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£33)
T |
L 47
G7
A COLL00UY
ON THE
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS
A COLLO QUY
ON THE
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS
PRESENTED IN
MR. W. E. H. LECKY'S HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS
FROM AUGUSTUS TO CHARLEMAGNE.’
By HENRY BLECKLY, Esq.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.’
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO.
WARRINGTON : PERCIVAL PEARSE, 8 SANKEY STREET
1873
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.
-t
it~
T^*.
A COLLO Q UY.
–4)--—
Scene.—The Grounds at Wellesley House, Arkdale.
The Persons,—MR. LockSLEY and MR. TUDOR.
Mr. Tudor. I didn’t see you on the moor this morn-
ing.
Mr. Locksley. I am afraid, in the first place, that I was
rather lazy; and then I met Miss Hope in the garden,
and was detained until it was too late to attempt the
Ill OOI’.
Mr. T. I fancy the detention was not disagreeable, for
Miss Hope is a bright lively girl, and seems to be a favour-
ite of yours?
Mr. L. I don’t deny that she is a pleasant companion
on these bright, summer mornings, as she possesses both
taste and enthusiasm.
Mr. T. I thought her taste in poetry rather question-
able; for she tells me she prefers Longfellow to Tenny-
SO]].
Mr. L. Her reading of Tennyson has not been exten-
sive, and at her age the superficial beauties of Longfellow
may be more attractive than the subtler ones of Tennyson ;
2 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
she says that she often doesn’t quite understand Tenny-
son ; but I have read poems of his to her which she
thoroughly appreciated.
Mr. T. Which is not surprising, as you probably selected
what girls of her age would be sure to admire; but do you
know that by the ladies of her acquaintance she is con-
sidered fickle and frivolous !
Mr. L. I am sorry to hear it ; though I might perhaps
venture to suggest that there are ladies in the world who
are not perfectly generous and just to the vivacity and
warmth of feeling that are characteristic of say sweet
Seventeen.
Mr. T. But it is precisely real warmth of feeling that
is not conceded to her, they say she has no heart.
Mr. L. I thought I was a tolerable judge, but one
may be deceived, for I must admit that if the ladies are
sometimes sharp in their criticism of each other, they are
mostly discriminating. Miss Hope asked some one a while
ago to write out a list of her faults, and the enumeration
commenced in this fashion—
“I only note sweet gentle ways
And winning grace.”
So that I am not the only person who has been blind to
her faults; but, after all, a very moderate amount of culpa-
bility may make up what is called in some quarters
fickleness and frivolity.
Mr. T. Yes; the lines of demarcation are not always
very clear, nor is it easy to say where what is blameless
passes into what is blamable.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs. 3
*
Mr. L. The names by which we distinguish objects
serve well enough for common purposes, but the finer
shades of meaning are not discriminated by them.
Mr. T. This is a defect of language for which allow-
ance is seldom made, and yet it is at the root of our
disagreements on many subjects.
Mr. L. It was pointed out plainly by Locke, in what
remains the most interesting part of his “Essay.” The
chapters on the “imperfection of words,” and on the “ abuse
of words,” are not less important now than when they were
written. He says, “in the interpretation of laws, whether
human or divine, there is no end ; comments beget com-
ments, and explications make new matter for explications;
and of limiting, distinguishing, varying, the signification of
these moral words, there is no end. These ideas of men's -
making are, by men still having the same power, multi-
plied in infinitum.”* This may still be said of the same
subjects; our differences are as great as ever, and are
likely to continue, so long as we do not mean the same
thing by the same word.
Mr. T. When we speak of a visible or tangible object
we can guard against any mistake in our meaning by pro-
ducing the object and naming it, but when we speak of a
thing which has only a mental existence, our ideas about
it may differ without our knowing it.
Mr. L. Locke goes so far as to say “that morality is
capable of demonstration as well as mathematics, since the
precise real essence of the things moral words stand for
* Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book 3, chap. ix.
4 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
may be perfectly known, and so the congruity or incon-
gruity of the things themselves be certainly discovered, in
which consists perfect knowledge.” So little progress has
been made in this “demonstration" since Locke wrote his
“Essay,” that one might be inclined to believe the prospect
he holds out is chimerical, if one did not recollect how long
it usually takes to realise the ideals of sagacious and far-
seeing men—
“Deep in Nature's undrain’d cornucopia
Every good that man seeks he shall find ;
And to fools, only fools, is Utopia
The abode of the hopes of mankind.” +
Mr. T. How far the evils that afflict mankind are
inevitable, and how far they are preventible, is not clear ;
the hopes of man, and the ideals that have glittered before
him, have often enough been Utopian; but, on the other
hand, he has realised very much which ignorance would
have looked upon as mere folly, and there may be in store
for him greater conquests than the most Sanguine have
ever anticipated. The results of real science transcend the
dreams of imagination. -
Mr. L. And is moral evil one of the things that will
be diminished by the material and mental progress pre-
dicted for mankind? - -
Mr. T. A certain amount of moral evil is the product
of ignorance, and may be expected to disappear as know-
ledge increases. *
* Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book 3, chap. xi.
t Epilogue by Owen Meredith.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 5
Mr. L. We were speaking yesterday of Mr. Lecky's
book on European Morals, which you were reading—how -
do you like it?
Mr. T. Very much, but I have been puzzled with the
first chapter, in which he discusses the Utilitarian Theory
of Morals. -
Mr. L. His treatment of the subject is not to me at
all satisfactory. -
Mr. T. I wish we could read a few passages together.
Mr. L. If you will bring the book into the lower
arbour we will do so; we shall probably not be interrupted
there, and if you have nothing else to do, it will be a good
morning's work. -
Mr. T. Or unless the white dress I see fluttering
yonder should raise thoughts of Tennyson, and attract you
to something more fascinating, for I thought I heard you
promise Miss Hope to read Tennyson’s “Love and Duty”
to her this morning.
Mr. L. And you probably think that a duty one loves
is not likely to be neglected; the fact is, however, that the
duty stands over until to-morrow, for they are all going to
Ilkwood to-day, and neither the white dress nor its wearer
will interrupt our discussion.
Mr. T. Well, then, I will fetch Lecky's first volume,
and your commonplace book, which may throw some light
on the subject. (Mr. Tudor returns with Lecky’s “History
of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne.”) To
start from Mr. Lecky's plainest and most unquestionable
proposition will enable us to get at his meaning. He says,
6 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
“Some qualities, such as benevolence, chastity, or veracity,
are better than others, and that we ought to cultivate
them and repress their opposites.”
Mr. L. One can have no difficulty in agreeing with
this statement, but then one wants to know why these
qualities are better than others; what is it that makes them
better, and gives to them their superiority ? This is the
essence of the controversy; they are better, as I believe,
for the definite reason that their results are more beneficial
to mankind. Experience has proved that they conduce to
the happiness and advancement of the race, and this it is
which entitles them to the name of good. Mr. Lecky
says that “right carries with it a feeling of obligation;”
which is true when the word has got a recognised place in
human affairs. The domain of obligation grows from
generation to generation, as the knowledge of right is
ascertained and enlarged.
Mr. T. (reads). “By the constitution of our nature
the notion of right carries with it a feeling of obligation.
To say a course of conduct is our duty, is in itself and
apart from all consequences an intelligible and sufficient
reason for practising it, and we derive the first principles
of our duties from intuition.”
Mr. L. If Mr. Lecky had said that this was an analysis
of his own consciousness, it might have been unobjection-
able, but we are dealing with a historical inquiry that
is very much confused by the introduction at every turn of
the personal pronoun—we. At a certain stage of moral
progress, when defined notions of duty, and obligation, and
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 7
right, have been acquired, and when men understand the
consequences of actions, it is easy to assert that they
should pursue duty and right “apart from all conse-
quences,” for the word duty implies the existence and
knowledge of relations which make a particular course of
conduct due and desirable. But this is not the question ; the
notions of duty and right flow from the antecedent facts and
information, but previous to this state of things, before
this light was struck out—we ask how men knew actions
to be right and wrong 2 The question is not to be
decided by abstract arguments, without reference to facts.
Mr. T. (reads). “It is easy to understand that experi-
ence may show that certain actions are conducive to the
happiness of mankind, and that those actions may be
regarded as supremely excellent. The question still remains,
why are we bound to perform them?”
Mr. L. Actions that conduce to the happiness of
mankind will get performed because mankind have an
interest in their performance, just as plants which are
useful to mankind will be grown because of their utility.
Why does a man do any act that is agreeable to him 7 or to
put the question in Mr. Lecky's way, why is he bound to
perform such acts 2 His nature or constitution leads or
obliges him to do what, according to his knowledge, con-
duces to his happiness. If a man be under the influence
of motives that induce certain acts, he is, in the literal sense
of the word, obliged or bound ; the motives coerce him;
and if law obliges, the law in its turn was made obligatory
by circumstances. If you ask why a man is bound to
8 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
perform acts beneficial to society, I answer, first, because
society can compel the performance of them ; and next,
because man is amenable to the constitution of things by
which one set of actions is preferable to another, and pre-
ferable is what is preferred for its consequences; the con-
sequences being results both personal and public, not
accidental and fortuitous, but the real effects of definite and
ascertainable causes. Acts that have only personal
consequences a man does or refrains from at his peril. He
is bound by his nature and constitution to care for
himself, and if he refuses to do so he is hurt. If
actions were indifferent, and produced no consequences,
they might be disregarded, but not so if they involve pain
and peril. Butler says—“If the natural course of things
be the appointment of God, and our natural faculties of
knowledge and experience are given us by him, then the
good and bad consequences that follow our actions are his
appointment, and our foresight of these Consequences is a
warning by him how we ought to act.”* We must do or
bear what our nature and constitution appoint—to this we
are “bound,”—we submit or resist at our peril; what
pleases us we “perform” for its pleasantness; what is
painful we avoid for its painfulness ; and to say we are
“bound” or obliged adds no force to the language.
Mr. T. You would say we are “bound to perform”
certain actions—such, for example, as eating and drinking
—by the condition of things, and are bound to perform
others by the compulsion of law, but in the ultimate
* Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 9
analysis we are “bound” by the desire to escape what is
disagreeable or to obtain what is agreeable.
Mr. L. This is certainly the real bond, both as regards
the individual and society. The word disagreeable ex-
presses perhaps too slight a feeling of aversion, and yet it
seems correct, for it is the want of agreement between two
things that is at the bottom of the question ; but the dis-
agreement must be real and radical, not merely imaginary
or conventional.
Mr. T. To Mr. Lecky's question—Why we are bound?
you would answer that the constitution of things binds us.
We may create false obligations, in our ignorance, but obli-
gation itself is the force by which circumstances rule our
feeling and intelligence.
Mr. L. The idea of obligation undoubtedly springs
from the fact of being obliged, and “being obliged” means
“must,” and “must” means the pressure and compulsion
of things. Society says you must do certain things; your
constitution says you must not do certain other things;
and when we probe it to the bottom, it is because these
several things are hurtful, or otherwise, that we are to do
or avoid them. Being “bound” also implies the action of
two or more persons related to one another, and that to which
they are “bound” is the fulfilment of the relations sub-
sisting between them—the relations being a series of facts
which may be perverted in a thousand ways.
Mr. T. (reads). “A theory of morals must explain not
only what constitutes duty, but also how we obtain the
notion of there being such a thing as duty. It must tell
10 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
us not merely what is the course of conduct we ought to
pursue ; but also what is the meaning of the word ought,
and from what source we derive the idea it expresses.”
Mr. L. Mr. Lecky finds a word existing in a compli-
cated and highly organised state of society, and expressing
deep and varied meaning; and he appears to assume
that what the word represents now, it represented in the
beginning—which is an error. The Archbishop of York,
in his work, “An Outline of the Necessary Laws of
Thought,” says on this subject, “It does not follow
that a word, as we use it now, bears a gross, narrow,
or material sense, because the root to which we can
refer it was connected with matter. . . . If spirit
meant originally no more than breath, it has so far left
that sense behind, that when the breath is exhaled the
spirit remains immortal.” It would be absurd to argue
because the word spirit may now have acquired 8,
meaning beyond its original signification, that it always
possessed it ; and it is not less absurd to assume that the
word “ought,” with the varied associations created for it
by generations of writers and thinkers, was primarily
endowed with the entire meaning which has become its
later inheritance. “The value of the high-sounding name
Patrician, in the later Republic, must not be transferred to
”* In its primitive form,
the original Fathers of Rome.
with which only we are concerned, the word “ought” is
of no doubtful or recondite meaning ; it is a part of the
word owe ; and the fact of owing must have existed before
* Long's Decline of the Roman Republic.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. - 11
the form “ought” came into being. Chapman, in his
comedy of “All Fools” (1605) says—
“My father yet hath ought Dame Nature debt
These threescore years and ten.”
The idea now represented by the word grew out of the facts,
and whatever aristocratic connections it may since have
formed, here is its ancestry; and the word “duty” belongs
to the same family. “Render unto all their dues” (Rom.
xiii. 7) is the concrete from which the abstract “duty” has
been derived; and the whole set of words, “ought,” “must,”
“debt,” “duty,” “bound,” etc., as they appear in our English
Bible, are the representatives of one and the same Greek
word, signifying “to owe :” this is the root from which
they have sprung, and the Sap of it runs through them all.
That they should have had so humble an origin may seem
improbable—as to the unlettered man listening to the music
of the Homeric verses,
“Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn,”
it might be inconceivable that such glorious sounds could
be woven out of the few insignificant Scratches that make
up an alphabet.
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky puts it, that, according to Utilita-
rianism, “no character, feeling, or action is naturally better
than others, and, as long as men are in a Savage condition,
morality has no existence.”
Mr. L. What does Mr. Lecky mean when he says
morality has no existence? IJoes he mean Christian
morality. But translate the word morality into moral
12 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
actions, and I say that wherever men have learned
to discriminate between voluntary actions that in their
nature are hurtful or beneficial, they have got a rudi-
mentary notion of what is moral; and, far from con-
tending that “no character, feeling, or action is naturally
better than others,” I should affirm there is the greatest
difference between one set of actions and another ; and
that the difference consists in the one being hurtful and
the other beneficial—a distinction broad and plain, and of
all others the easiest to discover; and, if it be sometimes
difficult to apply, it is a test than which none else can
be so safe and certain.
Mr. T. (reads). “The distinctive characteristic of the
inductive school of moralists is an absolute denial of the
existence of any natural or innate moral sense or faculty
enabling us to distinguish between the higher and lower
parts of our nature, revealing to us either the existence of
a law of duty or the conduct that it prescribes.”
Mr. L. Whoever affirms the existence of an “innate
moral sense” must prove it, and account for the pre-
sent and past condition of mankind upon this hypothesis.
Cruel and brutal acts have been everywhere sanctioned and
approved. The innate moral sense has had no better stand-
ard than that worked out by experience or enjoined by
authority. There was no law to condemn notions of right
and wrong, which experience has unequivocally found to
be evil. What Mr. Lecky calls the higher and lower parts
of our nature have been rated differently in nearly every
age, and by nearly every people; higher and lower are
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 13
relative terms that merge into one another, but an innate
moral sense, set in motion for the purpose, ought surely to
give uniform decisions. -
Mr. T. (reads). “The differences between the intuitive
moralists and their rivals . . are of two kinds. Both
acknowledge the existence in human nature of both
benevolent and malevolent feelings, and that we have a
natural power of distinguishing one from the other ; but
the first maintain, and the second deny, that we have
any natural power of perceiving that one is better than
the other.” - . -
Mr. L. The word natural is ambiguous; but let that
pass. This statement, however, contradicts in some degree
what Mr. Lecky last said. He now says both schools admit
a natural power of distinguishing, but the inductive school
deny that we have a natural power of perceiving that one
is better than the other. I do not dispute that men
have a natural ability, or power, or whatever you like
to call it, which discriminates between actions; but
I contend that the discrimination is based upon the
fact that the actions in one case are beneficial, and in
another injurious, and that, for this reason, they are
ultimately designated right or wrong. Men find that
single acts are injurious or otherwise, and experience en-
larges their horizon ; and thus they tolerate in one age
what is intolerable in another, but the ground of the
classification is primarily the consequences of the acts.
A false standard may prevail; and those who make laws
may brand actions as unlawful which interfere with their
14 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
rights or dignity, and opinion, ill-informed or interested,
may support them, and a public conscience be created to .
which private ones conform. It might be said that the
Supreme Ruler of the world has so constituted things that
“to do justly and to love mercy” is beneficial to every one,
that right actions are always in their consequences good,
and that they are right because they are good.
Mr. T. (reads). “When moralists assert that what we
call virtue derives its reputation solely from its utility, and
that the interest of the agent is the one motive to practise
it, our first question is, naturally, how far this theory
agrees with the feelings and the language of mankind.
But if tested by this criterion, there never was a doctrine
more emphatically condemned than utilitarianism. In all
its stages and in all its assertions it is in direct opposition
to common language and to common sentiment. In all
nations and in all ages the ideas of interest and utility on
the one hand, and virtue on the other, have been regarded
by the multitude as perfectly distinct, and all languages
recognise the distinction.”
Mr. L. Now, first of all, the common language of
mankind is not a standard to which such a question
can be referred. Language conforms more or less accu-
rately to the superficial appearance of things, and bears
upon it the impress of many errors, into which mankind
have fallen. I don't pretend to know what is found in “all
languages,” “all ages,” “all nations,” and the many other
“alls” that are so confidently introduced ; language repre-
sents the sun as setting, and conveys the impression that
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs. 15
the earth is stationary and the sun moving ; the common
language of mankind contains many other such like errors,
and cannot be appealed to as evidence of a scientific fact,
which has its own method of proof; the language of man-
kind can but express the notions which men have arrived
at upon all sorts of subjects; and as their notions require
revision, the language in which they have been clothed has
no higher or better warrant than the things or ideas of
which it was the vehicle, and needs to be modified with them.
“What we call virtue,” says Mr. Lecky; —now who is we ?
Pick out the best men from “all nations and all ages,” and
let them make a list of the separate actions which were
called virtuous and the reverse in their time, and would
two of them be found to agree ?
Mr. T. (reads). “If the excellence of virtue consists
solely in its utility, or tendency to promote the happiness
of men, a machine, a fertile field, or a navigable river, would
all possess in a very high degree the element of virtue. If
we restrict the term to human actions which are useful to
society, we should still be compelled to canonise a crowd
of acts which are utterly remote from all our ordinary
notions of morality.”
Mr. L. I confess that, upon a scientific question,
remoteness from “ordinary motions” would not concern
me ; nothing could be more remote from the ordinary
notions of men at one time than the generalisations of
political economy. I say that virtuous actions promote
the happiness of man. If it be said that a fertile field,
16 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
a machine, or a river does this, I grant it. I don't assert
that nothing promotes the happiness of mankind but
virtuous actions. The happiness of man flows from
various sources, but the most durable and certain flows
from his actions. Is this true or not ? because fertile fields
are useful, must we assert that virtuous actions are not so 2
we don't say that all actions useful to Society are virtuous,
but that it is the characteristic of virtuous actions to be
useful to Society; and they are distinguished from all the
other things Mr. Lecky names, as proceeding from the dis-
positions and intentions of voluntary agents. -
Mr. T. (reads). “No intuitive moralist ever dreamed
of doubting that benevolence or charity—or, in other
words, the promotion of the happiness of man—is a duty.
He maintains that it not only is so, but that we arrive at
this fact by direct intuition, and not by the discovery that
such a course is conducive to our interest.”
Mr. L. This is not a fair statement of the case. At
what stage of man's progress does he arrive at the idea that
it is his duty to promote the happiness of man 2 Show us
the nation that possessed this “direct intuition,” and which
did not begin by the pursuit of individual interest. Again,
to promote the happiness of man can hardly be called
à, specific duty. To perform acts which promote his
happiness is a duty, but what those acts are men have
only very partially agreed; men have thought they
were promoting the happiness of mankind by doing the
most outrageous acts of cruelty. A “direct intuition” that
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 17
left them ignorant of the consequences of acts would be
of little service to them.
Mr. T. (reads). “Happiness is one of the most inde-
terminate and undefinable words in the language, and what
are the conditions ‘of the greatest possible happiness’ no
One can precisely say. No two nations, and perhaps no
two individuals, would find them the same ; and even if
every virtuous act were incontestably useful, it by no
means follows that its virtue is derived from its utility.”
(Page 40)
Mr. L. Granted that it is not easy to enumerate all
the various ingredients that go to make up the com-
plex total called happiness, yet it is not difficult to
discover what actions are hurtful to us and what are
agreeable, and thus to find the road towards happiness.
But is the word happiness less definite and constant in
its meaning than the words Mr. Lecky employs so posi-
tively 2 Actions do unmistakably differ in their results,
and do influence man's happiness, and what higher recom-
mendation can an action possess than that it promotes the
happiness of rational agents? I don’t speak of results
that are imaginary, but real—not apparent consequences
but actual ones. I don't reckon abnormal conditions, nor
should conclusions on such a subject be invalidated by
idiosyncrasies or aberrations from a sound state of nerves
and sensibilities. If a man inherits a temper and consti-
tution that is diseased and depraved, or a taste that has
been corrupted and debased, we are no more to alter our
general conclusions on his account than we are to deny
C
18 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
the nutritive properties of bread, because in certain states
of the system it is not a wholesome diet.
Mr. T. (reads). “On the great theatre of public life,
especially in periods of great convulsions, when passions
are fiercely roused, it is neither the man of delicate scru-
pulosity and sincere impartiality, nor yet the single-
minded religious enthusiast, incapable of dissimulation or
procrastination, who confers most benefit upon the world.
It is much rather the astute statesman, earnest about his
ends, but unscrupulous about his means, equally free from
the trammels of conscience and the blindness of Zeal, who
governs because he partly yields to the passions and preju-
dices of his time.” - -
Mr. L. The language here is peculiar: “Zeal” afflicted
with “blindness,” and a “conscience” in “trammels,” are
not statesman-like things at any period, and a statesman
who “partly yields to the passions and prejudices of his
time” is most likely in part under their dominion ; but
surely the “sincere, scrupulous, single-minded enthusiast.”
is not the ideal of humanity, for he may join to these
qualities a perversity of intellect, an infirmity of temper,
or a narrowness of vision, which may mar every good dis-
position he possesses; whilst the statesman—reversing the
picture—acting wisely in his vocation, adapting his means
to his ends, though with an ulterior aim to his own
aggrandisement, succeeds in doing the good he works for.
The abolition of the corn laws was a measure highly
advantageous to the nation, and it would have been so if
those who brought it about were actuated by a predo-
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs. 19
minant desire to enrich themselves; and, on the contrary,
many of our penal laws were unmixedly abominable, how-
ever sincere and single-minded the enthusiasts might be
who enacted them. We are not now considering the merit
of the agent, but the consequences of his actions. If a man
intends well—of which we can only conjecture—and does
ill—of which we are able to judge—his actions are bad in
spite of his intentions. If another does well, of design, but
with Some personal qualities that are not good, his actions
are not to be condemned for his individual frailty. Both
agents may be faulty, but the actions of the one are
admittedly better than those of the other. To abolish the
corn laws from a mercenary motive was better than to
enact barbarous and cruel penal laws with the most excel-
lent intentions.
Mr. T. (reads). “Let us suppose an inquirer who in-
tended to regulate his life consistently by the utilitarian
principle. . . . One of his first observations will be
that, in very many special cases, acts—such as murder,
theft, and falsehood—which the world calls criminal, and
which in the majority of instances would undoubtedly be
hurtful, appear eminently productive of good. Why, then,
he may ask, should they not in these cases be performed?”
(Page 43) -
Mr. L. One would certainly like to see the inquirer
Mr. Lecky postulates, and ask him a few questions, that
one might know what sort of good “murder, theft, and
falsehood” “appear eminently productive of” Men have
committed these crimes, but the “good” they were in
20 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
search of was mostly the gratification of some bad passion.
If, however, any man in modern life, and not in a mad-
house, should come to think that murder, theft, and false-
hood were eminently productive of good, he would in all
probability be put under restraint. And if he should
unfortunately act upon his queer notion of things, he
would most likely get hanged; for the world has a very
clear opinion upon this subject, and will not allow it
to be tampered with. But assuming Mr. Lecky's in-
quirer to have a real existence, one might tell him that
if murder, theft, and falsehood did ever appear to him
eminently productive of good, the appearance was a
delusion and a snare, like many more ; that the world
is governed, as far as possible, by facts, and not by appear-
ances; and that, as a matter of fact, it had been proved in
the most unequivocal manner that these crimes are in-
jurious, and that society properly puts forth all its energy
to stamp them out. He might also be told that the
question is not a new one, but has been settled long ago;
that the first man who made the experiment of murder
not only found no good in it, but confessed that it brought
“punishment greater than he could bear” (Genesis iv. 13).
If, notwithstanding such lessons, Mr. Lecky's inquirer
persevered in preferring appearances to realities, he must
meet the consequences of his actions, which are those parts
of them not to be evaded by simulation or sophistry.
Mr. T. And one fails to see how an innate moral sense
would mend the matter, or answer so eccentric an inquirer.
Why should he abandon what appears eminently good,
DTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 21
because the innate moral sense of another man condemns
it? The penal consequences of an act, which are part of
the constitution of things, may reasonably operate as a
deterrent; but what rightful power has the innate moral
sense of A to overrule that of B2
Mr. L. If it has such a right, it must be grounded
upon Some reason; and why, as you ask, is a man to
abstain from what is eminently good at the bidding of
another ? If Mr. Lecky says it is not good, there is
an end of his objection. He started the hypothesis that
the thing seemed good—to a villain perhaps it might ;
but men's acts in the region of morals have distinct
consequences that make them good or evil—
“Seems, madam nay, it is ; I know not ‘seems.’” ”
Mr. T. And as the crimes Mr. Lecky enumerates
destroy happiness and create distrust and hatred, men
denounce and punish them as evil.
“Blood hath been shed ere now, i' th' olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal.” t
The “human statute” embodies human experience, and
arrests the bloodshed of the “olden time” in the interest
of the “gentle weal,” regardless of the “intuitions” of fan-
tastical inquirers.
Mr. L. The standard of right has relation to things
as known and understood. A man's conception of duty
and right is not an abstraction worked out of his own
consciousness, but something put into his mind by instruc-
* Hamlet. f Macbeth.
22 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
tion and experience, which continually modify men's con-
clusions, and these modified conclusions become the starting
point of a new generation, which again transmits to its
successors a larger inheritance,—an organisation to which
a truer and more trustworthy apprehension of things is
possible.
Mr. T. (reads). “That the present disposition of affairs
is in many respects unjust, and that suffering often attends
a course which deserves reward, and happiness a course
which deserves punishment, leads men to infer a future
state of retribution. Take away the consciousness of
desert, and the inference would no longer be made.”
Mr. L. This argument is, I am aware, a popular one;
but how can Mr. Lecky use it ! What is meant by desert 2
“A course which deserves reward” must mean certain
actions which deserve it, and why do they deserve it !
Their proper result is assumed to be happiness. Why,
unless it be the common characteristic of right actions ?
And then, by the bad arrangements of society, by unjust
laws, or by the force of adverse circumstances, the doer of
right actions is robbed of his reward, and thence men infer
a state of retribution. The man has been deprived of what
was due to him, and it is concluded that he will be recom-
pensed hereafter ; or, on the other hand, by the possession
of power and influence he has been able to counterwork
the natural consequences of bad actions, and has appeared
to escape the pain which was their due ; yet it is inferred
he has only escaped for a time, and that his wrong-
doing will be ultimately avenged. The issue of certain
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 23
conduct is assumed to be happiness, but the disorder in the
world disappoints it ; observing which, mankind conclude
that the balance will be adjusted in the world to come, and
that the real consequences of actions cannot finally be
frustrated or defeated. The whole force of the argument
lies in the fact that virtue and happiness are believed
to be at one ; or why should the balance be adjusted ?
Why should there be a day of reckoning unless actions are
expected to work out a certain result—the result of distri-
buting their real consequences? Mr. Lecky asks—“What
is the whole history of the intellectual progress of the world
but one long struggle of the intellect of man to emancipate
itself from the deceptions of nature?” and affirms that
“only after ages of toil did the mind of man emancipate
itself from those deadly errors to which, by the deceptive
appearances of nature, the long infancy of humanity is
universally doomed.” Are the laws of conduct less
“deceptive” in their “appearance?” If “intellectual pro-
gress” has been retarded by “deceptions of nature,” has not
moral progress been equally checked? And what are appear-
ances but the superficial and apparent consequences of
things and actions which have to be corrected by experi-
ence and reason? If society has been obstructed by deadly
errors in matters intellectual, it has not been less so in
whatever relates to the conduct of life ; as Shakespeare
says, man is always
“Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence.”— *
* Measure for Measure.
24 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
Mr. T. (reads). “The intuitive moralists . . main-
tain that without natural moral perceptions wenever should
have known that it was our duty to seek the happiness of
mankind when it diverged from our own; and they deny
that virtue was either originally evolved from, or is neces-
sarily proportioned to, utility.”
Mr. L. To seek the happiness of mankind is a large
phrase, and finds no place in primitive codes. But how do
the “intuitive moralists,” know that it could not be found
out by experience? If it is known now and was once un-
known, the presumption is that facts have brought it to
light, as they have brought other things to light; but, again,
why may not one man's happiness be an effect of which
other men's happiness is the cause ? Is there any intuition
on this point 2 Moral perceptions men have, or they could
make no moral distinctions. The question is, Of what do
the perceptions inform them what is the thing perceived ?
That an act is right—where does the notion of rightness
come from, as applied to an action ? and what is its right-
ness, as distinct from its beneficialness? Men perceive that
certain actions are hurtful to them ; a rule is then laid
down, conformity to which is—right.
Mr. T. But you wouldn’t consider that the conclusions
of a few lawmakers, or even of a “tyrant majority,” con-
stitute right 2
Mr. L. Certainly not ; both may be utterly mistaken.
What I mean is, that the notion of right implies con-
formity to some rule. The rule itself may not be a law
of life which experience eventually approves, but, being
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 25
the best attainable at the time, it serves as a standard
or measure, and the word right expresses the idea of agree-
ment with it. Hooker says, “Goodness in actions is like
unto straightness; wherefore, that which is done well we
term right.”* Straightness is ascertained by comparison
with some objective standard, and rightness by the same
method.
Mr. T. (reads). “Justice, humanity, veracity, and kin-
dred virtues, not merely have the power of attracting us—
we have also an intellectual perception that they are
essentially, and immutably good ; that their nature does
not depend upon, and is not relative to, our constitutions;
that it is impossible and inconceivable that they should ever
be vices, and their opposites virtues. They are therefore,
it is said, intuitions of the reason.”
Mr. L. These are large words — “essentially and
immutably good”—“not relative to our constitutions,”
though how we are to become acquainted with what is not
relative to our constitutions Mr. Lecky does not inform
us. No one dreams that at the same time and place,
to the same persons, the words virtue and vice meant the
same things; but it is equally clear that at different times
these and similar words have been applied to dissimilar
actions. The abstract word—justice, has conveyed to men's
minds opposite ideas. Acts have been thought just, and
by a generalisation from such acts the notion of justice has
been formed ; but apart from the acts, the notion is a
myth. The acts first existed, their qualities were observed,
* Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I. ch. 8.
26 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
and the word justice expressed that which they were
thought to have in common. As men's relations towards
each other came to be more correctly appreciated, their
notion of justice changed; the acts of one age to which the
word has been applied are repugnant to those of another.
There has been a duplicity in the thing represented by
the word ; the constituents of the notion have not been
the same. A man had a notion of justice—the identical
word that Mr. Lecky uses—and he had in his mind also
the remembrance of acts of real cruelty, oppression, and
selfishness, and he saw nothing in these acts inconsistent
with his notion of justice—he was conscious of no antago-
nism between them. To argue as if there were somewhere
a concrete thing called justice—like a footrule—is an
illusion. A footrule that was six inches long at one time
and twelve at another, would create inextricable confusion,
its length being altered and not its name; and exactly such
a footrule is the word justice, as used by Mr. Lecky. The
word has a meaning in relation to human conduct ; and as
men's estimate of human conduct has varied, the rule by
which they have measured it has varied also. The word,
if it so pleases any one, may be called immutable ; the
thing signified by the word has been mutable enough.
Mr. T. In any intelligible sense justice must mean
the regulation of human affairs according to some standard
which shall correctly estimate the rights and interests of
the individual and the community—rights and interests
which are the ultimate facts of man's nature. Provide
for these in their order and proportion, and you will do
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 27
justice. If by justice Mr. Lecky means this, he may say
it is immutably good.
Mr. L. That such a rule of action is good cannot be
denied, but it is one related entirely to man and his affairs,
whereas Mr. Lecky asserts that justice is not relative to
our constitution, and is an intuition of the reason; but
your description of it involves an acquaintance with actions
and their consequences—not only a disposition to deal
equally, but a knowledge of what constitutes equality.
Look at the ethical notions of some leading man of the
past. When the Israelites were threatened with a great
calamity, Moses is reported to have said, “Shall one man
sin, and wilt thou be wroth with all the congregation ?”
(Num. xvi. 22)—as much as to Say Such a rule of action
would be unjust ; and yet to others it has not seemed so.
Again, the Israelites, reading erroneously the signs of
things, had framed this proverb—" The fathers have eaten
sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge”
(Ezek. xviii. 2); but they were reproved for entertaining the
notion. Such a method of dealing was affirmed to be
“not equal,” although it had probably many advocates,
and some apparent Sanctions. Then, again, justice has
been satisfied to allow one set of human beings to have
unlimited power over another, and then she has pro-
nounced this arrangement to be utterly bad for both
parties. In all these cases, and they might be multiplied
indefinitely, there has been no uniform and abiding notion
of what constituted justice.
Mr. T. One may say that, the circumstances of Society
28 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
being different, the methods of dealing would vary also ;
a rude people would bear rude methods, and so on. But
the passages you quote from the Bible involve large
general principles, and if men disagree upon these they
cannot have within them any common and primitive notion
relating to them which could properly be called an intui-
tion of the reason. The remonstrance of Moses which you
have quoted, is it formed upon principles of justice or
is it not ? Until we know all that is involved in the cir-
cumstances, our conceptions must be inadequate. One can
imagine a set of circumstances that would lead us to
approve the principle indicated in the question ; and, again,
we can imagine another set from which we should un-
hesitatingly conclude that it was a profoundly unjust prin-
ciple. The word equality, made use of by Ezekiel, expresses
the clearest and plainest notion of what satisfies the mind;
but then, what is equality when principles are unfixed,
where knowledge is partial, and the instruments both of
judgment and action are imperfect ' Mr. Lecky says, “No
one ever contended that justice was a vice or injustice
a virtue.” (Page 80.)
Mr. L. Nevertheless, it has often been contended that
unjust actions were virtuous, and just ones vicious. “An
95
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was in “old
time” reckoned to be a rule of justice: it would now be
regarded as the opposite. The justice, therefore, which
exacted it at one era is named cruelty, and at another
a legal and legitimate retaliation. We have to deal with
concrete actions—an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 29
—does it engender cruel and revengeful feelings or not ?
if it does, it is evil. A bad thing may be made use of
to drive out a worse, and harsh methods may be needed
to uproot confirmed brutishness; but then we are not to
confound good and bad, nor to disguise under a good
abstract name a thing that is evil. -
Mr. T. Military law and strait-waistcoats are defen-
sible things against anarchy and madness; but whether
the justice they distribute is to be called vice or virtue
will depend upon circumstances.
Mr. L. In former times men and women who did not
believe what the Church required were subjected to griev-
ous penalties, and so badly were they thought of, that the
word which expressed misbelief was applied to the vilest
characters, and a miscreant—though his creed might be
unimpeachable—was a name for the lowest wretch ; and
men of the calmest minds discovered no injustice in
burning alive the man whose belief in certain points
diverged from their own ; the men of this order had notions
of “justice,” and feelings of “humanity”—So called, and
yet, without any provocation, and with perfect equanimity,
they did diabolical deeds. By-and-by it was recognised
that belief was a state of mind, the product of evidence
and association, and that where neither the proper evidence
nor the fitting associations had been brought to bear upon
the mind, the product was not to be looked for ; and
then it was felt there was some force in St. Paul's
question, “How can they believe in Him of whom they have
not heard?” and in the corollary, How can they believe
30 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
what is to them, from any cause, incredible? And so it
became clear that to burn a living man on account of his
belief was not just. Nay, it became conceivable that the
men who did the burning were, by reason of it, the greater
criminals; inasmuch as it was more plainly and patently
wicked thus to burn a fellow-creature, than it was to mis-
believe transubstantiation or the creed of St. Athanasius.
Mr. T. To burn a man to death because he thought
the evidence for certain propositions insufficient was —
though the world applauded—a mockery of justice.
Mr. L. And the world now thinks so, though the
burning disposition may survive; another old notion of
justice is thus dissected by Robert Browning:—
- “They were wont to tease the truth
Out of loath witness (toying, trifling time)
By torture : ’twas a trick, a vice of the age,
Here, there, and everywhere, what would you have
Religion used to tell Humanity -
She gave him warrant or denied him course,
And since the course was much to his own mind,
Of pinching flesh, and pulling bone from bone,
To unhusk truth a-hiding in its hulls,
Nor whisper of a warning stopped the way.
He, in their joint behalf, the burly slave
Bestirred him, mauled and maimed all recusants,
While, prim in place, Religion overlooked ;
And so had done till doomsday, never a sign
Nor sound of interference from her mouth,
But that at last the burly slave wiped brow,
Let eye give notice as if soul were there,
Muttered, ‘’Tis a vile trick, foolish more than vile,
Should have been counted sin ; I make it so :
At any rate no more of it for me—
Nay, for I break the torture engine thus !’
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 31
Then did Religion start up, stare amain,
Look round for help and see none, Smile and say,
‘What, broken is the rack 7 Well done of thee!
Did I forget to abrogate its use ? -
Be the mistake in common with us both !
One more fault our blind-age shall answer for,
Down in my book denounced though it must be
Somewhere. Henceforth find truth by milder means '
Ah, but, Religion, did we wait for thee
To ope the book, that serves to sit upon,
And pick such place out, we should wait indeed
That is all history : and what is not now,
Was then, defendants found it to their cost.” "
Mr. T. Thus complacently did justice torture and
burn, and see in it neither evil nor incongruity. To imagine,
as Mr. Lecky puts it, that in this world there is somewhere
a concrete thing or conception which is immutable, whose
name is justice, is an illusion. Actions called just have
been largely leavened with qualities that were unjust, and
the abstract notion in men's minds participated in the
defectiveness.
Mr. L. The word has played a great part in human
affairs, but the Smallest amount of information that can be
given about it is contained in Mr. Lecky's propositions—
that it is an “intuition of the reason,” and “is not relative
to our constitutions.” Rather, does it signify such a mode
of dealing with the world's business as approves itself
to the world's consciousness; but the world’s conscious-
ness is a fluctuating element. At all times it recognises a
better and a worse, a justice and injustice; but the better
* The Ring and the Book.
32 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
of one era is the worse of another, and the justice of this
period the injustice of that.
Mr. T. Intuitions, however, should be fixed, and are
not things to be mended ; and knowledge that is original
and primitive is not to be corrected by what is second-
ary and derived. There is another question—the words
in what Browning calls Religion's book have been much
the same at all times, but they have stood for very
different sets of ideas; how is this to be explained ?
Mr. L. Torture must be denounced somewhere in
her book, Religion says, but she didn't find it out. The
words were there, but not the meaning. Isn't it Carlyle
who says, we see only what we bring eyes to see ?
Mr. T. (reads). “There are many cases in which
diversities of moral judgment arise from causes that are
not moral but purely intellectual, as in the case of
usury, which obviously arose from a false notion of the
uses of money.”
Mr. L. So it may be said now, but such cases once
involved moral delinquency; they were not reckoned
intellectual errors by those whose conscience they offended.
The reference to usury as one of this class of errors is
especially unfortunate. In the first place, the Israelites
were permitted to take usury of strangers (Deut. xxiii.
20), but so profound a moral feeling had been created
on the subject that Ezekiel enumerates amongst the men
who are “just,” and shall “live,” him “who hath not
given forth upon usury,” and abstinence from this offence
he classes with abstinence from adultery, robbery, and
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 33
oppression of every kind (Ezek xviii. 8); and a devo-
tional writer in the 15th Psalm, asking — “Lord, who
shall abide in thy tabernacle 2 who shall dwell in thy
holy hill?” replies—he “that putteth not out his money
to usury;” so that here is an action having in it, as Mr.
Lecky admits, no moral quality, which had come to be
regarded with the deepest moral disapprobation. I don't
care to follow Mr. Lecky into his argument on the subject
of abortion, but one may well ask, What is the value of an
innate moral sense which mistakes usury for a crime, and
is doubtful as to the moral character of abortion? Mr.
Lecky separates “moral judgment” and “moral feeling."
and there is a difference, but not such a one as he points
to. Moral feeling gradually but certainly follows moral
judgment. Convince the judgment that an action is hurt-
ful, and a moral feeling may be excited to condemn it.
Associate the idea of sin with the practice of usury, and
abstinence from it is immediately rewarded with moral
approbation; and if usury were, in fact, as pernicious as
stealing, it would deserve similar condemnation. Men
were mistaken about it, but their innate moral sense did
not help to relieve them of the error. It was political
economy that banished this form of evil-doing from the
province of morals, and destroyed a superstition so wide-
spread and venerable.
Mr. T. (reads). “The iniquity of theft, murder, false-
hood, or adultery, rests upon grounds generically distinct
from those on which men pronounce it to be sinful to eat
D
34 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
meat on Friday, or to work on Sunday, or to abstain from
religious assemblies. The reproaches conscience directs
against those who are guilty of these last acts are purely
hypothetical; conscience enjoining obedience to the Divine
commands, but leaving it to reason to determine what those
commands may be.”
Mr. L. The answer to such a statement is furnished by
a historical example. In the 15th chapter of Numbers
it is recorded that an Israelite was found gathering sticks
on the Sabbath-day, and for this offence he was put to
death ; and it is hard to believe that the persons who
inflicted the punishment regarded the offence as “generi-
cally distinct” from theft or murder; and it is the judg-
ment of people upon actions of their own time that must
determine what their moral standard was. How is a
man to know the generic difference between commands,
when they are presented to him with the same sanctions?
The punishment of two crimes being equal, what is the
generic distinction between them if it be not the amount
of hurtfulness which each of them is calculated to pro-
duce? Then the “reason” of mankind can do little to
determine what are Divine commands; it takes them
mainly on authority; and “conscience reproaches” men for
breaches of commands said to be Divine which were never
entitled to such distinction. Assuming, however, two
Divine commands, the one not to kill and the other not to
work on the Sabbath-day, why should the breach of one
produce reproaches of conscience merely hypothetical or
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 35
generically distinct from the other? The argument of
St. Paul, in the 14th chapter of Romans, proves that the
breach of ceremonial and “hypothetical” commands bur-
dened the mind and kindled remorse as grievously as the
infraction of real obligations “generically distinct.”
Mr. T. (reads). “What transubstantiation is in the
Order of reason, the Augustinian doctrine of the damna-
tion of unbaptized infants and the Calvinistic doctrine of
reprobation are in the order of morals. Of these doctrines
it is not too much to say that in the form in which they
have often been stated they surpass in atrocity any tenets
that have ever been admitted into any Pagan creed, and
would, if they formed an essential part of Christianity,
amply justify the term ‘pernicious heresy,’ which Tacitus
applied to the faith. That an all-righteous and all-merci-
ful Creator, in the full exercise of those attributes, deliber-
ately calls into existence sentient beings whom He has from
eternity irrevocably destined to endless, unspeakable, un-
mitigated torture, are propositions which are so extrava-
gantly absurd, and so ineffably atrocious, that their adoption
might well lead men to doubt the universality of moral
perceptions.”
Mr. L. The propositions here so energetically con-
demned have been believed explicitly or implicitly by
many men. Why they have so believed is for our purpose
immaterial ; if, in morals, authority or argument can
generate belief that is “extravagantly absurd,” or appro-
bation of what is “ineffably atrocious,” then innate moral
36 4)
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
perceptions must be a poor protection against error; if a
moral sense cannot set down and settle the elementary
notions of what is good, nor save man from approving
what is “ ineffably atrocious,” its verdict must be of little
worth ; if it can mistake moral ugliness for moral beauty,
or “palter with us in a double sense,” how can we rely on
it 2 Mr. Lecky, and many more, denounce as “ineffably
atrocious” what Augustinians pronounce to be divine and
true ; and yet both parties are said to possess a moral
sense, the precise and proper object of which is to discri-
minate moral qualities. If the Creator of the world be
“Such an one’ as Augustinianism depicts, Mr. Lecky
would regard it as the chaos of morals; but the two beliefs
do co-exist, and render his theory inexplicable.
Mr. T. Augustinianism involves problems stretching
beyond the range of human knowledge, and if the whole
of it were known it might not deserve Mr. Lecky's de-
nunciations. r -
Mr. L. But he and others believe that it does, which
is enough ; the beliefs in question are fundamental and
irreconcilable—positive and negative poles; if the one
is good the other is evil, and the moral sense is totally
incompetent to adjudicate between them. We are not
discussing Augustinianism ; it may be what Mr. Lecky
asserts, or it may not. We are considering the state of
mind that calls it good, and the other state of mind that
calls it evil; and we ask which state of mind conforms to
the rule denominated right, and what, in this special case,
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 37
by Mr. Lecky's standard, the rule definitely is. That
which is “extravagantly absurd” contradicts some clear
intuition or some plain deduction from it, and that which
is “ineffably atrocious” is something radically cruel; and
it is manifestly absurd that what is thus cruel can be either
good or right. “The time cometh, that whosoever killeth
you will think that he doeth God service” (John xvi. 2).
Such a notion of the Divine Being we know to be false ;
we know he is not served by cruel acts ; and we deny the
validity of any thinking that justifies evil deeds by super-
mundane considerations. Whatever may be the fate of
Augustinianism, and whatever the possibilities beyond
and above it, we refuse any approbation or any of the
rightful authority of this world to principles or practices
that are hostile to man.
Mr. T. (reads). “The insensibility of some savages
to the criminality of theft arises from the fact that they
are accustomed to have all things in common.” -
Mr. L. Were it possible to have all things in com-
mon there would be no theft; the air cannot be stolen,
and if all things were in the same abundance, and there
was no need of appropriation, the law of theft would not
exist. There are many things now beyond its operation; and
it is easy to imagine an economy where there would be no
criminality in theft—where, in fact, there would be no such
thing. The effort and self-control necessary to restrain
man, in the midst of an abundance that is appropriated,
from taking or even coveting what is not his own, may be
38 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
a needful process of moral culture. In fact, all self-restraint
is a machinery for working out moral results which elevate
the character of man. He has acquired slowly crude
notions of right and wrong, and was placed in circum-
stances that, by an irresistible influence, tended to de-
velop and rectify them. He has had no ready-made
standard by which to gauge his relations, but he soon
discovered what hurt or helped him. His first generalisa-
tions were imperfect enough, but they grow better and
truer—
“Till old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain.” ”
Mr. T. (reads). “The considerations I have urged
with reference to humanity apply with equal force to the
various relations of the sexes. . . . The feeling of all
men and the language of all nations, the sentiment which,
though often weakened, is never wholly effaced,—that this
appetite, even in its most legitimate gratification, is a
thing . . . to which a feeling of shame is naturally
attached, something that jars with our conception of perfect
purity, something we could not with propriety ascribe to
a holy being.”
Mr. L. Mr. Lecky is constantly led away by a rhetoric
which is no doubt very fascinating, but sadly deficient in
probative force; and one must protest against such large
words as the “feeling of all men and the language of all
nations;” for the assertion is very much wider than any
* Milton.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS, -39
proof that can be adduced in its favour; but I should
answer his whole argument by the question of Eliphaz the
Temanite—“Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?”
(Job iv. 17). The “feeling of shame,” said to be so univer-
sal, is the very thing one misses in the social ways of
primitive men and women; in the comparatively recent
history to be found in such a book as the Bible, modern
ears are shocked and startled at the things they are some
times compelled to listen to ; and if individuals of the high
moral tone delineated there did and detailed such deeds,
what “feeling of shame” had their lower and less refined
brethren? If they did this thing in the green tree, what
would they do in the dry Mr. Lecky should leave this
argument to the ascetics who regard the whole func-
tions of the body as unclean, but whose unnatural
system has yielded fruits the most loathsome of all. The
relations of the sexes have done more to refine and
elevate the human race than any other single cause ; and
it is mere Manicheism to assert we have an “innate
intuitive perception that there is something degrading in
this sensual part of our nature.” It is hardly possible to
frame an argument on the subject less in accordance with
facts than Mr. Lecky's. What “conception of perfect
purity” is entertained by an uncivilised people?—and all
people have been uncivilised ; what, indeed, is any man's
“conception of perfect purity” apart from his own organisa-
tion? Is the “delicate Ariel” more pure than the
“admired Miranda”?
40 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
“Hence, bashful cunning ! .
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence.””
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky's argument is an anachronism.
His Creator has given to man a certain constitution,
the working of which, in all its parts, involves nothing
that is shameful, and nothing inconsistent with the
purity of a being so constituted. “Our conception of
perfect purity” may indeed be unlike that formed by
beings of a different order. On this subject Bishop Butler
writes more wisely than Mr. Lecky. In his sermon
“Upon Compassion,” he says—“It is an absurdity almost
too gross to be mentioned for a man to endeavour to get
rid of his senses because the Supreme Being discerns things
more perfectly without them. It is as real, though not so
obvious an absurdity, to endeavour to eradicate the pas-
sions he has given us because he is without them; for,
since our passions are as really a part of our constitution
as our senses, since the former as really belong to our
condition of nature as the latter, to get rid of either is
equally a violation of, and breaking in upon, that nature
and constitution he has given us. . . . Our appetites,
passions, Senses, no way imply disease ; nor, indeed, do
they imply deficiency or imperfection of any sort, but only
this, that the constitution of our nature, according to which
God has made us, is such as to require them.”
Mr. L. What we are in search of is a morality
for men and women as we find them in the world,
* The Tempest.
TJTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 41.
endowed by their Creator with feelings and passions which,
in their natural exercise, yield good and wholesome fruit :
“Love's a virtue for heroes; as white as the snow on high hills;
And immortal as every great Soul is, that struggles, endures, and
fulfils.” ” -
Mr. T. But you don't altogether identify the passion
of love with the sexual feeling Mr. Lecky refers to ?
Mr. L. What God has “joined” I am not careful
over-curiously to “put asunder.”
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky argues that in distant times, and
in various parts of the world, higher honours have been
paid to virginity than to maternity; and he implies, if he
does not absolutely affirm, that this is in accordance with
the best and purest impulses of our nature. He speaks
of the “ideal wife” of the Romans; “but above all this,”
he says, approvingly, “we find the traces of a higher ideal,”
the “vestal virgin.”
Mr. L. Roman ideals are not usually attractive ; but
if this “higher ideal” be “the salt of the earth,” surely
Mr. Lecky should be able to point out how and where
it has produced upon human affairs effects commen-
surate with its pretensions. Superstition has sanctified
forms of folly innumerable. Men and women may remain
in single blessedness because matrimony is inconvenient,
not because there is a “higher ideal,” and they are worthy
of honour if (although “it is not good for them to be alone.”)
they remain unwedded in order to do some work incom-
patible with married life; but the superior sanctity of
* Mrs. Browning.
42 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
the single state is a decaying Superstition. Mr. Tenny-
son's teaching on this topic is infinitely superior to Mr.
Lecky's :
“For, indeed, I know
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.”
Nature avenges every transgression of her laws, and a
recent writer supplies us with a curious commentary on the
celibacy of which Mr. Lecky is so enamoured. “The long
period of the dark ages under which Europe has lain is
due, I believe, in a very considerable degree, to the celibacy
enjoined by religious orders on their votaries. Whenever
a man or woman was possessed of a gentle nature that
fitted him or her to deeds of charity, to meditation, to
literature, or to art, the social condition of the time was
such that they had no refuge elsewhere than in the bosom
of the Church. But the Church chose to preach and exact
celibacy. The consequence was that these gentle natures
had no continuance ; and thus, by a policy so singularly
unwise and suicidal, that I am hardly able to speak of it
without impatience, the Church brutalised the breed of
our forefathers. She acted precisely as if she had aimed at
Selecting the rudest portion of the community to be, alone,
the parents of future generations. She practised the arts
which breeders would use who aimed at creating ferocious,
currish, and stupid natures. No wonder that club law
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 43
prevailed for centuries in Europe; the wonder rather is
that enough good remained in the veins of Europeans to
enable their race to rise to its present very moderate level
of natural morality.””
Mr. T. (reads). “The unchangeable proposition for
which we contend is this, that benevolence is always a
virtuous disposition—that the sensual part of our nature is
always the lower part.”
Mr. L. A proposition may be an unchangeable one,
whilst the words of which it is made up have embodied a
variety of meaning ; and an unchangeable proposition,
the terms of which are unstable, is a treacherous and
deceitful thing. We want to know whether the innate
moral perception of the living men and women in primitive
times, as they are depicted in history and biography, taught
them that particular actions were wrong and hurtful—
actions which experience has proved to be unmistakably
hurtful to the actor and to society. The Bible tells us
that certain evil things were permitted because of the
hardness of people's heart. And when was the hardness
abolished? Even “the tender mercies of the wicked are
cruel” (Proverbs xii. 10). Now it is a mere juggle of
words to speak of actions under abstract names which
have no fixed and permanent signification. The chastity
of one era would be an intolerable degradation at another,
and where actions are different they should not pass under
the same name. Mr. Lecky's benevolence, after all, is just
* Hereditary Genius; an Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences
By Francis Galton, F.R.S., etc.
44 UTILITAIRLAN THEORY OF MORALS.
what people think to be benevolent, and chastity what they
think to be chaste; and his assertion that abstractions are
“essentially and immutably good” is devoid of meaning.
Immutable things cannot be made known by mutable
words. We need not blame the actors of a particular era,
but without hesitation we may assert of actions they ap-
proved, that in this world of men and women they are
essentially bad.
Mr. T. Looking at the matter historically, it must be
admitted that cruel and brutal actions mark the early history
of all nations. Your quotation from the Proverbs meets
the case exactly. The words “tender mercies” may stand
for sundry moral acts, and “wicked” for all mankind; and
it is affirmed that things called “tender mercies” have been
“cruel,” so that the names of acts and their qualities have
been the precise opposites of each other, and the moral
acts of one set of men the immoral acts of another. The
words “tender mercies” have been a name for what was
cruel, and all such words in the lapse of time seem to have
involved like contradictions. What the innate moral
sense was doing is hard to say ; but when we look below
the surface of words, this is what we find.
Mr. L. St. Paul says, “The times of this ignorance
God winked at ;” but how should man be ignorant of what
is known by intuition? .
“What a thrice double ass
Was I to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!”
If Caliban's ignorance let him worship such a dull fool
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 45
as Stephano, is the ignorance greater or less which wor-
ships a piece of wood or stone? and if man has no intui-
tions that keep him from such blunders, what are the
intuitions worth ? or is it not a solecism to apply the word
intuition to such flagrant misapprehensions ? Man's beliefs
and his gods have been worthy of one another. The true
God is represented as winking at the times of this igno-
rance—not as approving or justifying them ; a distinction
Mr. Lecky overlooks. - -
Mr. T. Is it not objectionable on a question of morals,
which should be determined by evidence, to appeal to the
Bible as though it could be settled by authority ?
Mr. L. I refer to the Bible as a book of history and
ethics, and, whatever other authority it possesses, it is avail-
able for this purpose. It contains the history of a simple and
primitive people under a theocracy—of a people whose
literature embodies a higher moral code than any of their
contemporaries; it furnishes evidence of what such a
people thought, of the kind of reasoning that was addressed to
them,and of the moral atmosphere in which they lived. Their
poetry is the expression of their highest devotional feeling;
their laws of their highest attainments in moral, social, and
political distinctions; and their didactic books of the esti-
mates they formed of life. Now, the least acquaintance
with their literature will satisfy us that the considerations
addressed to them were always that to do good was to pro-
cure good. Mr. Lecky's notion that they should do what
was disagreeable, without any prospect of obtaining thereby
what was pleasant and pleasurable, is opposed to every
46 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
page of ethical writing they have left behind them. Their
lawgiver set before them “blessing and cursing,” and told
them plainly that they must do good if they would get
good. Their literature contains an image in reference to
human actions more apt than any Mr. Lecky has adduced.
In the second chapter of the first book of Samuel it is said
—“The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions
are weighed.” It is by “knowledge” that actions are esti-
mated, and their consequences are the weights that test
them.
Mr. T. (reads). “The universal sentiment of mankind
represents Self-sacrifice as an essential element of a meri-
torious act, and means by self-sacrifice the deliberate adop-
tion of the least pleasurable course, without the prospect of
any pleasure in return.”
Mr. L. Here, again, Mr. Lecky gets into the universal;
and in such cases we generally find that the matter of
proof is in inverse ratio to the magnitude of assertion. In
the next page he tells us what “all ages, all nations, and
all popular judgments, pronounce.” The answer to such
sweeping declarations is contained in a few plain and pre-
cise words, which prove at any rate that one man, if not
two, had a different notion from Mr. Lecky, and dis-
avowed this “universal sentiment of mankind.” St. Paul,
or whoever wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, says, “Moses,
when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of
Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with
the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a
season ; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 47
than the treasures in Egypt : for he had respect unto
the recompence of the reward.” If these words do not
contradict Mr. Lecky's assertion in the most direct and
unequivocal manner, words have no meaning. Moses,
—when he is come to years—refuses pleasure that is fleet-
ing and instantaneous, and chooses rather what is dur-
able and distant ; calculating, wisely and well. How
many disciples would a teacher attract who taught his
followers that they must always adopt the least pleasur-
able course, without the prospect of any pleasure in return?
The “universal sentiment of mankind” would be apt to
reject the bargain. When Peter found that he and his
fellow-disciples had apparently adopted the “least pleasur-
able course,” he asked, with a frank simplicity, “What
shall we have therefor?” and he was told that hereafter
“they would sit upon thrones,” etc., and that every one
who followed in their steps should receive an hundred-
fold now, in this time, besides a future reward. The
question—" What shall it profit a man if he gain the
whole world and lose his own soul?” proves that con-
siderations of personal profit and loss have been reckoned
fit instruments to determine men's actions.
Mr. T. (reads). “In exact proportion as we believe a
desire for personal enjoyment to be the motive of a good
act, is the merit of the agent diminished.”
Mr. L. The merit of the agent is not an easy thing
to gauge. But what shall we say of the ruler who asked,
“Good master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life 7”
And then what of the answer, “Thou knowest the
48 * * |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
commandments,” etc.? Assume that the man had asked,
How shall I make the present life happy 2 would the
answer have been different 2 The man desired the “per-
sonal enjoyment” of eternal life. He inquired how it
was to be secured, and he was referred to the command-
ments. He was not informed that the desire of eternal
life would rob every “good act” of its merit. On the con-
trary, this desire of personal enjoyment might lead him
into the right road, and he might be kept there by the
actual enjoyment which his continuance in it gave him.
Eor by the law of habit—which is a law of our nature—
that becomes easy and pleasant which at first was hard
and burdensome.
“Refrain to night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence ; the next more easy ;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either master the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.” “
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky's theory of self-sacrifice is senti-
mental rather than practical.
Mr. L. And it is expressed in words marked by the
usual ambiguity of their class. What is meant by self-
sacrifice? The predominant power in a man's habit and
constitution may, without impropriety, be named self; and
if this be altogether selfish, in the unamiable sense of that
word, and takes no account of the wishes and interests of
others, it will be wrong, and should be sacrificed ; if, on
* Hamlet.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 49
the contrary, it has a due and well-regulated respect to all
the claims and feelings of others, it should be cherished and
encouraged. Moral, mental, or material considerations may
each sway the mind supremely, and constitute the governing
power we denominate self; and just as they do so in an inor-
dinate degree, they should be sacrificed; but that which is
left willbemore satisfying than that which is rejected. If the
gratification of sense be the self that needs to be sacrificed,
the mental self which takes its place does so by its superior
attractiveness, and repays the sacrifice by a more durable
and rational reward; and so, if the mental self must be
suppressed for a time, in obedience to considerations of a
more urgent sort, these again “have their reward” (Matt.
vi. 16); and so, in all cases, the “self” that needs to be
sacrificed gives place to another that yields a satisfaction
more commensurate with the enlarging powers and neces-
sities of a complex and progressive agent like man. It
is impossible to deny that the scale of pleasure is thus
graduated to men's desires and capacities; and just as you
modify these you change the character of the pleasure that
is sought, but pleasure of some kind it is. It is a moral
arithmetic which has to be learned in the school of experi-
ence ; but it may be taught so as to render its acquisition
easy.
Mr. T. According to such a definition, self-sacrifice
might mean the most productive investment of a man's
happiness-producing powers.
Mr. L. I don't object to your translation, though it
might be put into more acceptable words; and I find in the
E
50 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
New Testament a theory of the same sort, though ex-
pressed in a somewhat different manner—“If thine eye
offend thee, pluck it out : it is better for thee to enter into
the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to
be cast into hell fire,” etc. (Mark ix. 47). Now, dropping
the metaphors, what is this but a recommendation to
sacrifice the less to the greater ? And if, in this case, it
is “better” thus to arbitrate between the claims of incom-
patible possessions, it will be “better” to do so in all
cases; and “better” is what produces most happiness.
It wouldn't be “better” for the whole body to be cast into
hell fire, although this would fulfil Mr. Lecky's condition
of adopting “the least pleasurable course, without the
prospect of any pleasure in return.” It is “better’ to
sacrifice an inferior self in order to preserve one of greater
value ; but the converse is never true. The words self-
sacrifice, self-denial, and the like, have no more fixed and
defined meaning than the word happiness, which Mr.
Lecky complains of Self-denial has meant the austerities
of asceticism, and the eccentricities of unreasoning fana-
ticism ; it has canonised Simeon Stylites and George Fox.
“Deep in yon cave Honorius long did dwell,
In hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell.” “ .
Mr. T. But you wouldn’t say that virtue and goodness
mean the mere balancing of self-interest ?
Mr. L. You put the matter unpleasantly, by em-
ploying a sort of mercantile phraseology which creates
* Childe Harold.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 51
prejudice. Mr. Lecky's proposition is a broad and plain
one, and lies at the root of his theory, and cannot
sustain itself by translating the opposing argument into
the language of the market for the purpose of disfiguring
it. The question is one, however, more of things than of
words, although giving a bad name to a good thing is apt
to endanger its reputation. Let me refer you again to the
Bible as representing facts of human nature. Isaiah
asks (chap. lv. 2) “Wherefore do ye spend money for that
which is not bread 2 and your labour for that which satis-
fieth not ? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which
is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.” This
is oriental colouring, but it has little resemblance in
form or substance to Mr. Lecky's meagre outline. And
if words have any meaning, these surely imply that
“righteousness”—right acting—which comprises all moral
good that man is capable of, is a means to happiness.
It is not described as something added or joined to it
afterwards, but as its weft and warp. Man being such
as he is, the constitution of nature being such as it
is, to be ignorant of or to oppose the order of things
produces inevitable pain and loss. Real wrong violates
the law of the universe, and the pain that results is
evidence of evil. “That which is crooked cannot be
made straight” (Eccles. i. 15); and that which is hurtful
in its nature cannot be made harmless. Call it what you
please, if the universe is governed by law, to disregard or
defy it is to incur a penalty of some kind.
Mr. T. If we are to gather our evidence from the
52. |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
Bible we must not overlook such statements as the follow-
ing, in the 37th Psalm:-“I have seen the wicked in great
power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.”
Mr. L. Certainly not, let us do justice all round ;
but follow the simile to the end, for the conclusion
would probably not be very satisfactory to the grower
of green bay trees, as the writer adds, “Yet he passed away,
and, lo, he was not ; yea, I sought him, but he could not
be found.” Now a green bay tree that disappeared in this
mysterious and unaccountable manner, like Jonah's gourd,
would not be a profitable tree to cultivate ; and the tem-
porary prosperousness of wrong-doing does not overturn
the theory. The world has many sources of enjoyment,
many “ways of pleasantness” which are not “ways of
wisdom.” The condition of all healthy action is pleasure
of some sort, and that of moral action is no exception to
the rule.
Mr. T. The argument is to me rather perplexing ;
and seems akin to the one carried on many thousand
years ago, in that far-off land of Uz, by Job and
those three friends of his, quaintly called comforters ;
and if they failed to settle it, I fancy it will not be
resolved by us in this nineteenth century of grace, and
in this pleasant valley of Arkdale. Job's friends (and
the word friend is not the least ambiguous we have met
with) argued that he must have perpetrated Some great
crimes because he suffered so severely, but they were
wrong both in fact and theory.
Mr. L. I don't deny that the question is a thorny one,
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 53
and that it needs the patience of Job to digest all that has
been said upon it. Job's friends appear to have erred in
assuming that all pain is the punishment of moral Wrong-
doing. Now, every one of Job's calamities might have
happened in the ordinary course of things. The Bedouins
of our time plunder just as the Sabeans and Chaldeans plun-
dered Job; and at the meridian of England, the Sabeans
and Chaldeans who haunt our Exchanges, speculators
and schemers, Swoop down upon our possessions, and
carry them off as ruthlessly as their nomadic predecessors.
The lightning too commits ravages now as it did then ; the
wind still prostrates houses and overthrows the inmates;
and “sore boils" continue to afflict mankind; but we have
learned in all these cases that the persons suffering such
things are not to be reckoned sinners above others (Luke
xiii. 2), for it is possible that each one of the ills, by
proper precautions, might have been prevented. Despising
or neglecting trivial things may produce indefinite evil,
and to despise or defy moral conditions may be the most
fatal folly of all. But in such a tangled world as this, the
consequences of actions are not always to be traced ; and
yet the rule that governs them is laid down with great
precision by that interlocutor in the Book of Job who alone
escapes censure. Elihu says, “If they obey and serve him,
they shall spend their days in prosperity and their years in
pleasures: but if they obey not, they shall perish by the
sword, and they shall die without knowledge.” We have
no right to assume that these words point to any super-
natural consequences; on the contrary, we may conclude
54 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
that they describe matters of fact which had come under
the speaker's own observation, or had been inculcated upon
him by those who had taken note of them ; for if the fact
be as he puts it, there is no reason why it should not be
observed and recorded.
Mr. T. But then there comes in the consideration of
a future life, where it is expected that the inequalities of
the present state of things will be redressed. Mr. Lecky
adverts to this, and we have spoken of it before.
Mr. L. The language on this subject in the Book of
Job is mostly of a gloomy character, and the meaning of
words is what they conveyed to those who made use of
them. Illuminate them by any light that has subsequently
dawned, and they may develop far other meaning than those
who used them had any notion of ; and this is an incident of -
language that creates much illusion. A word is a stationary
mark, but the tide of thought rolls higher and higher; and
a careless observer, occupied only with words, assumes
that the old mark represents a uniform and constant
elevation of the water, than which nothing can be more
delusive. Mr. Lecky says, “that the present disposition
of affairs is in many respects unjust ;” and if we adopt
this opinion, what is to prevent our concluding that “the
life to come will be of a piece with it 7” If, here and
now, well-being and well-doing are not bound together in
their nature, what security is there that they will be so in a
future state? If the essential characteristic of well-doing
is not to promote well-being, why, in the infinite future,
should it not be the parent of misery 3 and why should
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 55
the “life to come” be anticipated as a theatre of action,
developing more unalloyed happiness as the result of
clearer knowledge and purer feeling? If action rightly
regulated—extraneous causes apart—be not now the con-
dition of happiness, why should it ever be so 2 The words,
“with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turn-
ing” (James i. 17), express one of the highest ideals of Deity.
Butler says, “ Suppose the invisible world, and the invisible
dispensations of Providence, to be in any sort analogous
to what appears; or that both together make up one uni-
form scheme, the two parts of which—the part which we
See and that which is beyond our observation—are analogous
to each other.”* But how should this be if the prime
characteristic of virtue is not “uniform” here and there?
Butler says again, “Wirtue, to borrow the Christian
allusion, is militant here, and various untoward accidents
contribute to its being often overborne ; but it may combat
with greater advantages hereafter, and prevail completely,
and enjoy its consequent rewards in some future states.”*
Rewards, be it observed, the offspring of its own work,
the product of its own powers, not contingent benefits
bestowed. Butler goes on to say, “One might add, that
suppose all this advantageous tendency of virtue to become
effect amongst one or more orders of creatures, in any dis-
tant scenes and periods, and to be seen by any orders of
vicious creatures throughout the universal kingdom of
God;—this happy effect of virtue would have a tendency,
by way of example, and possibly in other ways, to amend
* Analogy, Part I. chap. iii.
56 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
those of them who are capable of amendment, and being
recovered to a just sense of virtue.” Here is another
passage on the same subject—“Our finding virtue to be
hindered from procuring to itself such superiority and
advantages is no objection against its having, in the
essential mature of the thing, a tendency to procure them.
And the suppositions now mentioned do plainly show
this, for they show that these hindrances are so far from
being necessary that we ourselves can easily conceive
how they may be removed in future states, and full
Scope be granted to virtue. And all these advantageous
tendencies of it are to be considered as declarations
of God in its favour. This, however, is taking a pretty
large compass, though it is certain that, as the material
world appears to be in a manner boundless and immense,
there must be some scheme of Providence vast in propor-
tion to it.” +
Mr. T. There is something grand in these speculations
of Butler, shadowed out as they are in such modest and
moderate words. Of course we are discussing the question
in the province of reason and analogy, and not in that of
revelation.
Mr. L. We are not encroaching upon the domain of
theology, but are keeping on the lower level, and whatever
demands assent by methods of logical proof may be tested
by the same methods. Law and sequence reign every-
where in the region of man's knowledge, and have formed
his mind to the belief of their universal predominance;
* Analogy, Part I. chap. iii.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 57
penetrate far as he may into the past they are never
absent, and the future can only be thought of as under
their rule ; without them prevision and effort would be
unknown, they are the terms that construe to his in-
telligence external phenomena ; applied to mental pheno-
mena they have a deeper significance, and include the
moral effects produced upon sentient agents; man expects
a state of more perfect happiness as the result of more
perfect order; the idea is congruous with his experience,
and has thus established itself; but if it were otherwise,
—if order were not progressive but fortuitous, if it were
the feebler force of the universe yielding up the supremacy
and falling back upon anarchy, if this “battle of the
warrior.”—though “with confused noise, and garments
rolled in blood,”—be here a random and dubious conflict,
man might say with Beatrice in “the Cenci”—
“If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no earth in the void world ;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world !
If all things then should be—
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life
e Whoever yet returned
To teach the laws of death's untrodden realm ?
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now,
Oh whither, whither ?”
Mr. T. To Beatrice, in her utter misery, the constitu-
tion of the world seemed unjust, and she shrank from the
future lest it should be like the present; and there is
58 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
between them a real analogy that warrants inferences from
the one to the other ; but then the facts must be rightly
apprehended, and in a serener atmosphere than Beatrice
was surrounded by they have another aspect, and it is
seen that pain is not undiscriminating and vengeful, but
regulated and remedial discipline.
Mr. L. And if it be discipline its successful action
may work its extinction. Wrong, results both from ignor-
ance and ill-intention, and its consequence is pain, near or
remote ; again we may refer to the Bible. It asserts “the
servant which knew his lord's will, and prepared not him-
self, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten
with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did com-
mit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few
stripes” (Luke xii. 47,48). Now, it seems unreasonable to
beat a man with stripes, few or many, for that of which
he is ignorant, unless we take it for granted that he is a
rational agent, launched on a career of indefinite improve-
ment, in a world where pain is the instrument by which
he is taught and trained. The worth and meaning of true
words is their agreement with facts. “I speak as to wise
men; judge ye what I say” (1 Cor. x. 15); and these
words in St. Luke mean—as the facts are—that stripes
are administered to ignorance and to ill design, and are
few or many according to the nature of the aberration
they are to correct ; now, if the government of the world
be a moral government, it must be uniform, and for the
future tense of the apologue we may, in our reasoning,
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 59
substitute the present, and say not only that he shall be
hereafter beaten, but that he is so now.
Mr. T. Error can never be intentional, and yet pain
may be its unvarying result. Shelley says—
“If I have erred, there was no joy in error,
But pain and insult, and unrest and terror.””
But may not pain indurate the mind?
Mr. L. To us, who only “know in part,” it may
appear to do so. Circumstances interfere with our tests;
nevertheless the world is not a chaos; pain is not purpose-
less, and is not mere torment.
“This dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow would confound me else,
Devised—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,_to evolve,
By new machinery in counterpart,
The moral qualities of man.”f
There is a correspondence between man's subjective
nature and his objective circumstances, and as these are
well or ill adjusted to one another, he is happy or other-
wise, and the conditions of his life are, or are not attained.
It matters not how this law of his life is communicated to
him, whether by reason or by revelation,--he will be right,
as he is at one with it, and his capacity for enjoyment will
be satisfied as he conforms to and comprehends it. Once
more, we have the point stated in precise words in the
Bible—“If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do
* Julian and Maddalo. t The Ring and the Book.
60 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
them” (John xiii. 17). Happiness is a product of the
two factors—knowing and doing ; and is, moreover, the
final cause of them, and throughout, their development is
and should be their end and aim.
Mr. T. (reads). “The plain truth is that no proposition
can be more palpably and egregiously false than the asser-
tion that, as far as this world is concerned, it is invariably
conducive to the happiness of man to pursue the most
virtuous career.” (Page 63.) -
Mr. L. Mr. Lecky has before said—“Happiness is
one of the most indeterminate and indefinable words
in the language.” What, then, does he now mean by it !
“Because sentence against an evil work is not executed
speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set
in them to do evil” (Eccles. viii. 11). The experience of
Solomon—with the dimmest, if any, anticipations of
a future world—is at variance with Mr. Lecky's dictum.
“The sentence against an evil work” must be the bad con-
sequences, near and remote, that it produces; and because
they are not in all cases immediate, “the heart of the sons
of men” foolishly assumes that it is “palpably and egregi-
ously false” to believe that the most “virtuous career" is
“invariably conducive to the happiness of man.”
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky can hardly mean, as a general rule,
that a virtuous career is not the most happy, but that it is
not invariably so.
Mr. L. We cannot dispel the ambiguity of the word
happiness, as Mr. Lecky here uses it ; we may say, man
is so constituted that his powers and functions are fitted
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS, 61
to produce more satisfaction in one way than in another,
and that the greatest amount of Satisfaction is produced
by virtuous actions; and a few exceptions would not in-
validate the rule. Industry is the surest road to wealth,
and idleness to poverty ; yet, if an idle man should grow
rich, and an industrious one poor, we should not consider
the general proposition in any degree weakened. Industry
may be joined to foolishness, and idleness to shrewdness.
The law of gravity is of universal application, and yet an
ignorant observer might occasionally think it had been
suspended because it was counteracted by some other law
that he was not acquainted with ; and so the law that
virtuous actions produce happiness may be apparently
thwarted by the intervention of some other law which has
been overlooked.
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky's proposition is a much more
sweeping one than we have yet noted. He asserts that,
so far as this world is concerned, a virtuous career is riot
even invariably “conducive” to the happiness of man. It
is not single acts he speaks of, but a whole career of virtue,
which he says is not always conducive to happiness.
Surely this is a rash assertion.
Mr. L. If he had said it was not invariably con-
ducive to worldly success, he might have been nearer the
truth, but even then he should show that a man's want of
success was due to his virtues and not to defects of know-
ledge and judgment ; he ought to prove that a man had
on his side all other qualities that conduce to happiness
and success, and that his failure resulted from his virtue ;
62 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
a virtuous disposition does not counterbalance every
deficiency of character, so far as happiness or success is
concerned. But, again, by what right does Mr. Lecky limit
the effects of a virtuous career to this world only 2 is it so
certain that there is no other? and are the hopes and
fears associated with another of no account 2 do they
form no part of this world’s retribution—increasing pleasure
and inflicting pain? for if they do, they must be reckoned
with, like whatever else enters into the composition of happi-
ness, and every grain of social distrust and hatred meted
out to a man who, for his own assumed interest, injures
Society, must be weighed and measured before the final
balance is struck.
Mr. T. (reads). “The possibility of often adding to
the happiness of men by diffusing abroad, or at least sus-
taining, pleasing falsehoods, and the suffering that must
commonly result from their dissolution, can hardly reason-
ably be denied. There is one, and but one, adequate
reason that can always justify men in critically reviewing
what they have been taught. It is the conviction that
opinions should not be regarded as mere mental luxuries ;
that truth should be deemed an end distinct from and
superior to utility, and that it is a moral duty to pursue it
whether it leads to pleasure or whether it leads to pain.”
Mr. L. Mr. Lecky ought to tell us what he means by
the word happiness, which he uses very vaguely. It is clear
enough that men are sometimes under so strong a delusion
“that they believe a lie” (2 Thess. ii. 11); and the lies
are probably “pleasing ;” and their “dissolution” the
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 63
cause of some “suffering.” But surely no one would
contend that it is better, mentally or morally, to believe
a “pleasing” falsehood than an unpalatable truth. No
matter how “pleasing” falsehood may appear, a rational
mind prefers truth. There are in the world hosts of
pleasing lies, which men steadfastly believe and reluctantly
part with. A railway company's accounts may be pleas-
ing, while they are a heap of lies; and it cannot “reasonably
be denied” that much “suffering” results from the “disso-
lution” of such lies; but the “dissolution” of all lies is
only a question of time ; and the happiness diffused
abroad by lies and shams must, Sooner or later, come to a
painful end. Let a man entertain a sufficient number of
pleasing falsehoods, and let their absurdity be sufficiently
marked, and he will presently find himself in a madhouse ;
or let him manage his commercial affairs by pleasing
falsehoods, and his happiness will be of short duration.
Nor can it be supposed that in weightier matters the fate
of pleasing falsehoods, if less traceable, is less destructive.
In reference to man's condition and prospects in this world
it is his “moral duty” to ascertain, as far as may be, what
is truth, for upon the knowledge of it depends his happi-
ness and well-being—
“Seeing ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” ”
A man engages in the pursuit of truth because he loves
it ; he seeks to know, because “knowledge is pleasant”
(Prov. ii. 10). But if the condition of things were reversed
* Shakespeare.
64 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
—if to understand the relations in which he is placed only
discovered and aggravated his wretchedness, and yielded
him no enjoyment and no aid, it would not then be
his “moral duty” to pursue such truth, any more
than it is now a moral duty to torture and torment him-
Self without an object. He has found by experience
that truth and knowledge—and in this sense they are
convertible terms—enable him to comprehend the laws
and relations by which he is surrounded ; and he has
discovered that in proportion as he becomes acquainted
with them, his lot in life is ameliorated and his power
enlarged, and he goes forward with the firm assurance that
this is a condition of things stable and permanent, and
that truth is a possession which ever and everywhere has
its reward. It is not, as Mr. Lecky puts it, “an end dis-
tinct from and superior to utility.” It is because of its
utility, because it is prolific of the means by which happi-
ness is increased and multiplied amongst men, that it is
worthy of being pursued. Show us a knowledge that is
profitless, a truth that is utterly barren of all useful con-
sequences—yielding and paying no tribute to man,—an end
and not a means,—and we may safely affirm that it is
no part of man’s “moral duty” to pursue it. Mr. Lecky
argues that the delusions we cling to in our ignorance are
preferable to the doubt and the struggle which at length
dispel them ; as if to be “clothed and in his right mind,”
in however lowly a garb, were not a nobler thing for a
man, than to be “monarch of all he surveys,” in a
madhouse.
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 65
Mr. T. Admitting that some men mentioned in the
Bible have sought goodness for such rewards as it might
possess or promise, and admitting that sentiments com-
mending this conduct are found in the Bible, is this
such evidence as overturns Mr. Lecky's proposition that
—“in exact proportion as we believe a desire for personal
enjoyment to be the motive of a good act, is the merit of
the agent diminished ?”
Mr. L. It will hardly be denied, whatever Mr. Lecky
may say, that a man acts from the idea of some pleasure
to be derived from the action. As a child, he acts in the
business of learning from the pleasure it gives, or from the
pleasure he receives from the approbation of his parents or
instructors, or perhaps from fear of the pain they may
inflict ; and the habits so formed, if wisely generated, be-
come themselves sources of pleasure. Subsequent steps in
life are made under the same influence, and with the same
result. * , -
Mr. T. The motive to an action then is the idea of
some pleasure to be acquired by our own effort. That a
motive should be the desire of pain is inconceivable,
although Mr. Lecky asserts that the merit of an agent is
diminished just as the desire of personal enjoyment is the
motive of his act.
Mr. L. If men's actions and efforts are designed to
Secure their own advantage, and if the motive is that
which moves to action, then the prospect of advantage
constitutes the motive. Mr. Lecky may despise personal
enjoyment, mankind do not ; but they do differ very widely
F
66 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
as to what constitutes it. The causes of their pleasure or
personal enjoyment are innumerable, and why good actions
should be excluded from the catalogue, or, being sources of
pleasure, why they should not be desired as such, is incon-
ceivable. -
Mr. T. It is reckoned mean and unworthy to act from
interested motives.
Mr. L. It would be very remarkable for any one to
act from motives in which he felt no interest ; the notion
is repugnant, a man must feel interest in what moves him
to act.
Mr. T. The motive, I suppose, is to be regarded solely
as the impulse to action ?
Mr. L. The word is used loosely, but this seems
its proper signification. When Macbeth, meditating the
murder of Duncan, says—
“I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition.”
He implies that the motive which had stimulated him was
flagging, and another motive, which pleased him better, was
getting the mastery of it, he says—
“We will proceed no further in this business.
He hath honour'd me of late ; and I have bought
Golden opinions of all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.”
The golden opinions to be retained by loyal actions were,
for the moment, more pleasurable ideas than the crown of
Duncan to be gotten by murder. The motive to the
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 67
murder was not the pleasure of killing, but the pleasurable
idea of wearing a crown—a thing in no wise immoral ; the
motive that for an instant quelled it was the pleasure
derived from golden opinions ; and whichever motive
finally prevailed, did so by its greater present pleasurable-
ness. He swayed backward and forward as the idea of
one or other pleasure acquired the ascendancy, and neither
of them had strictly a moral quality :
- • * “I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent.”
It was the intent that constituted the guilt, the intention
to obtain by murder the pleasure of a “kingly crown.”
Macbeth did not like the act, it needed the “spur.” of a
powerful motive to overcome his reluctance, and it was
only when the taunts of his wife were thrown into the scale
that the balance turned. Her contemptuous opinion
dashed to pieces the golden opinions that had stayed his
hand, and the motive of ambition did its work.
Mr. T. Each of the motives acting upon him was the
desire of personal enjoyment. The one motive led him to
crime, the other to abstain from it, and the damning fact
against him was, that he sought personal enjoyment by the
injury of others ; but that he should seek and receive it
from the honour conferred upon him by Duncan, and from
the golden opinions of all sorts of people, could not be
derogatory to him. -
Mr. Z. If it is the natural consequence of good acts to
command approbation—to win golden opinions, and if the
approbation of others gives personal enjoyment, can it be
68 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
immoral to desire it 2 or if moral approbation be the effect
of which moral action is the cause, and if this be part of
the order of things, can it be blamable in striving for the
cause to desire also the effect 2
Mr. T. I should say not.
Mr. L. Would you think it derogatory to a moral
agent that he derived happiness from moral action ?
Mr. T. Certainly not.
Mr. L. Or that, finding happiness in moral action, the
motives to it—by reason of their pleasurableness—operated
always promptly and decisively 7 -
Mr. T. I can see nothing derogatory in this. Delight-
ing in moral action as a cause of happiness is the direct
antecedent of delighting in it on account of its morality.
Mr. L. But its causing the happiness and wellbeing
of moral agents is precisely what entitles it to be called
moral. -
Mr. T. But food and clothing do this.
Mr. L. Exactly. But then food and clothing are not
actions; the act of giving food and clothing to the necessi-
tous may be a good action, and so may the industry that
earns them for one's self.
Mr. T. At any rate it is clear a man may find his
happiness in good actions, and may come to think prima-
rily of their goodness, and apparently derive pleasure from
this source alone; but the product is not the less pleasure,
and is caused by something of which it is the proper effect.
Mr. L. It is a mere truism to say that if the effect of
moral action be pleasure, the cause of pleasure is moral
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 69
action; and that if the cause be desirable it is no dis-
paragement to desire the effect.
2-
ſaction performedforthesakeof the pleasureorfor its ownsake?
^ Mr. L. The two become so blended together by good
culture and habit that they are not separable, and that is
Mr. T. To put the question in the shortest way, is the
felt to be pleasurable which is known to be right.
Mr. T. And, under the same culture and conditions,
that is felt to be painful which is known to be wrong.
Mr. L. We buy such things as books and pictures for
the pleasure they give, and this no one disputes; though
how a man should receive pleasure from a printed book
must, to a savage, be a mystery. Now, think of another
group of acts, not the mere personal class, like the buy-
ing of books, but acts bringing us into relation with our
fellow-creatures, who are to us sources of the highest
personal enjoyment. “I was an hungered, and ye gave me
meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a
stranger, and ye took me in : naked, and ye clothed me:
I was sick, and ye visited me : I was in prison, and ye
came unto me” (Matt. xxv. 35). Why may not each of
these acts be a cause of pleasure; and would they be per-
formed if they were for ever as painful as the toothache 2
At first they may be performed from the pleasure of imi-
tating some who are loved and admired. Then follows
the distinct pleasure of alleviating sorrow, and then the
habit of acting contributes its quota. No element may be
exactly discriminated, but the product is properly pleasure.
Mr. T. The full consequences of habit need to be
70 TJTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
ſ
x
|
/
recognised, not only as giving facility of action but as
making it pleasurable; we desire, say, Some improvement
in our own character, or some advancement in life, and
each involves effort in a certain degree painful, but the
pleasurable idea of what is to be gained—the motive, keeps
us steady, and then the effort itself becomes pleasure.
Mr. L. If the continued and persistent doing of what
is not at first pleasing becomes pleasant, why should moral
action be excluded from this law of our nature ? Acting
from habit in morals is not complained of, but when the
habit is converted into pleasure and becomes a motive, it
gets an indifferent name. Education and training, wisely
directed, may form a disposition that responds promptly
to the motives that produce moral actions, and the process
may be one of pleasure, and this result seems to me the
highest triumph of moral training.
Mr. T. Man's activities all yield pleasure greater or
less ; when nature wants a thing done she makes the doing
of it pleasant ; pleasure is not a thing to be rejected, but
selected ; pleasure that satisfies and stays proves itself
suited to our nature and constitution, and may be sought
without any reproach ; our literature boasts of the “Plea-
sures of the Imagination,” the “Pleasures of Hope,” and
the “Pleasures of Memory,” and though
“Pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower—the bloom is shed,
Or like the snowflake on the river,
A moment white—then gone for ever ;””
* Burns.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 71
they are not all of this class; human nature may at times
be content with “husks,” but it has a capacity for feeding
on bread, and finding pleasure in it. -
Mr. L. John Howard, in his quiet home in England,
could not rest because of the miserable wretches immured
in foreign prisons,—the burden of their sorrows oppressed
him, and he devoted himself to their relief. His neighbour,
John Smith, had an eager desire for objects of beauty,
pictures, marbles, and manuscripts; he lived sparingly, he
formed no family ties, he sought no society ; he travelled
far and wide in pursuit of his objects, endured many hard-
ships, and at last, alone and in a foreign land, “in the worst
inn's worst room,” he died. Howard ameliorated the con-
dition of some ruffians and some unfortunates, and human-
ised men's thoughts, and left a noble example. Smith
rescued from destruction an inestimable manuscript and
a priceless picture; by the one he confirmed the hopes and
by the other increased the pleasures of innumerable men,
but this formed no part of his intention. The world rates
these two men differently, and their objects were greatly
different ; but each found a certain pleasure in his work,
and each sacrificed for it something he appreciated less ;
but the purpose of Howard was the loftier one, as the
pleasure received from doing good to one's degraded
fellow-creatures surpasses that received from acts ter-
minating on oneself. Howard's ambition was to do some-
thing for others, Smith thought only of himself.
Mr. T. The Smith's are a large tribe, in whom the
instinct of doing something for themselves is probably
72 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
pretty well developed, but I do not recollect this parti-
cular one,
Mr. L. You will find a memoir of him in the Gentle-
man’s Magazine.
Mr. T. And you say that by original constitution, or
by circumstances, he sought his pleasures in the way you
describe; and that Howard, differently constituted, pursued
different objects, deriving from them the satisfaction they
were fitted to give.
Mr. L. Compel John Howard to devote his life to art
treasures, and existence loses its interest and pleasure ; Com-
pel John Smith to explore prisons and dungeons, and his
life becomes joyless, unless in each case the employment is
one needful for subsistence and is duly paid for. The
pay of mental gratification would keep neither at his work ;
but the ingredient of a needed and substantial stipend over-
comes the obstacle; the work goes on, and gradually becomes
pleasant. Howard and Smith, as stipendiaries, are brought
pretty much to the same level, for their acts have little in
them that is voluntary, and therefore little that is moral ;
each works for himself, and has his reward. The work is
done for the wages, and has, perhaps, some meed of merit.
But moral approbation bestowed upon moral effort is also
substantial enjoyment to him “who can receive it ;” and in
the last resort a man has his own approbation when the
conditions of his mental and moral constitution are satis-
fied, though the world be against him.
Mr. T. The idea of a reward is mostly associated with
some extraneous thing, and the word is rather spoiled for
expressing more refined gratification.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. - 73
Mr. L. We may get too refined in our language. I
know you don’t like being knocked down by the sledge
hammer of authority, but as we are considering what, after
all, is only the dictum of Mr. Lecky, the dictum of St. Paul
may be at least worth as much, and he says plainly—“so
5
run that ye may obtain ;” obtaining therefore is to be the
motive ; and he then adds “every one that striveth for the
mastery is temperate in all things; now they do it for a cor-
ruptible crown, and we for an incorruptible.” Whatever
you may think of the comparison, the meaning is not to be
mistaken, the athlete's object was a corruptible crown,
the apostle's an incorruptible, such is his own confession.
Mr. T. A reward of this magnitude offers of course
an overwhelming motive
Mr. L. That is not the question raised by Mr. Lecky,
but this—Can the motive of personal enjoyment operate at
all in moral action, without deteriorating the merit of the
agent 2 And the fact overlooked by Mr. Lecky is, that an
incorruptible crown may be a mental state which creates
and controls the sources of happiness. The language in
which ideas on this subject are expressed is that of man's
earlier and ruder notions ; but the facts of his life and his
faculties being at One, happiness ensues, larger capacities
are developed, and the motives to expand and invigorate
them operate unceasingly, whilst at every step they pro-
mote and stimulate personal enjoyment. -
Mr. T. The machinery of man's nature being adapted
to its work, must have its counterpart in the condition of
things and the rule of right under which he is placed, and
74 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
the harmonious interaction of these is what you mean by
happiness or personal enjoyment ; the desire therefore of
this must be the indispensable prelude of man's improve-
ment at every stage of his existence, from the lowest to the
highest.
Mr. L. If the desire of personal enjoyment does, as
Mr. Lecky says, deteriorate moral action, what is the goal
to which human nature is tending ? If conformity to physi-
cal law means personal enjoyment “after its kind,” why
should adaptation to moral law have a different effect 2 and
if the one is desirable why not the other ? Mr. Lecky fails
to discriminate between personal enjoyment and the causes
of it ; but the causes are sought for their effects, and the
causes may be anything, from a corruptible crown of parsley
to an incorruptible one of power and activity and moral
conquest. Of duty, Wordsworth says—
“Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace ;
Nor know we anything so fair,
As is the smile upon thy face.”
Mr. T. (reads), “Among the many wise sayings which
antiquity ascribed to Pythagoras, few are more remarkable
than his division of virtue into two distinct branches—to
seek truth, and to do good.”
Mr. L. One scarcely sees the remarkable merit of this
division. To seek truth is to do good after a particular
manner. Doing good is the genus, of which seeking truth
is a species. It is comprehended within it, as a greater
includes a less. Virtue therefore, according to this defini-
TJTILITARLAN THEORY OF MORALS. 75
tion, is doing good; but good is a relative term, the bound-
aries of which must be settled by the condition and cir-
cumstances of the beings towhom it is applicable. Where
“they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” all the
good that arises here from the conjugal relationship would
be incomprehensible; and so it might be with other sorts of
good. To do good we must know what it is, in relation
to the persons who are to be affected by it. As the
faculties and constitution vary, the relations may vary
also. Good must represent an equation. Man is seeking
truth when he investigates his various relations, and
he attains it just as his subjective ideas correspond to
objective realities, and he obtains good as this correspond-
ence is worked out in his life. To do good needs not only
the disposition to do it, but also a knowledge of what it is,
for the disposition without the knowledge has not sufficed
to keep the straight road.
Mr. T. (reads). “No discussions, I conceive, can be
more idle than whether slavery, or the slaughter of
prisoners in war, or gladiatorial shows, or polygamy, are
essentially wrong. They may be wrong now ; they were
not so once.”
Mr. L. This is a bold assertion for an intuitive moral-
ist who maintains the immutability of moral distinctions,
but whose theory here has so far perplexed him that
the questions it ought to solve he pronounces more
idle than any he can conceive. According to Mr. Lecky,
cock-fighting and bull-baiting, though they may be
wrong now, were not so once ; and Mr. Lecky has
76 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
here grown particularly cautious in his language ; he
does not positively assert that these things are wrong
even now, all that he says is, they may be. Slavery may
be wrong now—it was not so once One would like to be
informed when the transition from right to wrong took
place. Cowper imbibed his hatred of slavery whilst it had
a most respectable name ; just when his future friend
John Newton of Olney was a slave trader, and Clarkson
denounced it in the face of hostile Courts and Parliaments.
Was it the Emancipation Act that made it morally wrong
to hold slaves, or was the Act passed because it had
been discovered that, economically and morally, slavery
was a bad institution ? If this latter were the fact, then
slavery was always evil, unless the constitution of
things has changed, and unless it was once good for
men to possess absolute and uncontrolled power over
other men and women. If neither of these pro-
positions be true, then slavery was always one of those
clumsy contrivances which, as producing a plentiful crop
of evil—moral and material—is “essentially wrong; ”
If Imperial Rome possessed a Clarkson or a Granville
Sharp, who deplored the fallen condition of his country,
and knew that—
“Self-abasement paved the way,
To villain-bonds and despot sway”—
he might have seen in the barbarities of the arena both a
cause and an effect of the evil; but we learn from Mr.
Lecky that he would have been mistaken. The Roman
aristocracy, for their own purposes, pandered to the vile
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS, 77
taste of the Roman populace ; and Mr. Lecky tells
us that these Roman holidays were not wrong. The
indestructible interests of human nature have better in-
terpreters than Mr. Lecky. Prejudices may warp men's
minds, and ignorance may cloud them, but a remnant
remains (like the seven thousand in Israel) who refuse
to bow the knee to the Baals of the period, and who
are not imposed upon by falsehoods and shams ; power
and wealth may dazzle the multitude, and win a slavish
applause to evil deeds, but the day of reckoning comes,
and a solitary Elijah is seldom wanting to brave the tyrant
of the hour—
- “And tell him that
His evil is not good.” -
The hand that chiselled the dying Gladiator might have
been that of a contemporary, instinct with all the indig-
nation which glows in Byron's immortal stanzas, for Byron
does but translate into words the feelings and conceptions
which he finds in the sculptor's work—
“I see before me the Gladiator lie ;
He leans upon his hand, his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony,
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low—
And thro’ his side the last drops, ebbing slow
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one,
Like the first of a thunder shower ; and now
The arena swims around him—he is gone,
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch
who won.
He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away ;
78 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize :
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay,
There were his young barbarians all at play :
There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday—
All this rush'd with his blood ; shall he expire,
And unavenged 7 Arise ! ye Goths, and glut your ire | " .
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky actually extenuates the “gladiato-
rial shows,” by alleging that they “were originally a form
of human sacrifice adopted through religious motives.”
Mr. L. This sort of apology only adds to the confusion ;
if we assume that the gladiatorial shows were thus insti-
tuted, does religiousness of motive cure the “deep damna-
tion ” of an evil deed ? Wholesale slaughter was not a
whit the less devilish because it was done to propitiate a
devil who had usurped the place and name of a god. A
thing utterly evil, notwithstanding what Mr. Lecky calls
the “religious motives” in which it originates, remains
evil; roasting a man for his belief or disbelief is unalter-
ably evil, though it were done under the influence of
motives the most religious. Things are what they are, be
the superstitions of men never so abject—
“Let’s write good angel on the devil's horn,
'Tis not the devil's crest.” ”
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky fits into his system another piece of
barbaric virtue. He says, “The rude nomadic life of savages
rendering impossible the preservation of aged and helpless
members of the tribe, the murder of parents was regarded
* Measure for Measure.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 79
as an act of mercy both by the murderer and the
victim.”
Mr. L. The exigencies of Mr Lecky's theory must
have pressed him very hard before he could have advanced
such arguments in support of it. Men with an innate
moral sense, it seems, regarded murder as mercy, and the
murdered participated in the mistake, but after all they
were perhaps not mistaken, and the brutal starvation to
which the “helpless” were subjected, might advantageously
be exchanged for the repose of death ; which means that
the morality of “savages” made life less desirable than
death. What a mystification comes of these abstract words.
“Benevolence,” Mr. Lecky tells us, “is always a virtuous
disposition,” and surely “mercy” is not less so, and when
it leads to systematic murder we must conclude that
murder is a virtue; the murder of Napoleon's soldiers at
Jaffa was accounted by him an act of mercy, when their
preservation became impossible. What an admirable
disguise words furnish for all manner of hypocrisies.
Instead of Mr Lecky's word “impossible,” read in-
convenient, and the argument falls to the ground.
There are in civilised life “nomadic savages,” who
assure Boards of Guardians that it is “impossible” for
them to provide for their “aged and helpless” parent,
as the law requires, and as killing them is no longer
reckoned an “act of mercy,” these Savages are obliged
either to undergo some privation themselves, and thus
contributes to the “preservation” of their helpless parents
2)
or they are made to expiate the “impossible " condition
80 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
of their affairs by a few months' residence, with hard
labour, in one of her Majesty's gaols. If Mr Lecky's
“nomadic savages,” taking stock of their food, and finding
not enough of it for all, quietly murdered the helpless—
young or old—the act was a fiendish one; for those who
in this fashion murder to-day will to-morrow as ruthlessly
do it again for any cause or for none. But there was no
calm inquiry and judicial murder, the “helpless” were the
weak, whose labour no longer left the strong leisure to
loaf about, and weakness had the misfortune to consume
food instead of producing it ; the cupboard of the Savage
was bare, his appetite fierce, his passion unrestrained, and
his “helpless” parent or partner paid the penalty, and
then—
“You might see
The longings of the cannibal arise.”
Mr. T. (reads). “Nearly all moralists would acknow-
ledge that a few instances of immorality would not pre-
vent the excursion train from being on the whole a good
thing. All would acknowledge that very numerous in-
stances would more than counter-balance its advantages.
The impossibility of drawing in such cases a distinct
line of division is no argument against the intuitive
moralist, for that impossibility is shared to the full extent
by his rival.” - -
Mr. L. As Mr. Lecky cannot determine the question
by an intuitive standard, but is compelled to calculate the
balance of advantages, he conforms to the rule I contend
for. Some cases are easier of determination than others,
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 81
and the process by which the conclusion is arrived at
may often be overlooked, but if we are ever compelled to
balance good and evil to get at a result, why is the method
not always available? One man will tell you shortly that
to work on Sunday is to break the Sabbath, and there is
an end of it ; but even he is obliged to discriminate
between work of different kinds —allowing One Sort,
and forbidding another ; so that his ultimate standard
must be authority or utility; and words of authority
must be measured by their agreement with things, which
are the final, most cogent, and inflexible of interpreters.
Mr. T. (reads). “The moralists I am defending assert
that we possess a natural power of distinguishing between
the higher and lower parts of our nature.”
Mr. L. In the course of Mr. Lecky's first chapter
he uses these words— higher and lower, as applied
to man's nature, some twenty or thirty times, without
ever explaining what he means by them. High and low
are but figurative words applied to moral subjects, and we
want to know what is the specific quality on account of
which they are so distinguished. To say merely of
man's enjoyments they are higher or lower throws little
light upon them ; one sort may be more social than another,
they may be more durable, more under control, may
have more variety and less satiety ; they are therefore
higher because they are more beneficial in their conse-
quences:
- “Man might live at first
The animal life ; but is there nothing more ?
G
82 DTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
In due time, let him critically learn
How he lives ; and the more he gets to know
Of his own life's adaptabilities
The more joy-giving will his life become :
The man who hath this quality is best 1” ”
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky says “we possess a natural
power;” and “we,” for the purposes of his argument, must
mean mankind; but in the early stages of society the
muscular part of man's nature is mostly reckoned higher
than any other; he has certainly a natural power of “ dis-
tinguishing between" strength and weakness, he finds it
“excellent to have a giant's strength,” but has he primi-
tively any notion that it is hateful and “ tyrannous to use
it like a giant?” -
Mr. L. I should say not. But suppose we want to
graduate this scale of higher or lower to our own social
circumstances, where are we to look for the “natural
power ?” we may assume that what is morally right is
higher than its opposite, and we ask, is it morally right for
a man to marry his deceased wife's sister And if we
cannot decide the question by an appeal to some law
of acknowledged obligation, we must try it by an appeal to
the circumstances of society, and to the various interests
affected by it, and we conclude it is moral or immoral as
one or other set of considerations preponderate. If, during
a lengthened period, the law has forbidden such marriages,
then the feeling of the people, what would be called their
“intuitive perception,” would pronounce them wrong; but
* Cleon, by R. Browning.
UTILITARIAN THEORY, OF MORALS. 83
let the law be altered under the force of discussion and ex-
ample, and in a certain time it will come to pass that such
marriages will be contracted without any consciousness of
wrong—the former “intuitive perception” notwithstanding.
Mr. Lecky has said that “to the great majority of mankind
it will probably appear, in spite of the doctrine of Paley, that
no multiple of the pleasure of eating pastry can be equiva-
lent to the pleasure derived from a generous action. It is
not that the latter is so inconceivably intense. It is that it
is of a higher order.” Mr. Lecky is sadly addicted to grand
assertions. What may appear to the majority of mankind
is more easy to affirm than to prove, and I fancy that to
hungry Savages the eating of a quantity of pastry would
be a greater pleasure than remaining hungry and gene-
rously bestowing the pastry upon fellow-savages. A well-
regulated mind, not goaded by an empty stomach, would
Soon decide between a generous action and the pleasure of
eating pastry, and no doubt the former kind of pleasure is of
a “higher order” than the latter, but how is the comparison
to be made 2 If generous actions were always injurious in
their operations and their results, who would perform
them? Just as if eating pastry invariably produced
disease and death, no one would touch it.
Mr. T. The eating of pastry is a solitary pleasure, the
doing a generous act a social one, and the social is worth
more than the solitary, as “two are better than one’’
(Eccles. iv. 9), but there must be a trial before there can
be a verdict ; the pleasure of eating, to young children, is
commonly greater than the pleasure of being generous; the
84 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
latter has to be cultivated, and may be partially inherited,
but the normal instinct is -
“That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can :”
what affects the individual is felt first, what concerns others
comes into play later.
Mr. L. Generosity implies that there are in the world
wants and pains and the means of alleviating them, and that
a certain feeling is associated with the act; cancel any of the
items and generosity changes or ceases; or, if giving created
positive mischief, the impulse in a reasonable mind would
be restrained by the same principle that now forbids us to
seek gratification by the injury of another ; a moral action
is one that does more good than harm, and when the
pleasure of being generous produces an overbalance of bad
consequences it is no longer a virtue but a weakness; the
experience of mankind on this subject is embodied in the
maxim that we should be just before we are generous,
which means that the consequences of just actions are of
more value to society than the consequences of generous
ones; and if we had instruments that could as accurately
and certainly measure other kinds of actions, we should
have as little doubt respecting them,
Mr. T. These two sets of actions—the generous and the
just—have been observed and estimated, and it has been
found out that the just ones are of more value than the
generous ones, and the conclusion appears in the form of a
maxim, and you say that experience can as truly teach the
value of other actions, and that such value is, as in this
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 85
case, their utility. A moral action you say is one that
does more good than harm ; but then what is meant by the
word good 7
Mr. L. The word good, as I understand it, expresses
some special quality of objects affecting man's sentient
nature ; man only knows these objects as they affect him ;
they do not always affect him in the same degree and
manner, hence the various estimates he forms of them ; in
some departments of life the estimates are tolerably
constant, the relations are simple, and the results uniform ;
physical good is much the same to everybody, but as
relations become more complex differences arise ; when we
get out of the sphere of the simply physical into that where
living agents act upon one another, the conditions are more
involved ; the problem, however, is still the same—to bring .”
the relations into harmony; or, in other words, to get out of
them the most of what they possess which is felt to be good;
the word good here standing for something more than mere
physical good, and comprehending whatever the profounder
relations of sentient minds is able to bestow ; physical
good the individual chooses for himself, subject to physical
law; but when his actions affect the welfare of others their
estimates must be reckoned with, and the larger the
number affected the more arduous the reckoning ; the
problem is not altered, only complicated; the sentient
nature of an ever-increasing number has to be cared for
and considered in its reciprocal action; the relations include
new consequences, and the rules that regulate them under-
go a corresponding change, but the end is always the same,
86 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
—good, derivable from the relations; and it is found as before,
in their adjustment to each other; more subtle and delicate
machinery may be at work,+a Sentient nature of wider
compass, but objects suited to it exist, which it seeks, and
those which confer the greatest benefits are most valuable
or useful; utility, in its widest signification, becomes the
ultimate law that regulates action, and useful is a name
for the cause of good.
Mr. T. So that, when Mr. Lecky objected to utility as
the measure of virtue, because it would imply, as he said,
that a fruitful field or a navigable river being useful would
possess the element of virtue, he might equally have objected
to the word good, for if a field is useful the crop may be
good, and if a navigable river is useful the water of it may
be good.
Mr. L. Certainly, the one word is open to the same
objection as the other, for they both represent multifarious
things, and the things most useful as developing in their
Order and proportion the powers and relations of a living
agent must be causes of his greatest good ; the same things
might not be the greatest good of a differently organised
being, for that will be its good which is adapted to the
organisation. -
Mr. T. The word is frequently used in an abstract
way, as if there were good apart from good things. Mark
Antony says “the evil that men do lives after them, the
good is oft interred with their bones,” and in this form the
word suggests the idea of good distinct from good acts and
their consequences. Dr. McCosh has this strange proposi-
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. - 87
tion, “The good is good, altogether independent of the
pleasure it may bring.”
Mr. L. Good is a word made by man to express some
quality of the objects that affect him, and it. is clear he
could not have had the word until he had the previous
experience of something to which he could apply it, and
this was of course the pleasure or feeling produced in his
mind. Independent of this feeling or pleasure the word
has no meaning ; a thing may indeed be good independent
of the pleasure it brings to particular agents; but it is a
misnomer to call that good which brings no pleasure to
any Sentient nature in the universe. In every one of its
phases good is a name for what brings pleasure to sentient
agents, and apart from or independent of such agents the
word would be unintelligible. It expresses a relation
between what is subjective and what is objective, and
when the relation is destroyed there is nothing to be
named ; if we are dealing with a perceiving agent, and
naming things as perceived or felt by it, when the per-
ception is abolished nothing can be predicated.
Mr. T. Resistance is a word that expresses the feel-
ing received from an object we call hard, annihilate the
feeling, and the word hard would have no place in our
vocabulary.
Mr. L. So far as we know good, it is an attribute of
things as they affect sentient agents, using the word in its
largest meaning. Hooker says, “The end for which we
are moved to work is sometimes the goodness which we
* The Intuitions of the Mind, Book IV. s. 111.
88 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
conceive of the very working itself, without any further
respect at all, and the cause that procureth action is the
mere desire of action, no other good besides being thereby
intended. . . . All things are somewhat in possibility,
which as yet they are not in act. And for this cause there
is in all things an appetite or desire whereby they incline
to something which they may be, and when they are it
they shall be perfecter than they now are. All which
perfections are contained under the general name of good-
ness. And because there is not in the world anything
whereby another may not some way be made perfecter,
therefore all things that are, are good.””
Mr. T. They are good as satisfying some part of man's
nature, and whatever does so, high or low, he calls good.
Mr. L. And moral good is this particular relation at
its best, bestowing the most good, through the appropriate
means; we become acquainted with moral good mainly
through laws and rules which experience has discovered
and enjoined, and the reason or foundation of them is
the well-being of those who are affected by them. Hooker
calls his great work, “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,”
and though so limited a subject, it opens with the dis-
cussion of the nature of good, tracing law to the desire of
good; he says, “To return to our former intent of dis-
covering the natural way whereby rules have been found
out concerning the goodness wherewith the will of man
ought to be moved in human actions; as everything
naturally and necessarily doth desire the utmost good and
* Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 89
greatest perfection whereof nature hath made it capable,
even so man. Our felicity, therefore, being the object and
accomplishment of our desire, we cannot choose but wish
and covet it. All particular things which are subject
unto action the will doth so far forth incline unto, as
Reason judgeth them better for us, and consequently the
more available to our bliss. If Reason err, we fall into
evil, and are so far forth deprived of the general perfection
we seek; seeing, therefore, that for the framing of men's
actions the knowledge of good from evil is necessary, it
only resteth that we search how this may be had.
We know things either as they are in themselves or as
they are in mutual relation one to another. The know-
ledge of that which man is, in reference unto himself and
other things in relation unto man, I may justly term the
mother of all those principles which are as it were edicts,
statutes, and decrees, in that law of nature whereby
human actions are framed. . . . Good doth follow unto
all things by observing the course of their nature; and, on
the contrary side, evil by not observing it.”
Mr. T. Our friend Dr. Twilight has some super-
sensitive idea of good which is offended at this sort of
definition, although he does not contest the assertion that
“every creature of God is good” (1 Tim. iv. 4), and that
creature here is a very wide word.
Mr. L. Like many others, Dr. Twilight seems to think
that the abstract is something more than man's method
of manipulating the concrete, and that the abstract con-
tains some ingredient not to be found in the concrete,
90 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
but no such thing can be known. Hooker, you will
observe, applies the word good to whatever is desirable,
and the abstract is goodness—which is therefore desirable-
ness; and, if we are consistent in our language, moral
good is desirable for the same reason that other good is so—
because it conduces to the wellbeing of sentient agents.
Mr. T. Things then are good or evil as sentient agents
perceive them to be so ; but the perception does not con-
stitute them good or evil. It is only the means of be-
coming acquainted with it. Actions, for example, have the
quality of doing good or harm, and are named accordingly;
but the naming may be done loosely and ignorantly, and
the sentient agent, properly instructed, finds by degrees a
true standard ; the alteration is on the side of the sentient
agent, and is brought about by the teaching of facts, by
the
“Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
Mr. L. What the sentient agent means by the words
good or evil, can only be known as we know the particular
things the words represent to his mind. When St. Paul,
arguing for the existence of a Supreme ruler of the world,
said, “He left not himself without witness, in that he did
good :” He explained the word by the facts that “He gave
us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts
with food and gladness” (Acts xiv. 17). This is tangible
good, to be appreciated by the senses; other good, to be
otherwise appreciated, reveals itself by appropriate conse-
quences. If, as Hooker argues, man may be the perfecter
by whatever good is to be found in the world, moral good
DTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 91
is that by which he is made most perfect, and therefore
most happy, and for this reason only it is entitled to the
name of good.
Mr. T.
“There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would man observingly distil it out.” +
This sentiment does not confuse the two things together;
but points to that chemistry of mind by which helps are
distilled from impediments and hindrances—things in a
certain sense evil; the word evil includes so large a class
of objects that when it stands alone it is not always easy
to say which sort it refers to.
Mr. L. The fundamental notion conveyed by it is of
something antagonistic to human interests; whatever be
the form, this is the substance. “Things evil” may be any-
thing which man's nature finds to be injurious. Hooker
says “man’s observation of the law of his nature is right-
5
eousness;” and the term law of his nature, taken com-
prehensively, and including every subordinate rule, fur-
nishes a standard of right, the disregard of which, sooner
or later, brings evil of every sort.
Mr. T. Dr. Twilight has a violent antipathy to such
words as law and nature, when they assume any relation-
ship to a word like righteousness.
Mr. L. Dr. Twilight is rather narrow and technical, and
is apt to be “mastered by a modern term,” and I prefer
Hooker, who further says, “The nature of goodness being
thus ample, a law is properly that which reason in such
* King Henry W.
92 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
sort defineth to be good that it must be done. And the
law of reason or human nature is that which men by dis-
course of natural reason have rightly found out themselves
to be all for ever bound unto in their actions.” “.. If this
be true of moral good, it is not less true of other good ;
each has to be found out by natural reason, which herein
has final jurisdiction.
Mr. T. And in many cases the “wayfaring man,
though a fool, cannot err therein.” What is good he
knows to be so, and what is evil is equally plain.
Mr. L. This is true in the limited sense we have
remarked before ; for man has drugged and sophisticated
his mind until he has mistaken the plain qualities of
things—he has called evil good, and good evil; he has put
darkness for light, and light for darkness; he has put bitter
for sweet, and sweet for bitter (Isaiah v. 20). The things
had these palpable properties, they were injurious or they
were beneficial, and he dealt with each as he should have
dealt with its opposite ; what was bitter he pronounced to
be sweet, and cherished with a fanatical zeal. To an
uncorrupted sense the bitterness was patent and the dark-
ness too ; an opinion or a belief that hindered his good he
has clung to with a blind devotion ; his theories have been
at war with facts, but he has disregarded the facts; he has
even fed on ashes (Isaiah xliv. 20), protesting they were a
wholesome and succulent food.
Mr. T. And the men who asserted that they were
arid and indigestible were persecuted, and made to expiate
* Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 93
3)
their temerity “in dens and caves of the earth,” and in
dungeons and fetters. - -
Mr. L. As if the world were already so full of know-
ledge and happiness that it needed no more ; whereas,
generation after generation, it has been amenable to the
reproach of Isaiah, “they have not known nor under-
stood” (chap. xliv. 18). * -
Mr. T. The men of whom this was written were
makers of wooden idols, who were distinctly derided for
their work, which was proved, moreover, to be palpably
absurd ; yet the logic may not have convinced any of
them, for delusions of this sort lose no credit with their
votaries because they are proved to be unreasonable.
Mr. L. Nay, they often enough induce an incompe-
tence to deal with facts, and this seems to have been their
effect on the persons Isaiah describes, for he affirms
they had “neither knowledge nor understanding to say
ſº is there not a lie in my right hand?” (Isaiah
xliv. 19, 20). Now a lie is just a vital disagreement be-
tween some fact and some representation of it.
Mr. T. And though the representation should be
believed by all the world, it would not, according to your
definition, be the less a lie; the universal belief of the im-
mobility of the earth would thus be believing a lie ; and
though the word is often applied more restrictedly, the
writer whom you have quoted evidently uses it with a
large signification.
Mr. L. The word commonly means a representation
intentionally false ; but this is not the whole of its
94. UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
meaning, for we have before seen that men are sometimes
in the mental condition of believing a lie (2 Thess. ii. 11),
which must be the believing what is contrary to fact and
truth. Any belief, therefore, of this kind, is not inappro-
priately called a lie.
Mr. T. Even though the means may not exist of
proving it to be so, nor the attitude of mind be formed
which could apprehend the truth ?
Mr. L. Until the facts were reasoned out the idea of
the earth's form and motion could not be entertained, and
what would be called the common sense notion would
universally prevail, until new and better evidence dis-
placed it. -
Mr. T. And if the new and better evidence had not
been forthcoming, the false representation must have con-
tinued to be the common belief; and so the large mass
of men's ideas, which cannot be brought into contact with
the objective existence they are assumed to represent, may
very widely diverge from the reality.
Mr. L. And there is no guarantee against this, except
in the prevalence of the “knowledge and understanding,”
appealed to by the writer we have quoted ; for knowledge
is acquaintedness with facts, and understanding the power
of construing them. It is not necessary to suppose that the
men who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
did so of evil design; it has often enough been done
“ignorantly,” and the means did not exist of knowing better,
which is just saying, intuitive knowledge did not exist,
for means are the processes and steps by which man
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS, 95
arrives at knowledge, whilst intuitions are direct and
immediate.
Mr. T. St. Paul asserts of certain men that they were
“without excuse,” because that which it behoved them to
know might be “clearly seen” and “understood by the
things that are made” (Rom. i. 20); moral information for
the guidance of their lives was to be gathered by observa-
tion and inference, and to be understood, and the implica-
tion is, that if information and intelligence were not in
equilibrium, the men would stand “excused.”
Mr. L. And this is the universal postulate underlying
every real notion of moral blame—
“Call ignorance my sorrow, not my sin.” +
but if “the things that are made" have given to man an
uncertain sound, the words, which so poorly adumbrate
the things, increase the liability to error;
“Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.” ”
Man often wrongs the thought, missing the mediate word,
and has probably done so when most fiercely anathematis-
ing whoever has distrusted the particular mediate word
by which he has designated some specially intangible
thought.
Mr. T. We have now some idea how the strata of the
earth were deposited and dislocated, but to speak of them
as “things that are made,” gives no information as to the
method; if we would learn how they came into the present
* The Ring and the Book.
96 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
state we are not helped at all by the words “they were
made,” which are indeed an answer to another question ;
the word “made" does no doubt convey the idea of some-
thing put together as it stands, and not the idea of a
lengthened process, such as there is reason to believe the
earth has undergone. The facts must be disclosed before
we can know them, and the words which antedate the
revelation of the facts are mostly mere symbols, convey-
ing no real ideas. -
Mr. L. The idea represented by the word “made,”
could only be such an idea as the facts they were acquainted
with enabled the men who used it to express, and just in
so far as the idea differed from the form of the fact it was
erroneous. A recent writer says, “a true proposition is one
which excites in the mind thoughts or images correspond-
ing to those which would be excited in the mind of a per-
son so situated as to be able to perceive the facts to which
the proposition relates.”* The man in whose mind a pro-
position does not produce this effect is, so far as the
variation exists, in error, and a word that excites an idea
unlike the reality, is also a source of error. Those who
called evil good, and good evil, might at some time be cor-
rected, but there are words that cannot be compared with
what they stand for, and which in different minds may
always represent divergent ideas.
Mr. T. .
“In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice ;
* Indian Evidence Act, Introduction.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 97.
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law ; but 'tis not so above ;
There is no shuffling—there the action lies
In his true nature.” ”
An action then has a true nature, call it what you will,
and does not depend, as Mr. Lecky puts it, on chronology;
and the question is, Can it even here act contrary to its
true nature by any amount of shuffling 2 Being bitter can
it have the property of what is sweet And what are its
properties but its effects upon the condition of man?
Mr. L. -
“Man’s mind—what is it but a convex glass
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky 1’’t
The scattered points, the phenomena of life reflected in
his mind, are the materials of his knowledge; they are
the causes, of which his feelings and thoughts are the
effects ; they may not create feeling and thought, but
awaken and fashion them ; and if there be any contrariety
between the two sets of things, feeling and thought must
modify themselves, for the phenomena will not alter to
accommodate them. Man's business is to ascertain what
the phenomena mean, and from the individual facts to
work out a theory that corresponds with them ; to look
below the surface into their real import ; to “judge not
according to appearance ;”
and in morals appearance is no
more to be depended upon than in other things.
Mr. T. We often speak of the mind as though it were
* Hamlet.
+ The Ring and the Book.
H
98 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
a congeries of faculties, not a homogenious power working
upon different materials, according to their nature and pro-
perties. It is necessary to have names for the different
operations of the mind, but not to suppose that the mind
itself is divided into separate faculties ; in the acquisition
of knowledge different processes are required. The constant
use of language implying that the mind is a cluster of
faculties is no doubt misleading; and the words moral
sense and common sense, though capable of an intelligible
meaning, are often employed in a loose way, as if there
were some department in the mind corresponding to them.
Mr. L. The simplest and truest expression is that the
man does this or that, he reasons, imagines, or feels; the
compound nature of man does the work, but the facts pre-
sent themselves under different aspects, and so are handled
in different ways, Common sense, one would think, should
mean the common agreement upon Some subject by a num-
ber of men having equal opportunities and means of judging;
take any large number of men possessing the same endow-
ments, which they have exercised under the same circum-
stances, and their agreement on any subject may properly
enough be called their common sense—the common con-
clusion they have arrived at; but words like these, originally
ambiguous, pick up new meanings as they go along, and so
common sense, in common language, becomes a faculty or
department of the mind; and the words moral sense may
have had their signification similarly modified.
Mr. T. But neither such common sense nor moral sense
ensures rectitude of judgment. Men's common sense
TJTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 99
assured them that the earth was stationary and flat, and
their moral sense (in your application of the term) has been
equally misled. *
Mr. L. No one supposes that the common sense or
agreement of mankind respecting the figure or motion of
the earth is of any value, and their notions in morals have
often had no better foundation. In her conversation with
Emilia, Desdemona Says—
“Beshrew me, if I would do such a wrong
For the whole world.”
To which Emilia replies—“Why, the wrong is but a wrong
i' the world; and having the world for your labour, 'tis a
wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it
right.” So long as right is only convention, Emilia's con-
clusion is just ; but if this be a world governed by law,
things cannot be dealt with in so arbitrary a fashion.
Mr. T. And the proofs which alone are admissible are
the results dominant in the world.
Mr. L. “By their fruits ye shall know them ;” prin-
ciples that produce good fruits are good principles, and
good fruits are the dispositions and deeds which bring
durable and controllable happiness. If some men deny
that such dispositions and deeds yield happiness, we cannot
help it—they may also deny the figure and motion of the
earth, but it moves notwithstanding; and is it less certain
that well-being is the final cause of well-doing, or that the
law which enjoins well-doing can only vindicate itself by
producing fruits of well-being? - * - -
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky's argument reminds me of one or two
100 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
extracts from Butler which I found in your common-
place book. He says—“Were treachery, violence, and
injustice, no otherwise vicious than as foreseen likely to
produce an overbalance of misery to society, then, if in any
case a man could procure to himself as great advan-
tage by an act of injustice as the whole foreseen inconve-
nience likely to be brought upon others by it would
amount to, such a piece of injustice would not be faulty
or vicious at all, because it would be no more than in any
other case for a man to prefer his own satisfaction to an-
other's in equal degrees.” What do you say to this?
Mr. L. One differs from Bishop Butler with very
great hesitation, because he is so cautious and profound a
thinker. But the argument he puts here seems seriously
defective ; first, we have a right to ask, as a matter of
fact, Whether it has not been proved that injustice is dis-
tinctly injurious to men 2 For, if so, the “misery" it is
“foreseen likely” to “produce” in some particular case,
though apparently less than usual, would not justify its
performance, because experience has proved in reference to
it not only what is “likely” but what is. Then, “the
whole foreseen inconvenience” of injustice may be but a
small portion of what is foreseeable if our information were
more extended and more perfect; again, who is to determine
whether “the whole foreseen inconvenience of an act of in-
justice” will overbalance or not the “misery to society”
Is it to be the man who desires to perpetrate the injustice
or the man who is to suffer it, or is it to be some impartial
* The Introduction to the Analogy.
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 101
spectator whose verdict is already upon record? And as the
question is to depend upon what is “foreseen likely”—sup-
pose the likelihood is falsified—what then The experiment
has been often tried, and the result is no longer doubtful.
Butler says elsewhere—“We conclude that virtue must be
the happiness, and vice the misery of every creature.”
His present hypothesis is inconsistent with this conclusion.
If a poison in some particular case did not cause death, should
we therefore be entitled to argue that was not poisonous?
and if the experience of mankind has proved that the
whole “foreseen inconvenience” of acts of injustice does
overbalance the advantages, any man who proceeds upon
an opposite theory does so at his peril, and acts as wisely
as he who should choose to disregard some other well
ascertained law. Men do injustice and are punished, and
men do it and apparently escape, but they may be deterio-
rated and hurt by it, though it may be an unobserved
process to those who look on, as Macbeth's mind was “full
of scorpions,” though they were visible to no one. Butler
says—“The constitution of nature is such that delay of
punishment is no sort nor degree of presumption of final
impunity.”f What then becomes of “inconvenience” “fore-
seen likely” to occur 2 Is “the constitution of nature” to
determine our actions, or ill-regulated desires of what is
fancied or “foreseen likely” 7 And as we are constituted
what is “punishment” but the consequence of antecedent
wrong? Why is the vanity or egotism of one man, with no
* Dissertation on the Nature of Virtue.
t Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
102 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
more faculty than his fellows, to reverse the plain and un-
ambiguous verdict of generations of men Butler's case
breaks down. The “whole foreseen inconvenience likely to
be brought upon others ” by Jacob's treachery to Esau,
might seem to be overbalanced by the advantage he pro-
cured to himself. But it was not so. As Macbeth says—
“In these cases
We still have judgment here ; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor; this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.”
Mr. T. Butler goes on to say—“The fact then appears
to be, that we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood,
unprovoked violence, injustice ; and to approve of benevo-
lence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all con-
sideration, which conduct is likeliest to produce an over-
balance of happiness or misery.” **
Mr. L. Man is so constituted that he comes to con-
demn and approve what was once indifferent to him,
and, I assume it is the hurtfulness or advantage of the
things that has excited the feelings. Is not this plain matter
of fact 2 Men, as represented to us in history, have approved
falsehood, and many other such like things, which seemed
profitable to them. Their successors, better instructed, have
condemned them, and this better instructedness is mainly
the net result of the interaction between the faculties of
man and the facts of his position, or of the relations in
which he is placed. The relations are permanent, and pro-
duce results tending towards stability. Relations have
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 103
been perverted and misunderstood, and have needed recti-
fication ; the lesson has been slowly learned by what
Butler calls the “inconvenience” of ill-adjusted relations.
What legislators find to be hurtful they pronounce to
be wrong ; what man has partially done for himself
they do for society, adding to acts which are hurtful the
opprobrium of wrong. Butler's statement should be
transposed thus—We have come to know what conduct is
likeliest to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery.
Falsehood, unprovoked violence, and injustice, are of the
class which produce misery, and benevolence of that
which yields happiness; and on this account we approve
or condemn, and by all the means in our power prevent
or promote such actions. From the antecedent of their
hurtfulness follows (in speculation) the consequent of their
wrongfulness. So long as certain relationships have existed
or continue to exist, the actions which are in antagonism to
them are and have been evil. It is a question of fact to
be determined by evidence; and all the apparatus of man's
emotional nature is quickly excited against an act that is
proved by appropriate evidence to hurt individuals and com-
munities—moral disapprobation is created by evidence of
moral injury. Butler says in the same dissertation—“ Our
sense or discernment of actions as morally good or evilim-
plies in it a sense or discernment of them as of good or ill
desert.” But good or ill desert is just the subjective feeling
which is the counterpart of their good or ill consequences.
The ill desert is what they deserve, or rather the ill con-
sequences which the ill-doer has earned. Desert belongs to
104 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
the agent, and not properly to the act. The act is a bad one,
and the agent deserves, as we judge, a certain quantity of
pain on account of it. The existence of a well-ordered com-
munity is incompatible with unchecked injustice, and its felt
ill desert or ill reputation is the measure of the injury it
inflicts, according to the standard which happens to pre-
vail. Now, if society would be disintegrated and broken
up in presence of universal injustice, single acts of injustice
must carry within them the seeds of ultimate mischief;
and what is thus pernicious to society is so because
of its ill consequences to individuals, both agent and
patient. What is detrimental to all cannot be advantage-
ous to each.
Mr. T. Butler has another statement bearing on the
subject which is worth considering. He says– Perhaps
Divine goodness, with which, if I mistake not, we
make very free in our speculations, may not be a bare,
simple disposition to produce happiness; but a dis-
position to make the good, the faithful, the honest man
happy.” " -
Mr. L. I always hesitate in differing from Butler,
but I think it a more correct representation of the fact
to say, a disposition to make men happy by making
them good, faithful, and honest. The road to intelligent
happiness is by the way of confirmed goodness, faithful-
ness, and honesty. First by obtaining a clear apprehension
of what the things are, and then by a well-directed and
steady pursuit of them. Man has a threefold nature—
* Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 105
physical, intellectual, and emotional. A disordered physi-
cal nature may mar the working of both the intellectual
and the emotional, and so destroy or diminish his happi-
ness; but if the whole three are in full and harmonious
action, happiness must be the result.
Mr. T. You say that hurtfulness is the mark of
wrongfulness, that intellectual blunders produce penalties
corresponding to their nature and character, and that
ignorance and pervertedness in morals are even more
destructive of the happiness of men.
Mr. L. There can, I think, be no doubt of this : What
criterion of the wrongfulness of an act can be more con-
clusive and deterrent than that it is productive of present
pain, or burdened with the future prospect of it ! The
existence of a moral and beneficent Governor of the universe
is hardly conceivable if this condition of things were
reversed. Butler postulates the possibility of some act of
injustice producing more profit than pain, but then the
balance must be truly adjusted, the injustice must be a real
and not merely a conventional thing, and in estimating
it the disposition must be taken into account, and every
consequence, near or remote, that springs from it. Besides,
at what stage of the world's history are we to appraise
unjust actions? When society, well knowing what is evil,
and well armed against it, makes every culprit feel, with
unfailing certainty, not only the weight of its moral indig-
nation but the legal penalty that must be endured ? Shall
we make the calculation at this juncture, or must we cast
up the account in a state of general lawlessness, “when
106 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
every man does whatsoever is right in his own eyes”
(Deut. xii. 8)
Mr. T. The words you have quoted are prefaced
by a command that every man should not do what was
right in his own eyes. Now, this may mean his own
conception or thoughts, or, as Mr. Lecky puts it, his in-
tuitions; and he was instructed in his actions not altogether
to follow his own eyes, or notions, or intuitions.
Mr. L. This is quite true; and wherever this form of
words is found, it is in connection with some lawless and
immoral act which had been done, the explanation of which
is, that every man did what was right in his own eyes, not
what was wrong, but what was right according to his own
idea ; and the consequence was that the country was in a
state of moral anarchy.
Mr. T. Suppose it should be said that in this case
what is right in a man's own eyes means whatever his in-
clination leads him to, and does not imply moral judgment
at all.
Mr. L. I know that words of this kind may be made
to take almost any shade of meaning that suits the ruling
theory of a man’s mind; and it is hardly possible to fix
them to a strict and determinate signification when they
are closely interrogated. -
Mr. T. In a note in his Sermon, “On the love of our
neighbour,” Butler says, “ There are certain disposi-
tions of mind, and certain actions, which are in themselves
approved or disapproved by mankind, abstracted from the
consideration of their tendency to the happiness or misery
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 107
of the world; approved or disapproved by reflection,-by
that principle which is the guide of life, the judge of right
and wrong; numberless instances of this kind might be
mentioned. There are pieces of treachery which in them-
selves appear base and detestable to every one.” This is
something like what Mr. Lecky says, except that with
Butler the things are “base and detestable to every one,”
whilst with Mr. Lecky they may be right and approved at
some periods of the world's history.
Mr. L. This statement is much the same as the other,
but then what is meant by “approved or disapproved
by mankind”? Does it mean all mankind, or a select por-
tion of them 2 Plainly the latter, for the verdict of all
mankind is not attainable ; and the proposition is thus
reduced to a very insignificant one, for select portions of
mankind have approved and disapproved the most con-
tradictory things. The next question would be, Are the
dispositions and actions referred to in fact baneful or
beneficial 2 have these consequences been felt, and known,
and registered, among the experiences of men? and if so, is
it not on this account that they have been approved or dis-
approved ? Solomon asks, Is there any taste in the white
of an egg 2 and we may ask is there any moral flavour in
an act which is neither hurtful nor beneficial? Society
finds certain acts to be hurtful, and makes them un-
lawful ; but the generations that grew up under the
notion of their unlawfulness may not carry their view back-
ward to that of their antecedent hurtfulness; just so the
“dispositions and actions” to which Butler alludes, having
108 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
been found good or bad in their consequences, come
to be designated right or wrong, and approved or disap-
proved ; –right or wrong, in relation to a rule which has
for its object human happiness. Is not this a fair repre-
sentation of the matter? For we cannot get away from the
notion that wrong implies the infraction of a rule, and
rules regarding human conduct are or ought to be framed
with a view to human happiness. -
Mr. T. Butler adds, “that numberless instances of
this kind might be mentioned. There are pieces of
treachery which in themselves appear base and detestable
to every one.” It is a pity that out of the numberless
instances he thought of he did not furnish us with a
few. .
Mr. L. But you notice that he picks out “pieces of
treachery” as such instances; now, I ask you to recollect
the special “piece of treachery” perpetrated by Jael, and
recorded in the 4th chapter of Judges ; a “piece of
treachery” as “base and detestable” as is to be found in
history ; observe there was no feud or hostility between
Jabin and the house of Heber, to which Jael belonged.
Hotly pursued by his enemies, Sisera passed near her tent ;
she came out to him, and with flattering and hypocritical
words inveigled him in ; with a lavish and ostentatious
hospitality she sought to allay any lurking suspicion ; and
when her confiding victim, overpowered with weariness, was
“fast asleep,” she foully murdered him, and for this deed of
blood she received the unbounded approbation of Deborah,
who is called a prophetess, and who was manifestly a woman
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 109
of great intelligence and power. We have here, then, a “piece
of treachery, base and detestable” enough, and which, ac-
cording to Butler, ought to have appeared so to every one,
and yet it was regarded by Deborah as a noble and virtuous
act, over every step and incident of which she gloats and
exults. I am not blaming her, I only summon her into
court that she may tell us what her opinion is of a certain
“base and detestable piece of treachery.” Butler does not
say that when men have been taught and trained they
approve or disapprove particular dispositions and actions,
he asserts broadly and universally that they do so, and he
selects pieces of treachery as the sort of actions that
5
“appear base and detestable to every one ;” and yet here
are two leading women of an age, the one of whom
betrays and slays in cold blood, and the other, in the most
glowing and devotional language, extols the deed. Butler's
allegation is, that things “appear” in a certain aspect,
which is exactly what they do not. Doubtless Deborah
had in her mind an abhorrence of something she called
treachery, and the treacherous act by which her enemy
was destroyed she contemplated under another name; but
acts don’t change their nature to suit the names men
happen to give them. If treachery is hateful, here it is
full blown, and yet it awakened no note of disapprobation.
Jabin could not have injured Israel more than the king
of Prussia has injured France ; besides, it is said that
Israel was “sold” to Jabin for her sins. Now, a French-
woman who should avenge her country's wrongs by mur-
dering Moltke or Bismark d la Jael would very properly
110 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
be put to death with universal execration ; and why this
difference 2 treachery and murder are always the same,
base and detestable, but at One time the Deborahs
applaud them, and at another none can be found to justify
them. It is not, therefore, as Butler puts it, that the acts in
themselves, and at first sight, are approved or disapproved ;
it is the acts felt and appreciated in their results when
the “reflection” he appeals to has had time and oppor-
tunity to do its work. For what is reflection but thought,
Occupied with actions in their multifarious relations and
tendencies 2
Mr. T. But then Butler immediately gives it another
name, calling it “a principle” and “a judge ;” it is hard
to get any precise idea of a thing that is distinguished by
so many and such different names.
Mr. L. What has a clear and unambiguous existence,
known and ascertained, it is not difficult to mark by a
definite name, but when there is indistinctness in the
thought there is usually a corresponding vagueness in the
language ; to call the same thing, in the same sentence,
reflection, a principle, and a judge, leaves it in a haze.
Mr. T. That men's minds work in the same way is a
reason for giving to the operations a common name. Man
reasons and reflects—but these processes have led to the
most motley results, and except through certain primitive
data no agreement can be arrived at. The verdict of man-
kind, therefore, as you say, though so often invoked, is
in reality a myth, except in matters of the simplest sort,
—those for instance to be determined by the Senses, and
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 111
where only one determination is possible. Men meet here
upon an equality, their means and materials of judgment
are about the same, and their conclusions vary but little.
To Jael the external world was much what it is now ;
innumerable properties of it were hidden from her, but its
great features,-above all, its externality, appeared to her
as it appears to us. But can we put actions into the same
category 3 do they appear in the same guise to different
generations ? Surely not. But the actions are not altered ;
it is the way of looking at them that has undergone a
change, and we ask, what has wrought the change 2 Why,
as the lawyers say, do men approbate what they afterwards
reprobate 7 Why, unless they have found out what at first
did not “appear;” and if a thing does possess latent proper-
ties that are bad, is it unlikely that at some time they will
“appear”? And the bad property, inherent in bad actions,
as we infer, is their injuriousness to man, individually,
socially, or politically.
Mr. L. This seems to be the abiding characteristic,
and it is one that sooner or later will make itself felt.
Actions may for a long time pass under false names and
colours, but as they work after their kind—doing good or
harm—one day or other their quality is revealed ; men's
opinions of them, as we see, undergo a change, because
their experience of them is enlarged and corrected. Ex-
ternal things do profoundly modify internal thoughts, and
human character is what it is by the combined operation
of the one upon the other ; it is the friction of these two
forces that brings out the new light which shines upon
112 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
man's life, and reveals latent deformity in many old things
of good name.
Mr. T. We may not individually be better than our
fathers, whatever that may mean, but certainly we know
more, and can do more, and the accumulated wisdom of
Society is greater, and its conclusions are truer and surer,
standing upon a larger base of experience ; and experience
is not less available for actions than for other phenomena.
Nature has deceived man as actions have deceived him,
and the instrument that rectifies the one and the other is
the same. At first, and in all things, he sees “through a
glass darkly,” by-and-by more clearly ; and it is impos-
sible to believe as regards the human race that there is
any arrest of this progress. The individual in his lifetime
may gain but little, the generations acquire much ; and
while experience shall continue to teach and human
intellect has faculty to learn, there can be no pause. The
vocabulary of man’s “dispositions and actions” may remain
steadfast, but the meaning of the words fluctuate ; new
knowledge and feeling may find expression in the old
forms, the new wine may be put into the old bottles, but
as the old things pass away, the unchanged abstracts will
be derived from varying concretes.
“Man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what once seemed good to what now proves best.”*
“What once seemed good” has got put into another
category, and now seems “base and detestable;” the
* R. Browning.—A Death in the Desert.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 113
change is subjective not objective. What “every one” may
think respecting particular acts a thousand years hence
we cannot predicate, what they thought of them ten
thousand years ago may be equally indeterminate ; and so
Butler's proposition—prospective and retrospective, and
universal as it is—collapses. -
Mr. L. It needs qualification if it is to square with
the history of the world. We quoted Macbeth just now,
and one cannot help remarking how anxiously he weighed
and measured the results of the crime he was contem-
plating.
“If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here ;
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.” .
Macbeth is ready to jump the life to come, but he has a
firm conviction that he cannot “trammel up the conse-
sequence—here—upon this bank and shoal of time.” He
has no notion that “such a piece of injustice, and violence,
and treachery, may not be faulty or vicious at all, if the
whole foreseen inconvenience likely to be brought upon
others is less than the advantage procured to himself.
Macbeth was well aware that the act he had in view would
produce fruit internal and external, which he was in
dread of There was nothing else that held back his hand;
If “this blow” might be the be-all and the end-all. it
would be struck without hesitation. It was the conse-
quences that made him pause. He knew there were evil
I
114 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
results to be encountered, and he quailed before them. It
was not artificial laws that he was afraid of, but the down-
right pain and danger that followed such wrong-doing.
Mr. T. If an ordinary observer were treating of Mac-
beth's career it might be represented that his treachery was
successful, that he obtained the crown and the power
for which he plotted, and was an example of prosperous
villainy ; but Shakespeare lets us into his secrets, and
shows how soon his worst anticipations were realised.
He speaks of “terrible dreams that shake him nightly;”
and he exclaims—
“Better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.”
And then—
“Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife I’
And at last the confession is wrung from him,
“I’m sick at heart—
I have lived long enough ; my way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf;
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have ; but in their stead,
Curses not loud, but deep.”
The things he had lost were honour, love, obedience, troops
of friends, and he had got in exchange “ curses not loud,
but deep,” “torture,” “terrible dreams,” and “scorpions.”
Mr. L. When Macbeth paused on the brink of the
precipice, and allowed his better nature for a moment
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 115
to sway him, it was his relations with Duncan that furnished
the restraining motives, no abstract considerations, but
certain concrete facts.
- “He’s here in double trust :
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed : then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door—
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off.”
It may not be a very noble kind of virtue that Macbeth
displays in this soliloquy, but, at a certain point of moral
progress these are perhaps the only incentives that
operate, and when they have done their work they give
place to others that are worthier.
“I hold it truth with him who sings
To one clear harp, in diverse tones,
That men may rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.””
And if men—then mankind ; the “dead selves” are the
inferior motives and dispositions which may have been for
a while the only influential ones; the “higher things” are
the products of better training and culture, of a truer
estimate of human life, of a more genuine sympathy,
and of more real regard for the rights and feelings of
others; at every stage irritating and selfish passions
may be allayed, and more reasonable and healthy Satisfac-
tion acquired ; and the progress of the individual is a type
* In Memoriam.
116 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
of that which marks the species. This is simple matter of
observation, but when applied to the growth of moral senti-
ment in the human race something more mysterious is
sought for, and plain matter-of-fact is not reckoned suffi-
cient. - -
Mr. T. It was Macbeth’s conscience that made this
misery for him. He had violated the laws of God and
man, and suffered the pangs of remorse.
Mr. L. The laws of God and man are enacted for
some reason ; they either suit man's condition or they
are supposed to do so. Man's law-making is often enough
radical blundering, and yet the infringement of it may
be the cause of pain; much more must the breach of
laws, having a real foundation in things, produce pain.
Man's law Macbeth did not care for, and God’s law he was
ready deliberately to defy, and “jump the life to come.”
Law, except that of things maintained by force, he set
at naught, and he dared even that for the sake of some
present good. But as black will not be made into white,
nor two and two into five, neither will actions produce plea-
sant consequences which nature has made to yield painful
ones; and Macbeth's actions of this sort did in due time pro-
duce the harvest that was proper to them. The best laws are
the interpreters of nature's intentions, and nature holds in
her own hand the rewards and penalties, “whether we
hear, or whether we forbear.” -
Mr. T. Butler points out another fact which is
often overlooked. He says—“If the pain which we feel
upon doing what tends to the destruction of our bodies,
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 117
suppose upon too near approaches to fire, or upon wound-
ing ourselves, be appointed by the author of nature to pre-
vent our doing what thus tends to our destruction,-this
is altogether as much an instance of his punishing our
actions, and consequently of our being under his govern-
ment, as declaring by a voice from heaven that if we acted
so he would inflict such pain upon us, and inflicting it
whether it be greater or less.”* -
Mr. L. Postulating with Butler, an author of nature,
we cannot escape his conclusions. A voice from Heaven,
as a method of communication, seems more authoritative
and clear; but as it must be conveyed by words, which
are fluctuating and unstable, the evidence of things, where
it can be obtained, is less open to dispute. That actions
do harm is unequivocal evidence of their being evil in
some sort, and words can hardly make it plainer. The
intentions and design of the author of nature are to be
made out by what he does as well as by what he says,
for in either case the meaning has to be sought out and
construed, and where there is an apparent conflict, facts
may be more intelligible than words.
“Conjecture of the worker by the work.” t
Mr. T. Butler's argument is a very sweeping one. He
says—“Wain is the ridicule with which one foresees some
persons will divert themselves upon finding lesser pains
considered as instances of Divine punishment. There is
no possibility of answering or evading the general thing
* Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
f The Ring and the Book.
118 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
here intended without denying all final causes. For final
causes being admitted, the pleasures and pains now men-
tioned must be admitted too, as instances of them. And
if they are ; if God annexes delight to some actions and
uneasiness to others, with an apparent design to induce us
to act so and so, then he not only dispenses happiness and
misery, but also rewards and punishes actions.””
Mr. L. Inducing us to act by pleasure and pain is
just what I contend for, with this addition, that the uneasi-
ness or delight (to use Butler's words) annexed to actions
is an inherent property of them, in relation to a creature
having the attributes and the surroundings of man. The
pain and pleasure are not accidents, just as it is not an
accident that fire burns ; and if its burning us when we
come into contact with it is notice to us not to do so, then
if Butler's reasoning be true, other pain is of similar
import; and an action, the product of which, soon or late,
is preponderant pain, must be in a normal state of things
unmistakably evil. -
Mr. T. Not, of course, necessarily wrong, in a moral
SellSe.
Mr. L. No ; just as it may not be morally wrong to go
too near the fire, although if you do so, you are, as Butler
puts it, punished by being burnt. Butler in this case gives
the word punish an enlarged signification. It is not a
word easy to define, but if it is made to include all sorts
of pain, it must modify some current opinions very con-
siderably. . *
* Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
UTILITARLAN THEORY OF MORALS. 119
Mr. T. The law of things, as you call it, in relation to
actions, is difficult to discover, although it may be as
certain as the law of fire; but it is not so apparent nor SO
urgent.
“Break fire's law,
Sin against rain, although the penalty
Be just a singe or soaking 7 No, he smiles;
Those laws are laws that can enforce themselves.””
Mr. L. If the laws of our moral nature are laws at
all, if they are determined by the constitution of man and
the world, then the law of fire may be more patent and
prompt, but the others will be not less sure. They may
seem to fail and to be evaded, but our observation may
be at fault, or we may have discriminated erroneously.
Mr. T. The results of mere carelessness are sometimes
as hurtful as the worst kind of Wrong-doing, and although
there may be sorrow for it, there may not be that kind of
pain which we call remorse, and which is the peculiar con-
comitant of what is accounted guilt. ... •
Mr. L. There is this distinction undoubtedly; ignor-
ance and negligence are hardly less mischievous than direct
evil-doing. Mankind visit with greater disapprobation the
one set of acts than the other, and rightly so; a disposi-
tion to do harm, an intention to injure, has in it more evil
consequences than mere errors and mistakes.
Mr. T. Practical and intellectual blunders may some-
times produce as much misery as is the product of crime.
A man who, by miscalculation, causes the loss of a ship
and crew, does as much harm as he who should
* R. Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology.
120 |UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
wilfully sink the same ship; but the disposition to
do harm is absent in the one case, and this is all the
difference ; the experience of mankind has taught them that
the design or determination to do harm is more injurious
than mere negligence, and on this account it is visited with
more pain and disapprobation. If the factors of moral arith-
metic are subtle and hard to fix, the general results are so
clear that we may predicate special effects without any great
uncertainty; evil flows from carelessness, and from ill design,
and occasionally the directly hurtful consequences of the
first may be more than of the second ; but upon the
whole this is reversed. Man also puts his weight into the
scale against wrong, and the penalty and the fear go to
make up a total of pain on the side of moral wrong which
is not to be mistaken.
Mr. L. From the first, men find some things
pleasant and others injurious. Those are called good,
and these evil. By-and-by these notions come respec-
tively under the dominion of authority, and codes of
law and of morals are called into existence, and fluctuate
as the real character of actions is more clearly
ascertained. It is incredible that an intuitive perception
should report so variously of the phenomena with which
it had to deal ; but postulating the faculties and feel-
ings of men, the necessities of their existence, the circum-
stances of their habitation, and the results are consistent
and comprehensible. If I refer again to the Bible it is
not dogmatically, but to remind you of a phrase which
expresses our view with great precision. In the 5th
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 121
chapter of Hebrews persons of “full age" are said to be
“those who by reason of use have their senses exercised
to discern both good and evil.” This language implies
all we require. The “senses” are the various percipient
powers of man. By “use” and “exercise” they discern
or discriminate both “good and evil”—not by intuition,
but by “use,” which is “experience;” and the verdict of
experience is determined by the consequences which have
been observed to flow from actions. Those not of “full
age” are easily deceived ; and the human race in its
infancy, before its senses had been duly exercised or its
experiences carefully checked and compared, was misled in
its moral reckoning, and has been ever since correcting or
attempting to correct its judgments.
Mr. T. Assuming that government is a natural and
necessary complement of society, which is mainly employed
in restricting individual action as hurtful to the com-
munity, it will undoubtedly give force and intensity to
notions of right and wrong in general; it is in fact the great
authority for constituting things right or wrong which were
thought to be indifferent, and in this way it must have had
an immense influence in creating a sense of obligation.
Mr. L. It is not possible to say how much a people's
notions of right and wrong have been directly and in-
directly derived from the fact that they have been
moulded by the heavy and coercive power of government;
that governments have always acted for the good of the
governed is unfortunately not true, but that they have in
some sort meant to do good by their laws is hardly to be
122 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
doubted; but the good aimed at has often resulted in posi-
tive injury. To legislate for the good of all was too large
a problem to be entertained in early times. What was
due to man as a sentient being—duty—was not (and per-
haps is not now) understood.
“Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd by the process of the suns.”*
The one object of government should be to make the
condition of human life more agreeable, and in what
other way can government justify the restraints it en-
joins except by proving that in some manner they
promote, or are believed to promote, the good of the
governed 2 Richard Hooker, whom all the world have
agreed to call “the judicious,” in the 8th book of his
Ecclesiastical Polity, lays down this proposition—“The end
whereunto all government was instituted was bonum
publicum, the universal or common good.” This dictum
of Hooker did little to influence the affairs of the world
for many years, and when Bentham resuscitated it in
his celebrated formula of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, it was looked upon with as much
curiosity and surprise as Rip Van Winkle, when he de-
scended into his native village after his twenty years'
slumber among the Katskill mountains. But whether
government should aim at anything less than the good
of the governed is not now a debateable question;–all
our legislation is, theoretically at least, referred to this
standard, so that what is right in law may be in its opera-
* Tennyson.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 123
tion good—to the utmost possible limit; and if this be
the highest ideal of law making, if laws are to be judged
“by their fruits,” can we conceive any other standard to
which actions lying beyond the reach of human laws can
be more appropriately conformed?
Mr. T. If, in his legislative capacity, man can frame
no worthier purpose than to promote the happiness of the
commonwealth, is there any higher object than happi-
ness to be attained in his social and individual sphere 7—
that is your question, and I must say I think not.
Looked at in this light, happiness would involve the
harmonious working of all the internal and external
machinery within and around us, and what more can be
accomplished? By ignorance and by passion it may
be marred, but it looks more like an ultimate test than
anything else. If it could be known beforehand what
actions would in all cases infallibly produce the largest
amount of well-being, might we not with certainty pro-
nounce them to be right 2
Mr. L. So far as we are acquainted with the physical
laws of the world they are uniform and constant in their
operation. Is there any reason to believe that there are in
the universe moral laws, or that they are less strict and
unbending than physical ones? Moral laws are the laws
of man’s life and conduct. Is it conceivable that they are
without order and design 2 and what design is more pal-
pable and obvious than that of making them conduce to
the happiness of rational agents, and that the obligation to
obey them should be the pain which the breach of them
124 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
S
SOOner Or later involves? But then this is not the whole
account of the matter. It is the raw material out of which
whatever relates to human action is fashioned, but the
passions and emotions, the imagination and the reason,
oftentimes give to things forms and colours which are
as unlike the original in appearance as the roots of a tree
are to the leaves and flowers and fruit, from which their
beauty and nourishment are derived. The most disinter-
ested action that can be performed, the one that is exter-
nally the least self regarding, contributes to the performer's
happiness, and would not otherwise get performed. It is
the characteristic of such actions to yield satisfaction, the
absence of which is painful; and pain is voluntarily
endured only in the pursuit of some good which is thought
to be more than commensurate. No profitless pain is, if
possible, incurred. The circumstances of his life
“Enable man to wring, from out all pain
All pleasure, for a common heritage,
To all eternity.” ”
Mr. T. Pain, as we have seen before, is the obvious
result of wrong-doing, and you infer that there is no excep-
tion to this rule, though for a time it may be counter-
acted, and though we may not always be able to trace its
operation or to explain its meaning. The correlative of
error, and folly, and wrong, is pain, and this is the con-
stitution of things. -
Mr. L. We must of course acknowledge that all
the pain existing in the world is not to be traced
* The Ring and the Book.
UTILITARUAN THEORY OF MORALS, 125
to the personal wrong-doing, moral, intellectual, or
physical, of the sufferer. It must, however, be reckoned
a means of teaching and reformation, and whatever
has no purpose beyond mere hurting and harming is to
be regarded as cruelty; but pain is a special product
of the wrong-doing, not something added to it after-
wards. As Butler says—“Whether the pleasure or pain
which thus follows upon our behaviour be owing to the
Author of Nature's acting upon us every moment which
we feel it, or to his having at once contrived and executed
his own part in the plan of the world, makes no alteration
as to the matter before us. For if civil magistrates could
make the sanction of their laws take place without inter- .
posing at all after they had passed them, without a trial,
and the formalities of an execution; if they were able to
make their laws execute themselves, or every offender to
execute them upon himself, we should be just in the same
sense under their government then as we are now, but in
a much higher degree and more perfect manner.”” Govern-
ments punish actions exclusively as detrimental to Society.
Acts are legally wrong because they are politically or
socially assumed to be injurious. What may be called
moral law gives notice to intelligent agents, by painful con-
sequences, that actions are wrong. They prove themselves
to be wrong and out of harmony with the constitution of
things by producing pain. The pain is the evidence of
their obliquity; and if we cannot trace the connection in
all cases, we have proof enough to justify the general
- * Analogy, Part I. chap. ii.
126 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
conclusion that pain and wrong are two phases of the same
fact. -
Mr. T. It is not by personal acts alone that man makes
acquaintance with pain; he derives good from those who
have gone before him, and he inherits evil, but it was never
uncaused, though its genesis be not discoverable ; it may
have been transmitted—his ancestors laboured and he
entered into their labours; they transgressed, and he was
born blind (John ix. 2), physically, morally, or mentally.
Mr. L. The constitution of things links man indis-
solubly, for better or worse, with what has gone before and
what comes after, and though this may perplex us in
the analysis of individual fate, we assume it is an
arrangement that will eventually justify itself by a pre-
ponderance of good ; it foils us in attempting to mete out
to individuals their exact share of blame-worthiness, and it
should therefore moderate our censoriousness both in
matters of belief and practice.
“Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it ;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.” ”
Mr. T. Look at it as we may, this aspect of things is
perplexing; the bonds that bind us to the past are not to
be broken, and the burden laid upon us must be borne,
hard and heavy though it be ; the compensations which it
brings we take as matters of course, but in particular cases
the pressure is terrible, though to the race eventually there
* Burns.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs. 127
may be a balance of good; Shelley looked at the dark side
of the problem, he says,
“What power delights to torture us? I know
That to myself I do not wholly owe -
What now I suffer, though in part I may.
Alas ! none strewed fresh flowers upon the way
Where wandering heedlessly, I met pale Pain,
My shadow, which will leave me not again.”*
Mr. L. We are not to take for granted that men have
as yet interpreted truly what is involved in this question,
nor yet that they have put such real knowledge as they
possess into transparent words.
Mr. T. This is the stumbling-block we are constantly
met by ; what is the precise meaning in morals of the words
made use of? What was the meaning attached to them in
past times? We say a man is selfish, and we know in
general what is meant by it; but then systems of ethics are
designated by the same word, though they may do no more
than apply the maxim of doing to others as we would
they should do to us, and this is a computation not
reckoned selfish in the ordinary sense of the word.
Mr. L. Hume says—“In my opinion there are two
things which have led astray those philosophers that have
insisted so much on the selfishness of man. They found
that every act of virtue or friendship was attended with a
secret pleasure, whence they concluded that friendship and
virtue could not be disinterested. But the fallacy of this
is obvious. The virtuous sentiment or passion produces
the pleasure, and does not arise from it. I feel a pleasure
* Julian and Maddalo.
128 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
in doing good to my friend because I love him ; but do
not love him for the sake of that pleasure.” + “Disin-
terested ” and “selfish,”—are words, the meaning of which
we fancy ourselves perfectly acquainted with, but when we
ask what are the precise facts they represent we don’t find
it easy to determine. A recent writer on this subject says—
“When we consider how far the development of knowledge
depends upon full and exact means of expressing thought, is
it not a pregnant consideration that the language of civilised
men is but the language of savages more or less improved in
structure, a good deal extended in vocabulary, made more
precise in the dictionary definition of words 2 The develop-
ment of language between its savage and cultured stages
has been made in its details, scarcely in its principle. It
is not too much to say that half the vast defect of language
as a method of utterance, and half the vast defect of
thought as determined by the influence of language, are
due to the fact that speech is a scheme worked out by the
rough and ready application of material metaphor and im-
perfect analogy, in ways fitting rather the barbaric educa-
tion of those who formed it than our own. Language is
one of those intellectual departments in which we have
gone too little beyond the Savage state, but are still, as
it were, hacking with stone celts, and twirling laborious
fiction fire. Ethnography reasonably accounts at once
for the immense power and the manifest weakness of
language as a means of expressing modern educated
thought, by treating it as an original product of low
* Hume's Essays—“Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature.”
TJTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 129
culture, gradually adapted by ages of evolution and selec-
tion, to answer more or less sufficiently the requirements
of modern civilisation.” + - -
Mr. T. The things and thoughts that we name must
have existed before they could be named, and the names
they received represented such appearance as the things
put on ; but a name which has been long associated with
an idea imposes a special meaning upon it, and if the mean-
ing was at the first a misconception, it may remain un-
corrected for many generations, and though the ideas of
men may gradually be modified, the yoke of the words is
hard to throw off. -
Mr. L. The names by which men have distinguished
actions have too often been egregiously false and mis-
leading, popular objects. of admiration have appropriated
to themselves epithets of which they were wholly unde-
serving, and it has needed all the force of reason to correct
the fallacious impression. In our own commercial age
actions of the most flagrant dishonesty are called by con-
ventional words which imply misfortune rather than
fraud, and the most shameful actions escape the moral
indignation which they merit. The man who cannot pay his
debts by reason of extravagance and speculation, looks with
disdain upon the man who fails to pay in consequence of
gambling upon the turf, though the former may do most
mischief; a man who purloins some trifling article is a
degraded thief, and expiates his offence in a gaol, whilst
the one who appropriates in a wholesale way the pro-
* Primitive Culture.—By Edward B. Tylor.
K
130 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
perty and earnings of others—makes what is called a
composition, frequents a church, and holds himself as high
as ever. If society made a righteous estimate of actions,
and judged of them according to the mischief they entailed,
these men might change places; but the respectable man
who has robbed his creditors of thousands would feel
grossly humiliated if he had to share the cell of the miser-
able wretch who stole half-a-crown.
Mr. T. The very word that distinguishes the system
of morals we have been discussing is a source of prejudice.
|Utilitarianism is a word which, when fairly interpreted, is
altogether irreproachable, but it has been associated with
what is “ common and unclean,” until it is difficult to in-
troduce it to better society. To love one's neighbour as
one's self is reckoned a good rule, and yet by a change of
words it gets the bad name of selfishness. The darkest
deeds of the Inquisition were clothed in venerable and
devout phrases, and this pious and plausible language im-
parted such a flavour to the bad work that its perpetrators
probably thought it was good.
Mr. L. Ifunctuous words disguise evil deeds, printed
words, with their hard and fast lines, take altered im-
pressions very slowly; the new wine of a fresh experience
is poured into the old bottle of an ancient word, and so the
new wine acquires the flavour of the old bottle.
Mr. T. Need we then wonder that the old ideas retain
their dominion? -
Mr. L. Nor should we repine, so long as the new are
put on their trial. That man does move forward we admit,
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. - 131
though at a rate and after a fashion baffling our compu-
tation, especially as estimated by the old chronologies.
Geology, however, has furnished better data and more
authentic evidence. The strata of the earth bear witness
to the enormous periods of time that were necessary for the
production of the phenomena they disclose ; and the mind,
proceeding by inferences which are elsewhere valid and
irresistible, confides in its interpretation of the facts
as firmly as in its reading of inscriptions upon pillars or
upon parchment. The detail of events which human eyes
did not see, and which imagination only has depicted,
can never become truly intelligible or conceivable by
the instrumentality of mere words, but may be in some
degree comprehended by means of what is tangible and
visible ; a history of the earth is written in the strata
of the earth, and brings new light to the history of
man. A finite intelligence, looking at our world in its
molten state, revolving for ages in its desolate path,
could never have dreamed that “this fiery mass” would
one day be adorned with the loveliness and beauty that
have since dwelt upon it, nor have conjectured that
the “fervent heat” which rendered it uninhabitable,
was but a phase of that evolution which was fitting it
for the abode of living beings. We are beginning to see
that the little drama comprised within the few and limited
acts recorded in our annals, represents but a very small
portion of the performance, and of the stage on which
man has hitherto played his part. That he sprang from
a low origin, at a remote era, may be granted without
132 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
fear. Fill up the interval as we may,+ within the
periods of authentic written history (and why should
hard, legible, ineffaceable facts be incredible?) — it is
evident that he has made vast acquisitions, and the
space that now separates the most advanced from the
most degraded of our species may be no greater than
that which separates the lowest living races from the
lowest that science has brought to light, and the re-
lations of these earliest specimens of our race, founded
upon their wants and impulses, must have borne a cer-
tain resemblance to those of their more civilised successors;
their morality also must have moved upon a parallel line,
for it must have consisted in the adjustment of inner
relations to external circumstances. Man—“the heir of
all the ages, in the foremost files of time,”—is poorly repre-
sented in the person of his very remote ancestor; and
what he has become now, why should not the lowliest
become in the future? and why should not this relative
position of the first and the last be maintained, so that the
noblest of our era may be the lowest of the “coming -
race " ?
Mr. T. But what are the causes of these civilising
effects? they are not accidents, but must be due to the
efforts and opportunities that have achieved them. Of
races, it is true that “whosoever hath to him shall be
given . . . but whosoever hath not, from him shall be
taken away that he hath ;” the Aborigines who have not
—perish ; and the race which has qualities and apti-
tudes that are good and useful survives and transmits
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 133
them, and if definite moral ideas are not inherited, the
experiences of the past get organised, and make new and
higher attainments perpetually possible. Locke's com-
parison of the mind to a blank sheet of paper is not alto-
gether a happy one; ages of contact with nature and human
nature have bequeathed to it—not the torpidity of paper—
but products of thought and feeling, which assimilate with
an ever-increasing facility the more elevated conditions
of its existence.
“ — a footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices ; mere decay
Produces richer life.” ”
Mr. L. Man's ideas and feelings are mainly the reflec-
tion of his circumstances and surroundings. If the internal
forces of nature had not broken up the surface of the earth
into mountains and plains, and if the effects of light and
shade had been other than they are, his notions of beauty
would have been of a different order ; what he possesses
is the product of his relationships, and would be altered
with them.
“How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature :
These boys know little they are sons to the King ;
Nor Cymbeline dreams they are alive.
They think they’re mine ; and though trained up thus meanly
I the cave wherein they bow, their thoughts do hit
The roofs of palaces ; and nature prompts them,
In simple and low things, to prince it much
Beyond the trick of others.” f
* Sordello. f Cymbeline.
134 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
Hitting the roofs of palaces is just a special instance of
that transmitted feeling of which man's general habitudes
are a wider if less observed illustration. “The sparks of
nature” had been struck out by the collision of natural
objects; “these boys know little,” and were “trained
meanly;" but their impulsive acting bore witness to former
culture ; direct consciousness of it there was not, and no
imitation, but withal a distinct bias, vocal and visible ;
effects—which nature everywhere slowly accumulates, or
as you say, organises; to the stature of the generation they
may add, not a cubit, but an infinitesimal part of one, for
things which nature approves do acquire ascendancy; the
conditions of life favour their growth, and they grow and
are indefinitely modified in their progress; causes, apparently
insignificant and of almost imperceptible action, by inces-
sant and combined operation accomplish the results; tend-
encies beneficial to the world, though at first feeble and
vacillating, gather to themselves power and persistence,
and vanquish opposition; and the impulse they give does
not spend itself in the generation that originates them, but
is carried forward and consolidated, until in its turn it
encounters some fresh force into which it is merged.
This fact then meets us, that it is conduct, intelligently
directed, which gets a final foothold in the world of affairs
—that habit may prompt it, without consciousness, and
that habit may be of inheritance; and the credentials of
conduct which are alone to be trusted are its effects in
the world,—happiness and well-being-" on earth peace,
good will toward men.”
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 135
Mr. T. To blunt the edge of Mr. Lecky's criticism
let us put in Hooker's definition of the word happiness,
he says, -“Happiness, therefore, is that estate whereby
we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full
possession of that which simply for itself is to be desired,
and containeth in it, after an eminent sort, the con-
tentation of our desires, the highest degree of all our per-
fections.” +
Mr. L. If Mr. Lecky had studied this definition he
need not have quarrelled with the word ; to human nature
certain things are always desirable, and certain other things
may become desirable, and in this direction there is no
limit, so long as the things are, by the constitution of the
world, adapted to the nature of man and are brought to his
knowledge.
Mr. T. What is ideally conceivable may be practically
unattainable; our subject is man, with his powers and the
objects provided for them ; he is only capable of such know-
ledge as he has instruments for, and of such happiness aS
his faculties furnish. He cannot transcend these ; if there
are in other worlds means of happiness or notions of recti-
tude which are not related to his nature, they are to him
non-existent. He can but know by the faculties he
possesses, and he can but act within the limits of his
function.
Mr. L. And if he pleases he may kick against the
pricks, and produce to himself inevitable pain.
Mr. T. Ricking against pricks, voluntarily or involun-
* Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, ch. xi.
136 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
tarily, yields Small returns in the shape of right feeling and
thinking. . .
Mr. L. Don't forget the geological eras; and don't
circumscribe your ideas within the narrow centuries of
which we have written records ; build theories upon facts.
At present none may furnish us with an unassailable
scheme of the universe, nor is it necessary we should have
one, and it even is more needful that we should not fashion
one out of discordant materials. We can wait, we have
Seen a cosmogany founded on words displaced by another
founded on things ; perhaps it is inevitable that such
words should be misunderstood until facts throw light
upon them, and the fate of these words should warn us how
treacherous a foundation words are, when the things which
they stand for are unknown. Remember the rudimentary
- intelligence and lowly condition of the primitive man
whose flint tools we have handled, and compare with them
the tools and books of his descendant. “Look on that pic-
ture, and on this,” and say if the suffering has been wasted
that has achieved the transformation ?
“Life is probation, and this earth no goal
But starting-point of man ; compel him strive,
Which means in man, as good as reach the goal,—
Why institute that race, his life, at all ?” *
Mr. T. (reads). “ The basis of our conception of duty is
an intuitive perception that among the various feelings,
tendencies, and impulses that constitute our emotional
being, there are some which are essentially 'good and
* The Ring and the Book.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 137
ought to be encouraged, and some which are essentially
bad and ought to be repressed.”
Mr. L. Whose conception does Mr. Lecky mean, when
he says “ours?” For to say that he has such a conception,
which he thinks to be intuitive, is not at all the question.
An “intuitive perception” should be the property of all
mankind who are not diseased or crazy. Let us hear
Butler on this point. He says, “ Human nature is not one
simple, uniform thing, but a composition of various parts—
body, spirit, appetites, particular passions and affections, for
each of which reasonable self-love would lead men to have
due regard, and make suitable provision.” “ Again, “Men
may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the World,
according to the experience they have had of it; but
human nature, considered as the Divine workmanship,
should methinks be treated as sacred, for in the image of
God made He man. That passion, from whence men take
occasion to run into the dreadful vices of malice and
revenge—even that passion, as implanted in our nature by
God, is not only innocent but a generous movement of the
mind.” + And in the same sermon he says, “No passion
God hath endued us with can be in itself evil.” A much
truer philosophy this than Mr. Lecky's ; “our emotional
nature,” what Butler calls passion, Mr. Lecky asserts is in
part “ essentially bad,” and known to be so by an “intuitive
perception;” strange that the same “intuitive perception”
did not discover that it was “essentially bad” to slay men
* Sermon upon “The Love of Our Neighbour.”
+ Sermon upon “Resentment.”
138 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
and animals for amusement, and to commit other prodigious
atrocities.
Mr. T. (reads). “It is not to be expected, and it is
not maintained, that men in all ages should have agreed
about the application of their moral principles. All that
is contended for is, that these principles are themselves the
same.” -
Mr. L. Whether men “should have agreed” or not, is
a question we have no means of determining, no valid ex-
pectation could be formed one way or other apart from
experience, and yet if one knew that men possessed some
“intuitive perception,” one would expect them to be aware of
it, and to be in tolerable agreement about it ; if innate and
acquired knowledge be open to equal doubt, what advantage
has one over the other ? Facts are facts, however we become
acquainted with them ; but that which is innate should
surely be self-evident, or carry with it the highest certainty.
Mr. Lecky says it is in “the application of their moral
principles that men have not agreed, but that these prin-
ciples are themselves the same ;” what does this mean?
that somewhere “beyond this visible diurnal sphere’’ there
are moral principles applicable to human affairs other than
those known to men, or that the human race everywhere
and at all times have been in possession of the same moral
principles. The first proposition is not germane to the dis-
cussion, and the second is contradicted by facts. “Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself ” is a moral principle,
plain and perspicuous, but it formed no part of the ethical
code of the world for many ages, and how could men
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 139
“apply” it until they were acquainted with it? When the
moral judgments of one age differ from those of another, we
conclude that the moral principles which direct them are
not the same. But, says Mr. Lecky, humanity was always
reckoned as a virtue and cruelty as a vice ; and how does
this help the matter for if “humanity” ever tolerated
and approved the butchering of one human being to make
a holiday for another human being, then the word human-
ity at one time included as part of its meaning what it
excluded at another, and it is a transparent fallacy to
treat it as always comprehending the same things; the
word may be the same, but the thing or conception it
has stood for has been fluctuating and unstable ; what
men mean by it we gather from their acts and their
reasonings; one generation speaks of the habitable world,
and means some very narrow district; another, by the same
word, designates the real globe, and many of Mr. Lecky's
words are equally indeterminate and elastic ; if men have
thought it a good, and pious, and possible thing to propitiate
their gods by human sacrifices, we conclude that their
moral principles were utterly at fault in the primary con-
ception of what is good ; if, under the sanction of law, or
custom, or superstition, they performed acts that were cruel
and hurtful, we unhesitatingly denounce the acts, guided
by the law and constitution of things as made known by
experience; we may excuse the offender, but not the offence.
Nature, however, is more stern and relentless for those who
violate her ordinances, “treasure up wrath against the day
of wrath” (Romans ii. 5); or, in other words, accumulate
140 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
the bad consequences of their acts; things take their
course, “whether men hear, or whether they forbear” (Ezek.
ii. 5). They don't produce pleasant fruits because men
give them pleasant names, or because the real character
and tendency of them are mistaken ; man's position is much
the same practically, whether he is ignorant of principles
or of their application; whether a mariner has a compass
or not matters little, if he can neither read its indications
nor apply them ; put a man into possession of the moral
principle, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” and
he immediately asks, “and who is my neighbour?” and he
must be informed either by authority, or by reason and expe-
rience ; a Roman, taking his holiday at the arena, did not
regard its victims as neighbours whom he should love,
but as things made for his gratification ; and what sort of
moral principles could co-exist with such a notion ? The
Roman poet who affected to be interested in whatever
belonged to man, uttered a sentiment that had no actual
relation to living men and women. -
Mr. Lecky, indeed, asserts that killing men for amuse-
ment was not a crime in a Roman (page 114); if it were
not, crimes have been very scarce in the annals of the
world; if it be true that a Roman by such an act committed
no crime against the laws of his country, against human
nature a great crime was committed, which was amply and
sternly avenged; if such acts are not crimes why do they
produce the fruits of crime? and why does mankind of the
“milder day” adjudge it a just and needful retribution
when “Goths glut their ire * upon the profligate and base
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs. 141
population who found pleasure in the degradation and
anguish of their species? -
Mr. T. A crime is technically an act injurious to the
community; but its criminality is its injuriousness, and not
its position on the statute book. It is strange that Mr.
Lecky should deny the criminality of acts that distinctly
debase and brutalise mankind ; whatever does this, in the
strictest sense of the word, is a crime, and will eventually
be so recognised. We shall make no acts injurious by de-
claring them to be so, and we shall make none innoxious by
apology or applause; consequences are not to be evaded be-
cause they are not apprehended. I suppose that filth gene-
rates fever whether men know it or not, and acts that deteri-
orate man's moral nature as certainly produce their proper
fruit ; “whatsoever a man Soweth, that shall he also reap”
(Gal. vi. 7). Is this matter of fact or mere dogma 3 “Sowing
the wind, and reaping the whirlwind” (Hos. viii. 7), is not
a concatenation, uncertain and capricious, but fixed and
determinate, though it should need long experience to
make it out.
Mr. L. Man's relations are real and substantial
things, not to be thwarted or perverted with impunity; he
may mistake or misinterpret them,--he may regard as
insignificant what is really momentous, or he may elevate
into importance what is trivial, but the course and current
of things is not altered by his estimate, and his condition
bears witness to the truth or error of his computation ; if
he worships idols either of the mind or of wood, his circum-
stances tell of the delusion, for nature is not mocked or
142 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
deceived, she is not imposed upon by lies or shams, but
appoints to each its appropriate penalty, and exacts it
punctually.
Mr. T. And yet men manage to live under the falsest
notions of things.
Mr. L. And they live badly enough, and are hurt in-
cessantly without knowing how or why.
Mr. T. Being under the dominion of laws they
are ignorant of, but which are inexorable in their opera-
tion. .
Mr. L. They cannot evade the physical suffering that
is the result of physical ignorance ; evil of this kind may
be disguised, but it does not become good by assuming its
garb, nor is moral evil at all more accommodating; its
nature is to do harm, and it does it. The moral atmosphere
of the Roman amphitheatre was no less pestilential than
the exhalations of the Pontine marshes, and Mr. Lecky
would hardly contend that these were harmless because
men might think them so; their influences might elude
observation, but they made themselves felt. -
Mr. T. The subjective impressions of men are not tests
of truth ; what they think may be material to their
own happiness, but has no effect upon the arrangement
of things; and right and wrong are surely attributes of
things founded upon their relations to man, but quite in-
dependent of his notions of them.
Mr. L. If actions that do moral mischief in the world
are not crimes we shall want another name of equally bad
repute to designate them, and we shall gain nothing by the
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 143
change; whatever does harm in the world will some
time or other get abolished, if the means exist ; what was
said about it “by them of old time " (Matt. v. 21), will be
gainsaid by those who come after. The history of the Jews
illustrates the fact ; a people at a low point of civilisation
had, in many things, a low moral standard to work by,
“because of the hardness of their hearts” (Matt. xix. 8).
It was not a question of applying moral principles, but of
not possessing them ; and the evil tolerated was evil not-
withstanding, though the people were not conscious of it.
Mr. T. The mind of the race, regarded historically,
has manifestly been more conscious of evil at one time
than at another, and maxims and rules have been syn-
chronically made to suit it ; measured by an ideal stand-
ard, or by man at his best, these have been bad, and the
evil was not an abstraction but a disorganisation, asking
compassion, not approbation ; and the thing asking compas-
sion was the state of mind that so imperfectly apprehended
its relations, and consequently endured so much misfortune;
but the experience that sufficed to rectify what had grown
complex was competent from the first to teach what was
simple.
Mr. L. Mr. Lecky tells us “The terms ‘higher
and lower,’ ‘nobler or less noble, ‘purer or less pure,’
represent moral facts with much greater fidelity than right
or wrong, or virtue or vice’ (page 113). They represent
something to those who have a standard, but then which
of all the standards are we to try them by ? Nobler than
what? Whose ideal shall we set up 2 A Jewish Phari-
144 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALs.
see's or a Roman Stoic's, a North American Indian's or a
Hindoo's, that of Thomas a Kempis or Thomas Huxley,
Tamerlane's or Tam o'Shanter's 2
“Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles—
And, by opposing, end them 7”
was the question that perplexed Hamlet, and has much
puzzled many more. “These were more noble than those
in Thessalonica, in that they received
with readiness of mind, and searched,” etc. (Acts xvii. 11),
but to the majority of the Jews this disposition was not
noble ; on the contrary, they thought badly of it, and gave
it a bad name. We must not be cozened with mere words,
it is for some reason that acts are called noble and pure, and
the reasons vary; the patriarchs were not pure after the
pattern of the Puritans. “It hath been said, thou shalt
hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, love your enemies”
(Matt. v. 43–44); love and hate, therefore, have each
been reckoned noble, and there are tribes of men now
who think it both a folly and a crime to love or spare
an enemy.
“Now, who shall arbitrate ;
Ten men love what I hate ;
Shun what I follow ; slight what I receive :
Ten, who in ears and eyes -
Match me ; we all surmise,
They, this thing, and I that ; whom shall my soul believe , ” +
Mr. T. The word noble gives us no more help than
* Rabbi Ben Ezra.
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 145
other words of the same class, for the conceptions it has
held together have been composed of discordant elements.
“What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason 3”
But this nobleness of reason has not been universally
acknowledged, the superstitious have denied it, and the
fighters have derided it ; -
“Nay, if we talk of reason
Let's shut our gates and sleep ; manhood and honour
Should have hare-hearts, would they but fat their thoughts
With this cramm’d reason ; reason and respect
Make livers pale and lustihood deject.” +
The admiration implied by the word noble has not been
bestowed on any settled or righteous principle. The word
has now a connotation that represents the culture of ages;
to the man of flint implements it had little meaning.
Mr. L. “The light of human minds is perspicuous
words,” + and the sort of words we are speaking of are not
perspicuous, because the ideas they stand for have been
unstable ; the ideas are not the mintage of an intuition
having immediate insight, but have corresponded to the
condition of the world ; hero worship has set up strange
gods, and the litanies it has made in their honour have
spared no word of praise, but
“That spèll upon the minds of men
Breaks, never to unite again,
That led them to adore
Those Pagod things of sabre sway,
With fronts of brass and feet of clay.”f
Mr. T. The man of flint implements had this in com-
* Troilus and Cressida. t Leviathan. # Byron.
146 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
mon with his successor, that he was related to the world in
which he lived, and to those by whom it was inhabited.
Mr. L. And these relations are the framework of man's
morality; he is a son, a father, a subject, a created being,
and each of these relations is a spring of action, shaping
and governing his moral character. There is a channel of
things in which his faculties and feelings are fitted to flow;
he finds it out by observation and reflection, and it becomes
known and assured to him by the fertility and beauty that
mark its course.
Mr. T. His relations being what they are, have correla-
tive duties and obligations; the one set of things should be
the counterpart of the other. A professor of moral philosophy
at Oxford, eminent in his day, the Rev. W. Mills, B.D., opens
a “Lecture on the Perception of Moral Beauty” in these
words—"I have endeavoured to show, in my previous lec-
tures, that the source and foundation of morality is in the
immutable relations of things and persons to each other, and
that the perception of it is placed in reason and intelligence.”
His published lectures accomplish this purpose imperfectly,
but his definition, minus the word “immutable,” seems a
fair, if not a perspicuous one ; the relation of things and
persons being the data from whence are deduced duties and
obligations which reason and intelligence approve, but
“immutable” is a word not to be predicated of man.
Mr. L. Think of the ten commandments, or of any
rule of right now regulating men's actions, as applied to
Adam on the primal day of his existence ; the “first com-
mandment with promise” would have had no meaning to
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 147
him : What could he covet? Against whom could be be a
false witness 2 and so on through the decalogue. Relations
and duties coincide; duties are what is due or owing on
account of some relation.
Mr. T. Mr. Lecky affirms that “some savages kill
their old parents” (page 104) from a feeling of kindness,
and parents, we know, have “sacrificed their sons and
their daughters unto devils” (Ps. cwi, 37), and Mr. Lecky
makes a sort of apology for such acts, as having been
prompted by religious or economical ideas; we are not to
suppose that these parents or children were worse than
others—their actions were probably approved. There has
at all times been a thing called cruelty, but sacrificing
children to devils had another name amongst those who
worshipped devils. -
Mr. L. And such devils were regarded with respect and
fear by their worshippers, and were to be propitiated by self-
inflicted sufferings. Bad acts were done that imaginary
supernatural beings might be appeased; and the acts were
bad because they were stupid and degrading.
Mr. T. No acts being reckoned good, how much soever
they may be applauded, which are proved to be injurious
to man.
Mr. L. Certainly not ; the abstract word goodness, must
derive its parentage from concrete acts that are productive
of good; acts have been called good which were mis-
chievous to man; they may have been done “ignorantly,
in unbelief,” or misbelief, but this doesn’t change the
nature of acts—“by their fruits ye shall know them.”
148 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
Mr. T. Our morning's talk has shown us how wide of
each other have been men's thoughts in morals ; and this
does not surprise us when the history of man is known.
What he has thought is what he was taught by the things
he has been in contact with—his fellow-men being the
most potent of the things; and out of his relations have
grown special ideas and feelings which have brought forth
and nourished those human qualities that have for their
object the good of man—the many and the one. “It is a
manifestabsurdity to suppose evil finally prevailing over good
under the conduct and administration of a perfect mind.””
Mr. L. Such good being something related to man's
nature and faculties; he may at times have doubted
—such has been his meanness and poverty—whether good
existed—“There be many that say, Who will show us any
good " (Ps. iv. 6). The problem being to develop intelli-
gence, emotion, and volition, from the lowest elements—
(“the dust of the ground, into which had been breathed the
breath of life,” forming the rudimentary material)—who
shall say by what steps and gradations, through what
dark and devious ways, so feeble an agent would traverse
the mighty space between the starting-point and the
goal 2 Who can determine the conditions most favourable
for the growth of wisdom and virtue, the relations most
helpful to them, or, in general, the activities most to be
desiderated ? Who can tell, prior to experience, what
speculative and active processes will conduce to a given
end ? If– - -
* Butler's Third Sermon on Human Nature.
|UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 149
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,”
what sort of stage should be set up, and what sort of play ?
What qualities are wanted in the player, and what perform-
ance will best bring them out? Of what objects should the
universe consist, and in what subjects should it be reflected ?
We have no faculties that can answer such questions, yet
our criticisms sometimes imply that we have.
Mr. T. If it be true that the evolution of intelligence
and feeling, as ultimate factors of the highest worth, be
the end and design of the universe, we are truly no judges
of the methods suited to produce them, and the machinery
around us, painful and perplexing though it be, may most
surely shape and mould the refractory material into those
higher forms it is predestined to assume.
“The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding Small ;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness he grinds
all.” #
Mr. L. And the process is evermore subservient to
the product. The material fabric, by means of which the
transformation is carried on, may prove to be a mere phall-
tasmagoria, an “insubstantial pageant,” which “shall dis-
solve,” and leave behind—to reappear under more durable
forms—the substantial fruit of emotion and intelligence
so painfully wrought out.
Mr. T. Is it possible to imagine a purpose for which
the machinery of life was set in motion except the ultimate
good of living agents?
* Longfellow.
150 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
Mr. L. Perhaps not ; the relations of man and his con-
stitution being the instruments of his good.
Mr. T. His intellectual nature fashioning itself on the
objects and sequences around, advances as it apprehends
and assimilates them.
Mr. L. And his emotional nature attaining its truest
and highest development as it moves in the regulated
orbit of its relations and affinities.
Mr. T. And right, as a rule of action, is the legislation
of the intellectual nature for the guidance of the emotions
and the volitions. Is it not ? -
Mr. L. I should say so, the volitional nature being
the controlling power of the organisation, deriving its force
from the emotions, and its direction from the intelli-
gence.
Mr. T. And, directed by defective or perverted intelli-
gence, is led astray. -
Mr. L. Yes, and hence the conflicting standards that
have been set up ; feeling has usurped a dispropor-
tionate authority and assumed a supremacy that did
not belong to it. The measure and value of action is
not its mere accordance with feeling but its outcome
and effect—the final product to the individual and the
community. -
Mr. T. And a system, an institution, or a theory, is
properly impugned when it ceases to bear fruit—“cut it
down; why cumbereth it the ground?” (Luke xiii. 7.) That
it once responded to men's feelings and intelligence was
enough, when it does so no longer it is doomed; the salt has
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 151
lost its savour—a contingency seldom provided for, and the
bare affirmation of which has been too often a presumption
not to be pardoned. - -
Mr. L. And yet much of the salt that has seasoned
human affairs has lost its savour in the course of
transmission, and become unmistakably vapid and taste-
less, but its votaries have nevertheless preserved it with
a devout scrupulosity, as though it retained all its pristine
power. -
Mr. T. The colour and appearance of Salt I suppose
have remained, but its useful properties are beyond recal;
“it is neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill,” the
last and lowest of all destinies; and therefore men “cast
it out” (Luke xiv. 35).
Mr. L. Figuratively, and in fact, “salt is good;” and
the Salt which in this economy of ours constitutes the true
antiseptic is utility; “What do ye more than others?” (Matt.
v. 47)—is the final test of principles and men; what a
thing does for mankind is that which entitles and enables
it to live. It may distribute its benefactions in an endless
variety of ways ; but that it does good, that it ameliorates
the lot of man and makes his life happier and brighter, is
what alone gives it vitality and virtue.
Mr. T. “That which decayeth and waxeth old is ready
to vanish away” (Heb. viii. 13); and to decay means to
lose usefulness by losing adaptation to the conditions of
life; a mental conception, or a principle, once representing
men's feelings and aspirations, when it renders no further
service “vanisheth away;” old conditions are broken up,
152 DTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
and the thoughts that responded to them may be pictur-
esque but have no power.
“Another race hath been, and other palms are won.””
Mr. L. One looks with regret upon the vanishing away
of what has been associated with human interest and
sympathies; and we are apt to imagine that the beautiful
and poetic side of things is departing, leaving only the dull
and prosaic, but this is a delusion; we have no reason to
Suppose that the future will be less attractive in its beauty
than the past ; the ideas of a wider culture may at first
seem cold and ungenial, but they will beget an enthusiasm
of their own. It is not the prerogative of any age to
stereotype ideas for all other ages, nor to hold exclusive
dominion over the beautiful; events develope ideas, and
yield materials of beauty, to which mind gives colour and
form. *
“They tell us beauty born above
From no form or shape doth fly.” t
History presents us with many experiments by which an
imperfect culture has sought to clothe itself in durable
forms; but they “decline and fall” as they come into
collision with the constitution of things.
Mr. T. The monastic system was such an experiment,
it was adapted to conditions that once prevailed, but when
the conditions - changed it crumbled into dust ; it was
formerly a home of hopes and fears created by the circum-
stances of the world, but these altered, and it was “ready
to vanish away.”
* Wordsworth. t Barry Cornwall.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 153
“The old order changeth, giving place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways.” "
Mr. L. And the power that built up the system, though
one of the mightiest the world has seen, cannot itself resist
the disintegrating process that brings into dust whatever
opposes the “constitution and course of nature ;” it may
talk loftily in the old strain, and utter “great swelling
words,” but they are “words of vanity,” emptied of their
former awe and efficacy; those who employ them may be
loth to admit it, but the fact is not to be gainsaid; the
phantom at the Vatican that now fulminates so feebly is
not the power that ruled the middle ages.
Mr. T. The glory has departed ; words and forms
remain ; but the power is gone, and the men who once
wielded it would be the first to proclaim it. The type is
changed, and you say the progress of events produces
the change; that things ultimately govern thoughts; that
men's notions, upon all subjects, get modified in a way that
is inconsistent with innateness. The more obvious and
simple relations of life, from the first have been interpreted
with tolerable accuracy, and actions fitted to them made
out with a certain uniformity, but beyond this there has
been confusion and diversity. The law of the production
and interchange of commodities necessary for the sus-
tenance and comfort of man baffled and confounded him
for ages. The subtler law that should regulate the conduct of
voluntary agents towards themselves,andtowards each other,
has even been more fatally misunderstood and misapplied;
* Morte d'Arthur.
154 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
and the one and the other are alike amenable to the teach-
ing of a wider and wider experience, whose final appeal
must ever be, as I suppose, the condition of those whom
it has trained and governed, or, according to your formula,
“by their fruits ye shall know” whatever challenges
approbation or disapprobation.
Mr. L. The condition of the world is the true expositor
of the systems that rule the world. If the former is bad,
the latter are poor, notwithstanding their pride. Men set
up theories of things based upon abstract notions, and
although they produce no fruit they cling to them with
invincible pertinacity. If they kept to the more modest
task of observing facts and phenomena, and marking
their meaning, they would get rid of some perplexing
dilemmas. Whether man should have been endowed with a
special feeling—a sort of Ithuriel’s spear—which should
immediately discriminate right from wrong; or whether,
placed in contact with the requisite materials, and fur-
nished with appropriate implements, he should be left to
work out the problem by means of an experience which
creates while it teaches, may be debateable; but when his
ways and his habits have been observed, when it is seen that
he acquires by painful effort whatever he possesses, that—
“Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to
point; ” +
the conclusion is no longer doubtful. Surrounded by inert
matter, he must acquaint himself with its laws before he can
“ have dominion” over its processes and subdue them to
* Tennyson.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 155
his purposes. Surrounded by living agents who affect him
even more powerfully than the forces of nature, he must
comprehend and adjust himself to them before he can direct
his affairs with success; and success means satisfaction to
his nature, which satisfaction is for ever enlarging its re-
quirements, “as if increase of appetite had grown by what
it fed on.”* Whether ready-made ideas, independent of
experience, would be preferable to knowledge gradually
acquired and frequently superseded, is a futile specula-
tion. The constitution of man is such that he will never
be content with the knowledge he possesses whilst his
condition is improvable ; and that it is to be improved by
knowledge is now his irresistible conviction. Wherever he
is hurt or impeded he infers that his information or practice
is wrong. “We must conclude the ultimate end designed
in the constitution of nature and conduct of Providence
is the most virtue and happiness possible.” + Happiness
as the consequence of virtue, and virtue as the means to
happiness. -
Mr. T. And man arrives at this conclusion by observ-
ation of what takes place around him ; but his judg-
ments are provisional, and liable to be set aside on a re-
hearing. His instruments are fallible, and if his mind
mirrors the facts and forms of existence, these facts and
forms may be refracted and distorted by the methods he
has adopted or the media to which he is limited.
Mr. L. But we assume that his methods and media
are the best for the evolution and training of intelligence
* Hamlet. t Butler's Analogy.—Introduction.
156 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS.
and feeling—if indeed this be the purpose and end in
view. Dogmatism is always intolerant ; and is intoler-
able in an intelligence which cannot get beyond this con-
dition—“now I know in part;” for partial knowledge can
never be positive and absolute. Bishop Blougram's dog-
matism is a fair specimen of its class—
“If once we choose belief, on all accounts
We can’t be too decisive in our faith,
Conclusive and exclusive in its terms.”
Certainly, if the belief is proportioned to the evidence ; for
there is no virtue in believing nonsense, be it ever So
solemn.
Mr. T. Bishop Blougram's notion of choosing belief
is an odd one ; are we to choose without regard to the
evidence, or to look only for such evidence as suits the
belief ? Belief has reference to facts or propositions for
which there either is or is not sufficient evidence, and
what is sufficient is a fact of the human mind. Man is
formed to believe upon evidence and not otherwise, and
experience teaches him to reject faulty evidence. But
choice would seem to be excluded; you don’t choose to
be convinced, you may refuse to look at the evidence, or
you may be mentally incapable of appreciating it, or you
may shut your mind against it, but that which results in
such a case is only a figment, unworthy the name of a
belief. -
Mr. L. Belief must be founded upon knowledge, the
knowledge that a belief asks assent upon grounds that
make it credible.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 157
Mr. T. Dr. Newman, you will recollect, contends in
his “Grammar of Assent” that Locke's theory “of the duty
of assenting more or less, according to degrees of evidence,
is invalid and erroneous.”” Locke pointed out, as the
mark of a sincere lover of truth, “the not entertaining
any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs
it is built on will warrant;” and he adds—“Whoever goes
beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not
truth in the love of it, loves not truth for truth's sake, but
for some other by-end.” Dr. Newman quotes this state-
ment of Locke, and, in an elaborate argument, undertakes
to confute it. -
Mr. L. And Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” has
a passage corresponding with Locke's. He says—“Now,
it is not required, nor can be exacted at our hands,
that we should yield unto anything other assent than
such as doth answer the evidence which is to be had
of that we assent unto. . . . . The truth is, that
how bold and confident soever we may be in words,
when it cometh to the point of trial, such as the evidence
is, which the truth hath either in itself or through proof.
such is the heart's assent thereunto ; neither can it be
stronger, being grounded as it should be.” + Locke and
Hooker are at one. What Dr. Newman calls “indefectible
certitude,” in this province of probationary knowledge is
not to be attained by man. We observe an intelligence com-
mencing its career in the lowliest guise, amid scenes and
things fitted to quicken and invigorate it, associated more-
* Chapter vi. f Book II. ch. vii. 5.
158 UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS,
over with feelings that spring up spontaneously in presence
of their objects, and we conclude that the two sets of things
were made for and balance each other ; we remark also
the limitations of this intelligence, and the conditions
under which it works, and we see no basis for trans-
cendental dicta. The platform on which we thus stand
may seem “ common and unclean,” but there has been
reared up by means of it an edifice of infinite variety
and beauty. If “probability is the very guide of life”*
to such an intelligence, we conclude that the temper and
habits it forms are the fittest for its work. The road
into higher states of knowledge and certitude, from
lower of ignorance and distrust, may for ever lie through
regions of doubt and difficulty. Doubt and difficulty
being the conditions indispensable to the development of
a human intelligence; and the relations of a life con-
stituted like ours, with its passions and its conflicts,
being also the fittest for arousing and cultivating emo-
tions and a will such as belong to man. At this stage
of his progress he may not be able to assert that there is
a perfect coincidence between his apprehension of things
and the reality, between the facts of existence and his con-
ceptions of them ; nay, as to a large class he may not even
affirm that the names by which they are known truly re-
present in different minds the same notions and things,
but his position and his possessions are not therefore
to be despised ; they may be narrower than he has been
wont to believe, but within the region of the knowable,
* Butler's Analogy.—Introduction.
UTILITARIAN THEORY OF MORALS. 159
distant alike from presumption and credulity, he will
find
“Ample scope and verge enough ;”
methods and materials that may enlarge the boundaries of
intelligence beyond any limits at present conceivable, and
advance in an equal degree the condition of the human
race. To be “destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos. iv. 6)
has been too often the lot of man ; and to “seek the living
among the dead” (Luke xxiv, 5), to pursue the shadowy
and unattainable, and to neglect what lieth at the door, to
bewilder himself with a “knowledge that increaseth sorrow”
(Eccles. i. 18), and to eschew what might bring happiness
and hope, this has been the way of him ; but the lesson
is not lost, the experience has not been in vain ; the future
will be better than the past ; for he has learned that real
knowledge is not his foe but his friend, and its own
“exceeding great reward,” delivering him from the delusion
and deceit to which he was in bonds, and giving to him—
within his faculty and sphere—this hope and pledge,
“what . . thou knowest not now, thou shalt know here-
after.”
“Truth fails not ; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date, do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain,
And is no more ; drop, like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout, that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.””
* Wordsworth.
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