MR. S1DGWICK'S METHODS OF ETHICS.*

[SECOND NOTICE.]

An attempt to compress into limits like ours any statement of what we hold to be the answer to the great problem which has

• Vie Methods of Ethic?. By Henry Sidgwick, hLA. London: Macmillan and Co.

exercised thought since its dawn, must confine in the narrowest space the critical notice which forms its needed background. The double inconsistency of the view advocated in the examination before us can only be briefly touched on. Utilitarianism, we have said, is futile as an explanation of Ethics; first, because it professes to analyse the idea of duty into a regard for the general interest, and then requires the idea of duty to oblige individuals to attend to the general interest ; secondly, because it professes to analyse the idea of morality into a means of happiness, while happiness is itself a complex thing, made up in a large measure of the sense of rightness which was to be resolved into it. And thus the thing which Utilitarianism professes to analyse is returned upon our hands in a twofold form as a result of the supposed analysis.

Thinkers of this school, and our author among them, do not always remember that this analysis is the true test between them and their adversaries. Of course the general aim is general wel- fare,—they are two words for the same thing. But if you are going to make general welfare explain why Morality is an aim, you must

exclude all moral element from the conception of welfare. Hap- piness must be a completely unmoral condition if its being an aim is to form an explanation of Morals. Mr. Sidgwick's conclu- sion on this point is not quite clear to us. On the one hand, he concedes (only in a note, however, see p. 93) that the Aristo- telian system is misunderstood for want of a better word to translate £VaCtil.40111C6 than "happiness ;" on the other, he pro- poses, apparently as a simplification of the whole problem, the conception of a being out of all moral conditions. "When we imagine a conscious being alene in the universe," he says (p. 378), "it seems clear that only its own happiness could be to it an ultimate good." Possibly, but in this statement of the case the problem is entirely got rid of. So far as each of us is cut off from communion with any other mind, his condition ceases to throw light on any moral question. You cannot, by multipliying a millionfold the aims of a being who stands out of relation to every other, represent the aims of a community.

We have said that almost all our objections to Mr. Sidgwick are little more than an expansion of some remark uttered by him as concession or criticism, but we must make an exception of the above. We miss throughout the volume the sense that Ethics deals with man as a corporate being. This mutilated view of Ethics, as we consider it, is the more surprising, because the author has a clear apprehension of the view most remote from it,—that which was taken of all moral questions by the thinkers of the old world. Man, in their view, was primarily the member of a State. The most celebrated discussion on politics in the world starts from the very question which the science of Ethics aims at answering—What is Rightness? It was felt by those whose ideal it expresses that you cannot consider the question at all while you take the individual as a unit. This view may be very easily confused with one examined, and we think rightly dismissed, byMr. Sidgwick as beyond the scope of Ethics (p. 17), the investigation "not of what ought to be done here and now, but what ought to be the rules of behaviour in an ideal society." This notion involves an error, as he well shows, which is the source not only of intellectual, but of moral confusion, —and we would add, not a purely theoretical source of the latter. It is not merely thinkers, but very ordinary men and women who are familiar with the thought that in such circumstances as theirs rightness is impossible, that they must get into a new set of relations before they can begin to live a good life, and that in the meantime the very notion of duty is inapplicable. Whether they yield to these whisperings or _not, there comes a time when they discern that thus to acquiesce is to sap all moral strength, that however tangled with disaster the relations in which a man is involved, there is yet at every moment some possible attitude for him which is a right one. But it Is one thing to say that Ethics -is an investigation of the rules of behaviour in an ideal State, and another to say that it is the investigation of man's duty as the member of a State. Take the simpler case of a family ; a son has treated a father with perfidy and ingratitude, he has utterly forgotten that he is a son. Does it aevertheless remain that the father retains a father's duties? Is the relation between them one of contract, "so much filial respect on your side, so much parental care on mine ?" so that a failure of the conditions on which parental care is given, ends the claim for it? Or is it rather a condition of that higher unity of which father and son are but members, and which nothing can end but their ceasing to exist?

• We gather from these pages that their author would choose the first of these alternatives, and it cannot be denied that it is towards this that modern thought has mainly directed itself. One who holds that the truth here lies rather with the thinkers of the old world can do little:more in such a space as this than endeavour to make the issue.between the two parties clear. And as our last article was an attempt to point out the weakness of that view which explains duty by its influence on general happiness, and tends to base duty on contract, the present is an attempt to point out the strength of its opposite,—that which regards duty as the secret of a completer organic union to beings who have imperfectly attained it.

We have objected to Mr. Sidgwick's definition of Ethics as the science of conduct, and if we had to propose an alter- native, we should define it almost indifferently as the science of Aims, or the science of Relations. For all moral aims are rela- tions, and the very meaning of the word "ought" is that these take precedence of every other, not ought to take precedence— of course we must not use the word defined in our definition of it—but actually do so. The father whom we imagined incensed at treacherous ingratitude in a son may be strongly tempted towards a severance of all bonds with one so base, may feel this desire so strongly that the act of yielding to it would supply vivid satisfaction, yet if he at the same moment discerns that oneness of the family which remains as outraged truth when it is defied as actual fact, he has a larger aim before him, one which he does prefer, even though he does not act in conformity with his prefer- ence. It is not that, as Mr. Mill says, he knows both pleasures, that of gratified resentment and that of forgiveness, and prefers the latter, we question if those who prefer the last do know the first. It is not that he wants a particular feeling in his own mind which can only be reached through forgiveness ; no one ever got the better of one feeling by means of the wish for another. It is that he sees a reality independent of all feelings from which he dreads separation, and that in conformity to that membership forgiveness consists. In taking this view of the claim of duty we are at issue with Mr. Sidgwick in our conception, of duty, which he considers to lie in actions, and which our view must exhibit as rather a certain attitud,e of spirit (see Book Ill., chap. xii, and especially p. 351) ; for it is quite conceivable here that the father who forgave andthe father who repudiated his son might take the same line of con- duct; we should think any one who said in such a case "You must not see me again," showed probably a great want of judg- ment, but we should concede that in certain conceivable cases even this was compatible with a recollection of the bond between the two, and a desire to give all that self-sacrificing attention to the welfare of another which is the ideal of parental love. We are not guarded, even by the most conscientious desire to do right, from the most disastrous blunders, and these have always some connection with defect in the moral nature ; but the per- ception of these, with all the shame and pain it involves, is entirely distinct from remorse. Conscience is not the faculty that points out the relative value of the various groups of which man is a member, so that you may say in what relation paternal duty, for instance, stands to citizenship, or what pro- portion of the claim of kindred is acquired by long friendship, or work with a common aim, or great benefits. Conscience is simply that in every man which converts or tries to convert judgment to will. It is that influence "impossible h meconnaltre, facile a etouffer " (as Madame de Steel expresses it), which draws us towards what judgment decides on as the dominant relation in our lives.

In making this decision, each of us, no doubt, has a great deal more light for himself than he has for any one else ; but as a matter of judgment, it is exactly of the same kind. We must all feel, in judging of duty for another, as if we were reading an obscure document by twilight; just when the meaning seems clear, some word is reached which is impossible to reconcile with it. And surely no one who knows life will say that there is nothing of this perplexity in deciphering our own duties. The stedfast purpose to do right does, indeed, arrange in marvellous, simplicity the problem which vanity or passion has complicated, but still the problem is there, conscience undertakes to supply no answer to it. All its urgency is directed to this,—that each one of us should decide for himself exactly as he would decide for another. He may decide wrong for himself, as he may decide wrong for another ; all that conscience insists is that the judge who appraises the value of varied springs of action shall take no account of any that belong to the exclusive self. To discard these is very often to give the answer, but not always.

If this negative assertion is all we can say of the form of the Moral Judgment, that in all cases the choice for each one must be the choice for all in like circumstances, can we say nothing more of its substance ? In discerning the corporate nature of Humanity, we believe this question re- ceives its implicit answer. We do not mean that the moment you substitute the conception of membership of a body for that of a duty in the abstract you have got rid of all perplexity ; apparently you have not got rid of any, but have merely restated your question in another language. For the same man is a mem- ber of various groups, and stands in a different degree of closeness to each. We are bound to our kindred by strong ties, but these are not the only ties that bind us; we sometimes feel others draw- ing us in a different direction, and any one must be very inex- perienced and very ignorant who does not know that these various bonds are the sources of real perplexity. How is it to be solved ?

Only by a clear recognition of the principle that the gradation of organic union is the gradation of claim, with its negative side— that every impulse which leads to mere severance is an antagonist to duty, that in the acts of purest aversion, if we take the word in its literal sense, the right attitude will always be one of membership. Here we shall seem to many to be uttering one of those tautologies whose dominion in moral science Mr. Sidgwick points out as so perilous to exact thought, for how, it may be asked, could you define organic union but as that which rightly claims our allegiance ? If you do not assert that kindred in all eases makes the first claim on a man's activity, you can only test this oneness of adhesion by rightful claim, so that the argument is in a circle. Our answer is that we are not giving a definition, but a test. We are describing the practical issue as it appeals to the Will at every crisis of action, and is tested by the certain ripening of time. As the disintegrating influences are alto- gether evil, so the binding influences are good in the propor- tion in which they tend to build up a certain organic whole. The significance of this seeming truism is shown by the multitude of impulses which arrange themselves against it, and these not all of an apparently evil nature. Fanaticism and taste, no less:than hatred, outrage this allegiance to a hierarchy of union, and blur the gentle gradation of varied spiritual kinship with sudden con- trasts and dazzling lights and shadows. But if any moral verdict is possible at all ; if looking back on our own lives, or the lives of others, we can in any case say there ill was done and there good was done, we shall End that the right action was the action of a son, or a brother, or a citizen ; the wrong action was that of an isolated being, to whom its separate existence was an aim.

We have said, somewhat coarsely, perhaps, that what we con- ceive the true ideal of morality was the ideal of the old world rather than of the new, and we may justly be asked to reconcile so glaring a paradox with the most elementary notions of

and wrong. In truth, it must be allowed that the, qua

we should introduce into that statement modifi o e mean- ing. The best men of the old world failed to recoknise some elements of goodness that are apparent to the least excellent of our contemporaries. Mr. Sidgwick reminds us, in a passage fully exhibiting his power of delicate criticism, that the most celebrated of all delineations of an ideal state contains a pregnant warning against the blindness of such ideal delineations in its acceptance of war (we would add slavery) as a permanent condi- tion of human society, an acceptance from which the soberest modern Utopia would shrink. The antique ideal of life is that of a small island of orderly and harmonious union surrounded by an ocean of disorder. It is a union which owes all its strength to ex- clusiveness. Within this inner circle union is cemented not only by attraction to a centre, but by that great additional force of repulsion at the circumference. That impulse of severance which we have excluded from our principles of action was with them the motive- power of half the world of action ; they could not have conceived union without it. We have to use their gold without the alloy to which it owed half its strength. We, if mere "fragments," as Shakespeare makes Coriolanus, with a fine utterance of Roman scorn, call the mob, are fragments of a larger whole. Whereas the largest ideal of antique communion stopped far short of humanity, ours must take account of impulses that are not even peculiar to humanity. No theory of human action, we venture to assert, can stand henceforward which is not applicable to all gradation of sentient life in its gradual approach to Humanity. That the impulses which are to bind us must be such as find their germ in the tribes below us is, we believe, the most important canon which Science has, in our day, furnished to philosophy.

We believe, therefore, that if, on the one hand, the theory of modern life has receded from this ideal of corporate union, which is the true meaning of Morality, on the other, the latest develop- ment of science is bringing us back to that ideal. We are certain, stall events, that this is the only view that makes history stall comprehensible. Suppose that the only thing that men desire is pleasure, in any sense which does not make pleasure identical

-with whatever men do desire, and so rob that assertion of all significance, and you are obliged to explain every great event in history by the hypothesis of enormous stupidity in all but a few

Do we, then, it may be asked, propose this ideal of oneness with -our kind as something more ultimate than the distinction of right and wrong, so as to make this notion itself derivative, and explain rightness as a means towards union, in the same way that Utili- tarians explain it as a means towards pleasure? In that case we must, of course, accept the same conditions we have shown to be binding on Utilitarians ; as happiness must be an unmoral condi- tion if it is to explain morality, so must union. There can be, then, sio question of any moral distinction within this hierarchy of *on. If it is to be a thing more ultimate than morality, the quektOrs becomes one of a mere maximum andminimum of binding powet, • and it would 4e then impossible to imagine one set of beings morally supfa*r to another, supposing the union between the two -groups to be ecmily close. To state such an inference is to refute the theory whickorig,inate_s it, no litho experimental refutation of the view which nakes all union equally holy, and its distinction only in the closeness or permanence of the bond, and the number of those it would include, far to seek. As for the first and second, we believe that not even „the tenderness of a mutual love round which the sanctions of common duty have woven their clinging tendrils, quite equals in the sensation of closeness that guilty union which replaces the claim of a loathed bond by the fierce impulse of a self-chosen 'allegiance ; and though this kind of union is generally as short-lived as it is intense, 'it sometimes affords a specimen of life-long fidelity. As for the last, to inquire whether such and such a course of action would put one in harmony with the greater number of one's fellow- creatures would in certain contingencies be absolutely a negative test of duty ; there never was a Reformer, for instance, who would not have been condemned, to inaction by it. But if neither the closeness, nor the permanence, nor the extent of union can be Tegarded as a guarantee for its rightness, how can we do without this very element 0 rightness which it was the object of this view to explain ? We cannot do without it. We hold that the idea of moral evil is more ultimately an object of recoil to the human spirit which discerns it than even the idea of ab- solute severance from.' all but Self, Which is the full -fruition of evil. We believe, for instance, that while the instinct of purity is that which guards the oneness of the -family, these two things Corresponding so exactly that every impure impulse ultimately threatens this oneness, and every increase of purity increases its security, yet it is as impurity we shrink from this evil, not even as that which destroys anything supremely excellent ; and we take a like view of the relation of -falsehood to the oneness of our common intellectual constitution. We fully concede, therefore, the Ultimate aspect of moral evil. -Our assertion' is not that union per Se is the ultimate object to humanity, but that a hierarchy of union is so. The objection that to make this distinction is to convert an assumed explanation into a mere restatement of the original problem in different lan- guage is plausible, but unjust. The truth that the oneness which is the ultimate object of human yearning is an organic oneness, is 'BO mere restatement of the truism that duties involve others than the person to whose conscience they appeal. No doubt you may so state this truth as to use the word "rightness" on both sides of the equation, and thus give the merely logical intellect an -excuse for striking it out on both sides. Rightness is union in a -certain order, and order is a certain right relation. But -the epithet "right" in the definition has a far wider range than the thing "rightness," which it is used to explain. It carries on the mind from the conception of certain feelings within to an objective system of relations without. The word "right," on this view, does, indeed, acquire a new dimension when we apply it to human relation, but a dimension superficially identical with that which it has in its application to all other re- lation. Purity is right for man in the same sense that the earth is the right place for the roots of a tree, in a sense which, indeed, takes in its human application a depth belonging -to no other re- lation, but which includes that surface of meaning which it covers

in its bearing on the unmoral world. You can just as much ex- plain why the roots of a tree ought to be hidden in the ground as you can explain why purity is a moral aim, it is a con.clition,of organic development ; but it is a simpler statement of the genie fact, and one much nearer the experience of all who deal with the things concerned, to say that the tree whose roots are exposed and the nation, which ceases to make purity an aim must both perish. And this new dimension given to an old truth which may be mis- represented as a mere tautology, is the key to the whole meaning of what we call Natural Law.

We have in the attempt to supplement this critical examination of ethical thought by a meagre outline of what we hold to be its true basis been unable adequately to express our adroiratioinfor the work revieweditself. If we spoke our whole mind, we sliguld accase Mr. Sidgwick of sympathy .with that disintegrating :tendency of modern, thought which seems- to us the guide-post ausapfrom the true theory of morals.. :But the candour, largeneas, andeeenracy of his-intellectual vision make his review.aAttiRff PT*146 1-,q. any conclusion, for almost all the facts on whie,ls.a.moraIlsypnthesis must be based aresteuebeci- en,Iis it, The arrangement 0i,tlie whole, which we ; have -seen-questioned, seeirts„tisna taregeallo patient attention the most, /careful considerationnof tbezariol relations of his subject-matter, and the style„tho4k, watifting perhaps in the variety -Muck would be thq[ideal of-d4 nessiemseskao large a field, iss,*Xaat4 adaPted tp what coPvitrhuncois not, in the 473 pages of the volume, ontoshich is languidobscure, or verbose ; there is scarcely one will* the rea4eentay not re- Peruse% with the 4;40444teticgi .4t (4vp 'RC 0044„00a4 to an interesting picture, and of harvesting the seed-corn of thought.