BOOKS.
TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY.4 [FIRST NOTICE.] THIS is unquestionably one of the most powerful of those not too numerous books which the rare philosophical genius of English thinkers has produced. Mainly historical as it is in its structure, it is the history of ethical systems as treated by one who has a fixed standard of his own by which to judge and estimate the philosophy of others. Dr. Martineau's account of the greater ethical systems is so happy in its choice of the strongest types, and so vivid, as well as so learned and subtle in picturing them, that it is impossible to read what he tells us of any of these great thinkers without feeling the deepest interest both in the system delineated and in the mind of the critic who is showing us so brilliantly, while he describes another, where and why the thought of that other succeeds or fails in satisfying himself. We doubt whether another book on Ethics so original as this has been published since Bishop Butler published his Three &mons on Haman Nature ; and certainly, to the knowledge of the present writer, no book has ever been published in the English language indicating the same deep study of the history of Ethics, the same brilliant and keen insight into the turning-points of ethical problems, and the same large command of philosophical method. Dr. Martineau combines the thoroughness and laboriousness of Teutonic scholarship with the lucidity, the precision, and often the vivacity, of French exposition. And if his book is not widely read in England, it will only be a proof how little depth there is in the English interest in philosophical pursuits. Doubtless, to those whose interest in Ethics is, in the narrower sense, moral, this book must, of course, appear a very hard one, for Dr. Martineau is never content to separate the ethical portion of any great thinker's system from the general structure of it, and to deal with it apart. He is not satisfied without giving us a picture of the whole field of which the' ethical theory too often forms a very subordinate department ; and as that whole field is, in some cases,—especially those of Plato and Spinoza,—sprinkled freely with somewhat severe abstractions, the mere moralist bent on finding a clear discrimination of the dictates of conscience and of their significance, will find himself at times encountering stiff theories in which he will take but little interest, and which will seem to him very remote from the object of his search. But it is not at all as a mere moralist that Dr. Martineau writes. He writes rather as a philosophical thinker of the first order,—one of the very highest order of those who have dealt with this class of subjects in the modern world,—and yet as one who sees in the question whether there is or is not a true law of moral obligation, the test question of all philosophy, the question on which depends the resolution of the further and deeper doubt whether the human intellect be chiefly a fertile source of more or less inadequately veiled illusions, or an organ for the apprehension of genuine truth. Viewed from this point of view, of course the search for atrue ethical theory becomes inseparable from the search for a true general philosophy; and it would have been quite as impossible for Dr. Martineau to have separated the ethical theory of such thinkers as Plato, Spinoza, or Comte from their general system, as it would be for a mathematician to discuss a treatise on navigation without any reference to the general principles of spherical magnitude and measurement. When the reason why a thinker goes astray in his Ethics is not to be found in his Ethics, so much as in his general philosophical assumptions, it is, of course, essential for a true critic to exhibit these general philosophical assumptions with force and accuracy, in order that the root of ethical error may be exhibited with force and accuracy too. In the whole of the first volume, Dr. Martineau is dealing with systems of this kind, systems, as he calls them, of an essentially " unpsychological" character, systems, that is, not beginning in a study of the human character, but in general assumptions concerning the universe at large, of which man himself is treated as a subordinate and dependent part. Dr. Martinean's first volume, then, deals with systems of Ethics which are not in their root ethical, which do not direct themselves straight to the question,—What do we mean by right and wrong, and what are the conditions upon which alone the ideas universally attached to right and wrong can be justified and accepted as a sure and safe guidance ? but which assume some creed as to the constitution of all things, which predetermines for man what his nature and moral constitution must be, instead of investigating directly what it is. These systems Dr. Martinean calls unpsychological, because they do not begin at the place which, from man's point of view at all events, is the safest, namely, what we know about ourselves, but rather affect to determine what we might infer with certainty as to our own thonghts and principles of action, derivatively from what we are supposed to know (much less certainly) as to the origin or no-origin of things in general. In an admirable passage of his Introduction, Dr. Martineau shows us how essential to the right answering of the question concerning the principle of moral obligation, is the point of view from which you put it. If you regard the moral law, and the relation of the human character to that law, as simply an outcome of some greater power, whether that power be divine, or natural, or neither divine nor natural, but in its essence, though not in its method, unknowable by us, it is highly improbable that you can derive any true ethical principle from such assumptions. For such thinkers aim at determining, not what Ethics is, but what the origin of all things, Ethics included, is, and that is much too ambitious a mode of approach to lead up to the true answer. These " unpsychological" systems either derive everything in man from what is outside man, or dispense with man as an independent factor in the universe altogether. For the most part, they treat his sense of power as a pure illusion, and either completely overshadow him by supernatural or natural control, or else regard the whole idea of power as a misleading idea, the source of a vast number of other misleading ideas which have placed man in a fancy world of his own, and led him after all sorts of mischievous will-o'-the-wisps into fens and bogs where rath is not :— " What these objects are that constitute the scene around him [man], may be expressed in two words,—Nature and God;—understanding by the former the totality of perceptible phenomena ; and by the latter, the eternal ground and cause whose essence they express. These two are the companions that no one can ever quit, change as he may his place, his age, his society : they fill the very path of time on which he travels, and the fields of space into which he looks; and the questions what they are, and what exactly they have to do with. him, cannot but affect the decision of what be ought to be. Whether you will first address yourselves to them, or will rather make your commencement with him, may seem a matter of small moment, inasmuch as all three must be relatively surveyed ; but in fact it makes the greatest difference,—the whole difference between the most opposite schools of opinion, between an objective and a subjective genesis of doctrine, between ancient and modern philosophy. If you give priority to the study of nature and God, and resort to them as your nearest given objects, you are certain to regard them as the better known, and to carry the conceptions you gain about them into the remaining field as your interpreters and guides : you will explain the human mind by their analogy, and expect in it a mere extension of their being. If, on the other hand, you permit the human mind to take the lead of these objects in your inquiry, the order of inference will naturally be reversed ; and with the feeling that it is the better known, you will rather believe what the soul says of them, than what they have to say about the soul. In both instances, no doubt, they stand related to man as macrocosm to microcosm ; and we may be asked, what matters it whether we think of man as a finite epitome of the universe, or of the universe as the infinite counterpart of
man In the last resort, the difference, I believe, will be found to consist in this ; that when self-consciousness is resorted to as the primary oracle, an assurance is obtained and is carried out into the scheme of things, of a free preferential power; but when the external whole is the first interrogated, it affords no means of detecting such a power, but, exhibiting to the eye of observation a coarse of necessary evolution, tempts our thought to force the same type of development upon the human soul. In the one case we obtain a volitional theory of nature ; in the other, a naturalistic theory of volition ; and on the resulting schemes of morals the great difference is impressed, that according to the respective modes of procedure, the doctrine of proper responsibility is admitted or denied. Thus then we obtain our first distinction of method, deducing it simply from the opposite lines of direction which the order of investigation may take. Ethics may pursue their course and construct their body of doctrine either from the moral sentiments outwards into the system of the world ; or from the system of the world inwards to the moral sentiments. The former method may be called the Psychologic ; the latter we will for the present oppose to it by the mere negative designation of the Ihtpsychologic."
This sufficiently describes the reason for considering such metaphysical systems as Plato's and Spinoza's " unpsychological," for both are reasoned out from assumptions which are far less certain than the moral elements of our nature, to conclusions which contradict the moral assumptions of our nature ; both treat man as one of the manifestations of some anterior existence, without any independent significance in himself. But there is a further distinction between these two nnpsychologic systems, which certainly marks one of them,—that of Spinoza..,—as even more completely in
consistent with any principle that we could call ethical, than the other. In the system of Plato, that which is beyond the universe, that of which the universe is a manifestation, is assumed to be infinitely greater than the universe. The universe is not regarded by Plato as expressing the fulness of the Platonic ideas, nor the fulness of Plato's God. The universe, as we know it, is a mere specimen of the wealth of the realities and the energies and the purposes behind it. In other words, the universe, as we see it is nothing when compared with that which it partially manifests. This is why Plato's system is called Transcendental, as distinguished from Spinoza's, in which the universe is identified with God and God with the universe,—in which there is no intention which overlaps action, no purpose which overarches existence, so that God is the universe, and the universe is God; or, at least, they are only to be distinguished by the very fine discrimination between natura naturans and natura naturata. Now, it is clear that no doctrine which regards God as wholly expressed in the universe, as it is, can accept what we may cal/ a divine character, as distinguished from the world which it has created. Accordingly, Spinoza tells us that God has no feelings, no intellect, no love, no aversion ; that it is only in man,—only in the natura naturata,—that the natura naturans attainsto anything like what we mean by character. The result of this assumption, even on the view taken of the character of man himself, is obvious. Of course, if man is the work of a power,—if power it can be called,—without self-knowledge until man comes into creation, that self-knowledge itself must
be treated as the creature of the blind necessity which determined it, and cannot be trusted for a moment, when it supposes itself
to be free. A finite character which is the outcome of some infinite tendency, neither intellect nor feeling, neither love nor purpose, will never be able to turn round on the infinite blank in which it originated and assert its freedom. Hence, Spinoza's
Pantheism is even less in keeping with any view of Ethics that .could attribute a real moral power to man, than Plato's Transcendentalism, which does, at least, ascribe the origin of man to the manifestation of a being of infinite goodness and infinite power, and infinitely beyond what the world has manifested.
When Dr. Martineau comes to the delineation of the third great type of unpsychological systems of Ethics, which he calls the physical, he selects Comte as his most typical thinker; not because Comte is materialist,—to him materialism hardly has a meaning,—but because Comte represents best the modern thinkers who get rid of the problem of moral obligation by simply denying altogether the existence of the conditions of moral obligation, and treating the universe as a painted veil, behind which it is simply impossible with any good result to search. Plato held that the universe manifests some great and infinitely good power ; Spinoza held that it manifests what it manifests, that it could in no wise be other than it is, but that what it is, is at least as much intellectual as physical, and perhaps even in some respects more intellectual than physical. Comte held that beyond appearances we have no business to look, and that almost all our errors in understanding appearances have been due to discerning something else behind appearances which we call realities, whereas the true realities consist in the appearances, and all that we call the realities beneath the appearances are unrealities which utterly mislead us. So far does he push this, that he treats man as a being altogether without true individuality. Finding on the surface so much that is complex in him, and treating the sense of personality, which is beneath the surface, as a misleading figment, he is obliged to tell us that the sense of self is a dangerous illusion, and that we are not egos at all, but only " synergies " of a number of distinct faculties
'Man is eminently multiple,' says Comte; using this phrase to denote, not the variety of capacities committed to the same indivisible agent, but the many organs of which now this group, and now that, may successively wake into energy and constitute the agent for the time being. Yet it cannot be denied that, to every one, doubt is impossible of the simple persistency of his personal essence through all his changes of mood and character. The question at issue is, therefore, what is the order of true relation under which we are to conceive the two recognised facts, the personal unity and the facultative plurality of the human being. The psychologist accepts and trusts the report of natural consciousness, and believes that the one individual manifests the many phenomena. Comte reverses the conception, and from the concurrence of many independent functions derives an illusory feeling of individuality. Asked to explain the mode of its origin, he can only assure us that it is merely the sympathy ' or the 'synergy' of the several faculties,—words which account for nothing; for that several organs should feel in combination, or should act in combination, can never teach us that there is no combination, at all. If each organ has its own feeling (and else there is no sympathy) how can the simultaneous existence of a number be nevertheless not a number but only one And, amid continual change of the particular organs subscribing to make up an act or state, how can the resultant unity, the conscious self, remain the same ? The thief who, under the excitement of acquisitiveness, secretiveness, and destructiveness, breaks open my house, shoots my servants, and carries off my plate, owes his individuality to the 'synergy' of these select endowments. Some awakening conversion brings into action his latent conscientiousness, benevolence, and veneration, and, struck with remorse, he makes confession and reparation. But the factors of his personality are now a different set of powers, and the product of their synergy cannot therefore be the same : the man who stole is not the man who repents : the crime he bewails was the crime of another ; his compunction is vicarious ; and the postulates of all natural contrition are false. Every attempt to conceive of the personal essence of the human being as a mere confluence of independent streams of activity must end in such absurd and mischievous results ; and incur the disadvantage of contradicting the fundamental deposition of all our consciousness, without even the' compensation of a plausible explanation of its origin. As to the assertion that the feeling of personality is not peculiar to man, the only proof of it offered by Comte is, that a cat is not found to mistake herself for another : which is true enough, since she must then know a difference between other and same. Need we say that such a blander would be an instance of the very self-consciousness, only mistaken instead of correct, whose total privation it is intended to exemplify. Absence of the idea of self is not evinced by making erroneous propositions about self : on the contrary, there can be no better proof that the idea is there. The proper effects of conscious personality are the ascription to oneself, as identical subject, of our own acts and states, as our changing predicates : so that, over and above the doing the acts and having the states, we know that we do them and have them ; and the inevitable conformity of our affections to this hypothesis ; so that we cannot help feeling responsible as agents for our acts and states in a way which would be groundless if they were our factors instead of our products. These effects are undoubtedly human ; and till the Positivist cat makes some further proficiency beyond the mere keeping clear of an alias, we shall continue to hold them characteristically human."
It will be clear at once to the reader that a system of which
this view—thus brilliantly criticised by Dr. Martineau—is the key-note, plunges deeper into scepticism in relation to any possible Ethics than even Plato's or Spinoza's, since it breaks up altogether the individual to whom the problem of duty is presented. And yet, so inconsistent are human thinkers, Dr. Martineau shows, with his usual sympathetic insight, how much there is of moral nobility in Comte's system, in spite of this fundamental principle which violently denies to man any inner life at all.
Having thus given a few bare and poor hints of the drift of Dr. .Martineau's first volume, we hope in a future notice to illustrate more in detail the brilliance with which he characterises various features in the three great systems of thought with which chiefly that volume deals. But the reader must understand that no. reviewer can, under the conditions of a review, give anything like an adequate notion of the vast labour, the subtle thought, and the firm criticism by which this great work is characterised throughout.
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