said of other realities. Its universal and uniform presence among men can be doubted, and its value where it is present can be called in question whenever it is employed to give a basis for ethics; since as a mere physical fact of the constitu¬ tion of human nature, conscience is not yet an ideal, nor an obvious foundation for an ideal. Both of these objections have been frequently urged. Let us venture to repeat the old story.
50 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY IV.
Instincts in general are useful, not because they are infallible, much less because they are rational (for they are neither), but because they work quickly and are less capricious than are our less habitual impulses, and so, in common life, are our substitutes for reason. But, in theory, no act is good merely because the instinct called conscience approves of it; nor does conscience in any man always instinc¬ tively approve of good acts. Therefore conscience is, for the purpose of founding an ethical theory, as useless as if it were a mere fiction. It gives no foundation for moral distinctions.
To be sure, we must be understood as referring here not to the moral consciousness of man in its highest rational manifestations; for that there is a rational and well-founded moral consciousness we ourselves desire to show. The conscience that we criticise is conscience as an instinct. When people say that so and so is the right because the immediate declaration of conscience shows it to be the right, they generally mean that so and so is right because it feels right. And when moralists found their eth¬ ical doctrine on conscience, they are in great danger of making their whole appeal to mere feeling. But such mere feeling can only give us problems; it can¬ not solve problems. To illustrate by a notable case: When Butler, in analyzing the data of conscience, in his “ Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue,” comes upon the fact that benevolence, or the effort to in¬ crease the general happiness, is, for our common pop THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 51 ular conscience, only a part of virtue, not in any sort the whole of it, he really discovers nothing- positive about the nature of virtue, but only gives us a very interesting problem about the nature of virtue. If benevolence were the sole basis of virtue, then, says Butler, for our conscience treachery and violence would be “no otherwise vicious than as foreseen likely to produce an overbalance of misery to society.” Therefore, he continues, “ if in any case a man could procure to himself as great advantage by an act of injustice as the whole foreseen inconvenience likely to be brought upon others by it would amount to, such a piece of injustice would not be faulty or vicious at all.” Even so, it would not be wrong, he points out, to take A’s property away and give it to B, if B’s happiness in getting it overbalanced A’s incon¬ venience and vexation in losing it. But since con¬ science disapproves of such actions, therefore, con¬ tinues Butler, “ the fact appears to be that we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all con¬ sideration, which conduct is likely to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery.” Were God’s “ moral character merely that of benevolence, yet ours is not so.” All this now shows how full of problems our uncriticised conscience is. It is the starting-point, not the guide, of moral controversies. Conscience approves benevolence, and it also ap¬ proves the repression of benevolence in cases where justice, distributive or retributive, seems to the pop¬ ular mind to be opposed to benevolence. And when 52 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY some moralist tries to reduce justice in all its forms to benevolence, the natural conscience is dissatisfied. Retribution it approves, not because retribution may ultimately increase happiness, but because retribu¬ tion seems good to it. And if the natural conscience is again appealed to, and is at last brought to admit that benevolence is, after all, really the highest end, and punishment only a means, then this appeal is simply a setting of conscience against itself. The popular conscience is, as an instinct, once for all confused and uncertain about the true relations of justice and benevolence. It is useless to ask this instinct to do what the natural conditions that made it never prepared it to do, namely, to make a system of morals. A thinker like Butler, with his serious¬ ness and depth of insight, defends the claims of con¬ science only by analyses which bring home to us that our conscience is a mystery, and that its asser¬ tions about all the deepest ethical questions become uncertain or confused as soon as we cross-question it. An instinct is, in short, like any other habit. You run fast down a familiar flight of stairs so long as you do not think what your feet are doing. Reflect upon your running, and ten chances to one you shall stumble. Even so conscience is a perfectly confident guide as long as you ask it no philosophical questions.
The objections here in question have been so frequently urged that it is hardly worth while for those who can feel their force to dwell on them very long. It is enough for the present purpose to add what all the moral skeptics from the time of the Sophists have insisted upon, namely, that the con THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS 53 sciences of various men, nations and races, are con¬ flicting in their judgments of acts. This objection, worthless when urged against a well-founded theory of the moral consciousness, is fatal to any theory that makes morality dependent upon a particular emo¬ tional or intellectual “ constitution ” of human nature, that declares morality to be known by men through one faculty or “ sense ” of a peculiar character. If there are many consciences, each claiming rank as the true conscience, and all conflicting, then the choice among these can only be made on the ground of something else than a conscience.