Chapter V: Introduction (5)

But the epoch-making book for me was Theodore Parker’s _Discourse of Religion_. Reading a notice of it in the _Athenæum_, soon after its publication (somewhere about the year 1845), I sent for it, and words fail to tell the satisfaction and encouragement it gave me. One must have been isolated and care-laden as I to estimate the value of such a book. I had come, as I have narrated above, to the main conclusions of Parker,—namely, the absolute goodness of God and the non-veracity of popular Christianity,—three years before; so that it has been a mistake into which some of my friends have fallen when they have described me as converted from orthodoxy by Parker. But his book threw a flood of light on my difficult way. It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory to find the ideas which I had hammered out painfully and often imperfectly, at last welded together, set forth in lucid order, supported by apparently adequate erudition and heartwarmed by fervent piety. But, in the second place, the _Discourse_ helped me most importantly by teaching me to regard Divine Inspiration no longer as a miraculous and therefore incredible thing; but as normal, and in accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and finite spirit; a Divine inflowing of _mental_ Light precisely analogous to that _moral_ influence which divines call Grace. As every devout and obedient soul may expect to share in Divine Grace, so the devout and obedient souls of all the ages have shared (as Parker taught) in Divine Inspiration. And, as the reception of Grace, even in large measure, does not render us _impeccable_, so neither does the reception of Inspiration make us _Infallible_. It is at this point that Deism stops and Theism begins; namely, when our faith transcends all that can be gleaned from the testimony of the bodily senses and accepts as supremely trustworthy the direct Divine teaching, the “original revelation” of God’s holiness and love in the depths of the soul. Theodore Parker adopted the alternative synonym to mark the vital difference in the philosophy which underlies the two creeds; a theoretic difference leading to most important practical consequences in the whole temper and spirit of Theism as distinct from Deism. I saw all this clearly ere long, and ranged myself thenceforth as a THEIST: a name now familiar to everybody, but which, when my family came to know I took it, led them to tell me with some contempt that it was “a word in a Dictionary, not a Religion.”

A few months after I had absorbed Parker’s _Discourse_, the great sorrow of my life befell me. My mother, whose health had been feeble ever since I could remember her, and who was now seventy years of age, passed away from a world which has surely held few spirits so pure and sweet. She died with her weeping husband and sons beside her bed and with her head resting on my breast. Almost her last words were to tell me I had been “the pride and joy” of her life. The agony I suffered when I realised that she was gone I shall not try to tell. She was the one being in the world whom I truly loved through all the passionate years of youth and early womanhood; the only one who really loved me. Never one word of anger or bitterness had passed from her lips to me, nor (thank God!) from mine to her in the twenty-four years in which she blessed my life; and for the latter part of that time her physical weakness had drawn a thousand tender cares of mine around her. No relationship in all the world, I think, can ever be so perfect as that of mother and daughter under such circumstances, when the strength of youth becomes the support of age, and the sweet dependance of childhood is reversed.

But it was all over—I was alone; no more motherly love and tenderness were ever again to reach my thirsting heart. But this was not as I recall it, the worst pang in that dreadful agony. I had (as I said above) ceased to believe in a future life, and therefore I had no choice but to think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the kingdoms of earth had actually _ceased to be_. She was a “Memory;” nothing more

I was not then or at any time one of those fortunate people who can suddenly cast aside the conclusions which they have reached by careful intellectual processes, and leap to opposite opinions at the call of sentiment. I played no tricks with my convictions, but strove as best I could to endure the awful strain, and to recognise the Divine Justice and Goodness through the darkness of death. I need not and cannot say more on the subject.

Happily for me, there were many duties waiting for me, and I could recognise even then that, though _pleasure_ seemed gone for ever, yet it was a relief to feel I had still _duties_. “Something to do for others” was an assuagement of misery. My father claimed first and much attention, and the position I now held of the female head of the family and household gave me a good deal of employment. To this I added teaching in my village school a mile from our house two or three times a week, and looking after all the sick and hungry in the two villages of Donabate and Balisk. Those were the years of Famine and Fever in Ireland, and there was abundant call for all our energies to combat them. I shall write of these matters in the next chapter.

I had, though with pain, kept my heresies secret during my mother’s declining years and till my father had somewhat recovered from his sorrow. I had continued to attend family prayers and church services, with the exception of the Communion, and had only vaguely allowed it to be understood that I was not in harmony with them all. When my poor father learned the full extent of my “infidelity,” it was a terrible blow to him, for which I have, in later years, sincerely pitied him. He could not trust himself to speak to me, but though I was in his house, he wrote to tell me I had better go away. My second brother, a barrister, had a year before given up his house in Queen Anne Street under a terrible affliction, and had gone, broken-hearted, to live on a farm which he hired in the wilds of Donegal. There I went as my father desired and remained for nearly a year; not knowing whether I should ever be permitted to return home and rather expecting to be disinherited. He wrote to me two or three times and said that if my doubts only extended in certain directions he could bear with them, “but if I rejected Christ and disbelieved the Bible, a man was called upon to keep the plague of such opinions from his own house.” Then he required me to answer him on those points categorically. Of course I did so plainly, and told him I did _not_ believe that Christ was God; and I did _not_ (in his sense) believe in the inspiration or authority of the Bible. After this ensued a very long silence, in which I remained entirely ignorant of my destiny and braced myself to think of earning my future livelihood. I was absolutely lonely; my brother, though always very kind to me, had not the least sympathy with my heresies, and thought my father’s conduct (as I do) quite natural; and I had not a friend or relative from whom I could look for any sort of comfort. A young cousin to whom I had spoken of them freely, and who had, in a way, adopted my ideas, wrote to me to say she had been shown the error of them, and was shocked to think she had been so misguided. This was the last straw. After I received this letter I wandered out in the dusk as usual down to a favourite nook—a natural seat under the bank in a bend of the river which ran through Bonny Glen,—and buried my face in the grass. As I did so my lips touched a primrose which had blossomed in that precise spot since I had last been there, and the soft, sweet flower which I had in childhood chosen for my mother’s birthday garland seemed actually to kiss my face. No one who has not experienced _utter_ loneliness can perhaps quite imagine how much comfort such an incident can bring.

As I had no duties in Donegal, and seldom saw our few neighbours, I occupied myself, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in writing an _Essay on True Religion_. I possess this MS. still, and have been lately examining it. Of course, as a first literary effort, it has many faults, and my limited opportunities for reference render parts of it very incomplete; but it is not a bad piece of work. The first part is employed in setting forth my reasons for belief in God. The second, those for not believing in (the apocalyptic part of) Christianity. The chapter on _Miracles_ and Prophecy (written from the literal and matter-of-fact standpoint of that epoch) are not ill-done, while the moral failure of the Bible and of the orthodox theology, the histories of Jacob, Jael, David, &c., and the dogmas of Original Sin, the Atonement, a Devil and eternal Hell, are criticised pretty successfully. A considerable part of the book consists in a comparison in parallel columns of moral precepts from the Old and New Testaments on one side, and from non-Christian writers, Euripides, Socrates (Xenophon), Plutarch, Sextius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, the Zend Avesta (Anquetil du Perron’s), The Institutes of Menu (Sir W. Jones’), the Damma Padan, the Talmud, &c., on the other. For years I had seized every opportunity of collecting the most striking ethical _dicta_, and I thus marshalled them to what appeared to me good purpose, namely, the disproof of the originality or exceptional loftiness of Christian Morals. I did not apprehend till later years, how the supreme achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a _new_, still less of a _systematic_ Morality; but the introduction of a new spirit into Morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.

Reading Parker’s _Discourse_, as I did very naturally in my solitude once again, it occurred to me to write to him and ask him to tell me on what ground he based the faith which I perceived he held, in a life after death? It had seemed to me that the guarantee of Revelation having proved worthless, there remained no sufficient reason for hope to counter-weigh the obvious difficulty of conceiving of a survival of the soul. Parker answered me in a most kind letter, accompanied by his _Sermon of the Immortal Life_. Of course I studied this with utmost care and sympathy, and by slow, very slow degrees, as I came more to take in the full scope of the Theistic, as distinguished from the Deistic view, I saw my way to a renewal of _the Hope of the Human Race_ which, twenty years later, I set forth as best as I could in the little book of that name. I learned to trust the intuition of Immortality which is “written in the heart of man by a Hand which writes no falsehoods.” I deemed also that I could see (as Parker says) the evidence of “a summer yet to be in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter;” the presence in human nature of many efflorescences—and they the fairest of all—quite unaccountable and unmeaning on the hypothesis that the end of the man is in the grave. In later years I think, as the gloom of the evil and cruelty of the world has shrouded more the almost cloudless skies of my youth, I have almost fervently held by the doctrine of Immortality because it is, to me _the indispensable corollary of that of the Goodness of God_. I am not afraid to repeat the words, which so deeply shocked, when they were first published, my old friend, F. W. Newman. “_If Man be not immortal, God is not Just._”

Recovering this faith, as I may say, rationally and not by any gust of emotion, I had the inexpressible happiness of thinking henceforth of my mother as still existing in God’s universe, and (as well as I knew) loving me wherever she might be, and under whatever loftier condition of being. To meet her again “spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost,” has been to me for forty years, the sweetest thought connected with death. Ere long, now, it must be realised.

After nine or ten months of this, by no means harsh, exile, my father summoned me to return home. I resumed my place as his daughter in doing all I could for his comfort, and as the head of his house; merely thenceforth abstaining from attendance either at Church or at family prayer. I had several favourite nooks and huts near and far in the woods, which I made into little Oratories for myself, and to one or other of them I resorted almost every evening at dusk; making it a habit—not broken for many years afterwards, to repeat a certain versified Litany of Thanksgiving which I had written and read to my mother. On Sundays, when the rest of the family went to the village church, I had the old garden for a beautiful cathedral. Having let myself in with my own key, and locked the doors, I knew I had the lovely six acres within the high walls, free for hours from all observation or intrusion. How much difference it makes in life to have at command such peace and solitude it is hard to estimate. I look back to some of the summer forenoons spent alone in that garden as to the flowering time of my seventy years. God grant that the afterglow of such hours may remain with me to the last, and that “at eventide it may be light!”

I knew that there were Unitarian chapels in Dublin at this time, and much wished to attend them now and then; but I would not cause annoyance to my father by the notice which my journey to the town on a Sunday would have attracted. Only on New Year’s Day I thought I might go unobserved and interpolate attendance at the service among my usual engagements. I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st of January and drove to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big, dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The service was a miserable, hybrid affair, neither Christian as I understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At last, the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived. The old Minister in his black-gown ascended the pulpit, having taken with him—what?—could I believe my eyes? It was an _old printed book_, bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1810 or thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek article when used before the word Θεός! My disappointment not to say disgust were such that,—as it was easy from my seat to leave the place without disturbing any one,—I escaped into the street, never (it may be believed) to repeat my experiment.

It was an anomalous position that which I held at Newbridge from the time of my return from Donegal, till my father’s death eight years later. I took my place as head of the household at the family table and in welcoming our guests, but I was all the time in a sort of moral Coventry, under a vague atmosphere of disapprobation wherein all I said was listened to cautiously as likely to conceal some poisonous heresy. Everything of this kind, however, wears down and becomes easier and softer as time goes on, and most so when people are, _au fond_, just-minded and good-hearted; and the years during which I remained at home till my father’s death, though mentally very lonely, were far from unhappy. In particular, the perfect clearness and straightforwardness of my position was, and has ever since been, a source of strength and satisfaction to me, for which I have thanked God a thousand times. My inner life was made happy by my simple faith in God’s infinite and perfect love; and I never had any doubt whether I had erred in abandoning the creed of my youth. On the contrary, as the whole tendency of modern science and criticism showed itself stronger and stronger against the old orthodoxy, my hopes were unduly raised of a not distant New Reformation which I might even live to see. These sanguine hopes have faded. As Dean Stanley seems to have felt, there was, somewhere between the years ’74 and ’78, a turn in the tide of men’s thoughts (due, I think, to the paramount influence and insolence which physical science then assumed), which has postponed any decisive “broad” movement for years beyond my possible span of life. But though nothing appears quite so bright to my old eyes as all things did to me in youth, though familiarity with human wickedness and misery, and still more with the horrors of scientific cruelty to animals, have strained my faith in God’s justice sometimes even to agony,—I know that no form of religious creed could have helped me any more than my own or as much as it has done to bear the brunt of such trial; and I remain to the present unshaken both in respect to the denials and the affirmations of Theism. There are great difficulties, soul-torturing difficulties besetting it; but the same or worse, beset every other form of faith in God; and infinitely more, and to my mind insurmountable ones, beset Atheism.

For fifty years Theism has been my staff of life. I must soon try how it will support me down the last few steps of my earthly way. I believe it will do so well.

CHAPTER
V.
_MY FIRST BOOK._

When I was thirty years of age I had an attack of bronchitis from which I nearly died. When very ill and not expecting to recover, I reflected that while my own life had been made happy and strong by the faith which had been given to me, I had done nothing to help any other human soul to find that solution of the dread problem which had brought such peace to me. I felt, as Mrs. Browning says, that a Truth was “like bread at Sacrament” to be passed on. When, unexpectedly to myself, I slowly recovered after a sojourn in Devonshire, I resolved to set about writing something which should convey as much as possible of my own convictions to whosoever should read it. For a time I thought of enlarging and completing my MS. _Essay on True Religion_, written for my own instruction; but the more I reflected the less I cared to labour to pull down hastily the crumbling walls which yet sheltered millions of souls, and the more I longed to build up anew on solid base a stronghold of refuge for those driven like myself from the old ground of faith in God and Duty. Especially I felt that as the worst dangers of such transitions lay in the sudden snapping of the supposed bond of Morality, and collapse of the hopes of heaven and terrors of hell which had been used as motives of virtue and deterrents from vice; so the most urgent need lay in the direction of a system of ethics which should base Duty on ground absolutely apart from that of the supposed supernatural revelation and supply sanctions and motives unconnected therewith. As it happened at this very time, my good (orthodox) friend, Miss Felicia Skene, had recommended me to read Kant’s _Metaphysic of Ethics_, and I had procured Semple’s translation and found it almost dazzlingly enlightening to my mind. It would be presumptuous for me to say that then, or at any time, I have thoroughly mastered either this book or the _Reinun Vernunft_ of this greatest of thinkers; but, so far as I have been able to do so, I can say for my own individual mind (as his German disciples were wont to do for themselves), “God said, Let there be Light! and there was—the Kantian Philosophy.” It has been, and no doubt will be still further, modified by succeeding metaphysicians and sometimes it may appear to have been superseded, but I cannot think otherwise than that Kant was and will finally be recognised to have been the Newton of the laws of Mind.

I shall now endeavour to explain the purpose of my first book (which is also my _magnum opus_) by quoting the Preface at some length; and, as the third edition has long been out of print and is unattainable in England or America, I shall permit myself to embody in this chapter a general account of the drift of it, with extracts sufficient to serve as samples of the whole. Looking over it now, after the lapse of just forty years, I can see that my reading at that time had lain so much among old books that the style is almost that of a didactic Treatise of the seventeenth century; and the ideas, likewise, are necessarily exclusively those of the pre-Darwinian Era. Conceptions so familiar to us now as that of an “hereditary set of the brain,” and of the “Capitalised experience of the tribe,” were then utterly unthought of. I have been well aware that it would, consequently, have been necessary,—had the book been republished any time during the last twenty years,—to rewrite much of it and define the standpoint of an Intuitionist as regards the theory of Evolution in its bearing on the foundation of ethics. For this task, however, I have always lacked leisure: and my article on “_Darwinism in Morals_” (reprinted in the book of that name) has been the best effort I have made in such direction. I may here, perhaps, nevertheless be allowed to say as a last word in favour of this Essay, namely, that such as it is, it has served me, personally, as a scaffolding for all my life-work, a key to open most of the locks which might have barred my way. If now I feel (as men and women are wont to do at three-score years and ten), that I hold all philosophic opinions with less tenacious grasp, less “cocksureness” than in earlier days, and know that the great realities to which they led, will remain realities for me still should those opinions prove here and there unstable,—it is not that I am disposed in any way to abandon them, still less that I have found any other systems of ethics or theology more, or equally, sound and self-consistent.

I wrote the “_Essay on the Theory of Intuitive Morals_” between my thirtieth and thirty-third years. I had a great deal else to do—to amuse and help my father (then growing old); to direct our household, entertain our guests, carry on the feminine correspondence of the family, teach in my village school twice a week or so, and to attend every case of illness or other tribulation in Donabate and Balisk. My leisure for writing and for the preliminary reading for writing, was principally at night or in the early morning; and at last it was accomplished. No one but my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, had seen any part of the MS., and, as I have said, nobody belonging to my family had ever (so far as I know) employed a printer or publisher before. I took the MS. with me to London, where my father and I were fortunately going for a holiday, and called with it in Paternoster Row, on Mr. William Longman, to whom I had a letter of business introduction from my Dublin bookseller. When I opened my affair to Mr. Longman, it was truly a case of Byron’s address to Murray—

“To thee with hope and terror dumb,
The unfledged MS. authors come;
Thou printest all, and sellest some,
My Murray!”

Mr. Longman politely veiled a smile, and adopted the voice of friendly dissuasion from my enterprise, looking no doubt on a young lady (as I still was) as a very unpromising author for a treatise on Kantian ethics! My spirit, however, rose with the challenge. I poured out for some minutes much that I had been thinking over for years, and as I paused at last, Mr. Longman said briefly, but decidedly, “_I’ll publish your book._”

After this fateful interview, I remember going into St. Paul’s and sitting there a long while alone.

The sheets of the book passed rapidly through the press, and I usually took them to the British Museum to verify quotations and work quietly over difficulties, for in the house which we occupied in Connaught Square I had no study to myself. The foot-notes to the book (collected some in the Museum, some from my own books and some from old works in Archbishop Marsh’s Library) were themselves a heavy part of the work. Glancing over the pages as I write, I see extracts, for example, from the following:—Cudworth (I had got at some inedited MSS. of his in the British Museum), Montesquieu, Philo, Hooker, Proclus, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Müller, Whewell, Mozley, Leibnitz, St. Augustine, Phillipsohn, Strabo, St. Chrysostom, Morell, Lewes, Dugald Stewart, Mill, Oërsted, the Adée-Grunt’h (sacred book of the Sikhs), Herbert Spencer, Hume, Maximus Tyriensis, Institutes of Menu, Victor Cousin, Sir William Hamilton, Lucian, Seneca, Cory’s Fragments, St. Gregory the Great, Justin Martyr, Jeremy Taylor, the Yajur Veda, Shaftesbury, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Confucius, and many more. There are also in the Notes sketches of the history of the doctrines of Predestination, and of Original Sin, which involved very considerable research.

At last the proofs were corrected, the Notes verified, and the time had come when the Preface must be written! How was I to find a quiet hour to compose it? Like most women I was bound hand and foot by a fine web of little duties and attentions, which men never feel or brush aside remorselessly, (it was only Hooker, who rocked a cradle with his foot while he wrote the Ecclesiastical Polity!); and it was a serious question for me when I could find leisure and solitude. Luckily, just on the critical day, my father was seized with a fancy to go to the play, and, equally luckily, I had so bad a cold that it was out of question that I should, as usual, accompany him. Accordingly I had an evening all alone, and wrote fast and hard the pages which I shall presently quote, finishing the last sentence of my _Preface_ as I heard my father’s knock at the hall door.

I had all along told my father (though, alas; to his displeasure), that I was going to publish a book; of course, anonymously, to save him annoyance. When the printing was completed, the torn and defaced sheets of the MS. lay together in a heap for removal by the housemaid. Pointing to this, my poor father said solemnly to me: “Don’t leave those about; _you don’t know into whose hands they may fall_.” It was needless to observe to him, that I was on the point of _publishing_ the “perilous stuff”!

The book was brought out by Longmans that year (1855) and afterwards by Crosby and Nichols in Boston, and again by Trübner in London. It was reviewed rather largely and, on the whole, very kindly, considering it was by an unknown and altogether unfriended author; but sometimes also in a manner which it is pleasant to know has gone out of fashion in these latter days. It was amusing to see that not one of my critics had a suspicion they were dealing with a woman’s work. They all said, “_He_ reasons clearly.” “_His_ spirit and manner are particularly well suited to ethical discussion.” “_His_ treatment of morals” (said the _Guardian_) “is often both true and beautiful.” “It is a most noble performance,” (said the _Caledonian Mercury_), “the work of a _masculine_ and lofty mind.” “It is impossible,” (said the _Scotsman_), “to deny the ability of the writer, or not to admire _his_ high moral tone, his earnestness and the fulness of his knowledge.” But the heresy of the book brought down heavy denunciation from the “religious” papers on the audacious writer who, “instead of walking softly and humbly on the firm ground and taking the Word of God as a lamp,” &c., had indulged in “insect reasonings.” A rumour at last went out that a woman was the author of this “able and attractive but deceptive and dangerous work,” and then the criticisms were barbed with sharper teeth. “The writer” (says the _Christian Observer_), “we are told, is a lady, but there is nothing feeble or even feminine in the tone of the work.... Our dislike is increased when we are told it is a female (!) who has propounded so unfeminine and stoical a theory ... and has contradicted openly the true sayings of the living God!” The _Guardian_ (November 21st, 1855) finally had this delightful paragraph: “The author professes great admiration for Theodore Parker and Francis Newman, but his own pages are not disfigured by the arrogance of the one or the shallow levity of the other” (think of the _shallow levity_ of Newman’s book of the _Soul_!). “He writes gravely, not defiantly, as befits a man giving utterance to thoughts which he knows _will be generally regarded as impious_.”

I shall now offer the reader a few extracts; and first from the _Preface_:—

“It cannot surely be questioned but that we want a System of Morals
better than any of those which are current amongst us. We want a
system which shall neither be too shallow for the requirements of
thinking men, nor too abstruse for popular acceptation; but which
shall be based upon the ultimate grounds of philosophy, and be
developed with such distinctness as to be understood by every one
capable of studying the subject. We want a System of Morals which
shall not entangle itself with sectarian creeds, nor imperil its
authority with that of tottering Churches, but which shall be
indissolubly blended with a Theology fulfilling all the demands of the
Religious Sentiment—a Theology forming a part, and the one living
part, of all the theologies which ever have been or shall be. We want
a system which shall not degrade the Law of the Eternal Right by
announcing it as a mere contrivance for the production of human
happiness, or by tracing our knowledge of it to the experience of the
senses, or by cajoling us into obeying it as a matter of expediency;
but a system which shall ascribe to that Law its own sublime office in
the universe, which shall recognise in man the faculties by which he
obtains a supersensible knowledge of it, and which shall inculcate
obedience to it on motives so pure and holy, that the mere statement
of them shall awaken in every breast that higher and better self which
can never be aroused by the call of interest or expediency.

“It would be in itself a presumption for me to disclaim the ability
necessary for supplying such a want as this. In writing this book, I
have aimed chiefly at two objects. First. I have sought to unite into
one homogeneous and self-consistent whole the purest and most enlarged
theories hitherto propounded on ethical science. Especially I have
endeavoured to popularise those of Kant, by giving the simplest
possible presentation to his doctrines regarding the Freedom of the
Will and the supersensible source of our knowledge of all Necessary
Truths, including those of Morals. I do not claim however, even so far
as regards these doctrines, to be an exact exponent of Kant’s
opinions.... Secondly. I have sought (and this has been my chief aim)
to place for the first time, at the foundation of ethics, the great
but neglected truth that the End of Creation is not the Happiness, but
the Virtue, of Rational Souls. I believe that this truth will be found
to throw most valuable light, not only upon the Theory, but upon all
the details of Practical Morals. Nay, more, I believe that we must
look to it for such a solution of the ‘Riddle of the World’ as shall
satisfy the demands of the Intellect while presenting to the Religious
Sentiment that same God of perfect Justice and Goodness whose ideal it
intuitively conceives and spontaneously adores. Only with this view of
the Designs of God can we understand how His Moral Attributes are
consistent with the creation of a race which is indeed ‘groaning in
sin’ and ‘travailing in sorrow’; but by whose freedom to sin and trial
of sorrow shall be worked out at last the most blessed End which
Infinite Love could devise. With this clew, we shall also see how (as
the Virtue of each individual must be produced by himself, and is the
share committed to him in the grand end of creation) all Duties must
necessarily range themselves accordingly—the Personal before the
Social—in a sequence entirely different from that which is comformable
with the hypothesis that Happiness is ‘our being’s end and aim’; but
which is, nevertheless, precisely the sequence in which Intuition has
always peremptorily demanded that they should be arranged. We shall
see how (as the bestowal of Happiness on man must always be postponed
by God to the still more blessed aim of conducing to his Virtue) the
greatest outward woes and trials, so far from inspiring us with doubts
of His Goodness, must be taken as evidences of the glory of that End
of Virtue to which they lead, even as the depths of the foundations of
a cathedral may show how high the towers and spires will one day
ascend.”—_Pref._, pp. V.–X.

In the first chapter, entitled _What is the Moral Law?_ I take for motto Antigone’s great speech:—

“ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν
νόμιμα....
οὐ γἀρ τι νῦν γε κᾀχθὲς, ἀλλ’ ἀεί ποτε
ζῇ ταῦτα, κοὐδεὶς οἶδεν ἐξ ὅτου ‘φάνη.
Σοφ. Ἀντιγ. 454.”

I begin by defining Moral actions and sentiments as those of Rational Free Agents, to which alone may be applied the terms of Right or Wrong, Good or Evil, Virtuous or Vicious. I then proceed to say:—

“This moral character of good or evil is a real, universal and eternal
distinction, existing through all worlds and for ever, wherever there
are rational creatures and free agents. As one kind of line is a
straight line, and another a crooked line, and as no line can be both
straight and crooked, so one kind of action or sentiment is right, and
another is wrong, and no action or sentiment can be both right or
wrong. And as the same line which is straight on this planet would be
straight in Sirius or Alcyone, and what constitutes straightness in
the nineteenth century will constitute straightness in the nineteenth
millennium, so that sentiment or action which is right in our world,
is right in all worlds; and that which constitutes righteousness now
will constitute righteousness through all eternity. And as the
character of straightness belongs to the line, by whatsoever hand it
may have been traced, so the character of righteousness belongs to the
sentiment or action, by what rational free agent soever it may have
been felt or performed.”

“And of this distinction language affords a reliable exponent. When we
have designated one kind of figure by the word Circle, and another by
the word Triangle, those terms, having become the names of the
respective figures, cannot be transposed without transgression of the
laws of language. Thus it would be absurd to argue that the figure we
call a circle, may not be a circle; that a ‘plane figure, containing a
point from which all right lines drawn to the circumference shall be
equal,’ may not be a circle, but a triangle. In like manner, when we
have designated one kind of sentiment or action as Right, and another
as Wrong, it becomes an absurdity to say that the kind of sentiments
or actions we call Right may, perhaps, be Wrong. If a figure be not a
circle, according to our sense of the word, it is not a circle at all,
but an Ellipse, a Triangle, Trapezium, or something else. If a
sentiment or action be not Right, according to our sense of the word,
it is not Right at all, but, according to the laws of language, must
be called Wrong.

“It is not maintained that we can commit no error in affixing the
_name_ of Circle to a particular figure, or of Right to a particular
sentiment or action. We may at a hasty glance pronounce an ellipse to
be a circle; but when we have proved the radii to be unequal, needs
must we arrive at a better judgment. Our error was caused by our first
haste and misjudgment, not by our inability to decide whether an
object presented to us bears or does not bear a character to which we
have agreed to affix a certain name. In like manner, from haste or
prejudice, we may pronounce a faulty sentiment or action to be Right;
but when we have examined it in all its bearings, we ourselves are the
first to call it Wrong.”—Pp. 4–7.

After much more on the _positive_ nature of Good, and the negative nature of Evil, and on the relation of the Moral Law to God as _impersonated_ in His Will, and not the result (as Ockham taught) of his arbitrary decree,—I sum up the argument of this first chapter. To the question, What is the Moral Law? I answer:—

“The Moral Law is the embodiment of the eternal Necessary obligation
of all Rational Free Agents to do and feel those actions and
sentiments which are Right. The identification of this law with His
will constitutes the _Holiness_ of the infinite God. Voluntary and
disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the _Virtue_ of all
finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless
approach to the Divine nature, and to perfect conformity with the law.
God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and (doubtless) all
worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only
reigns throughout His creation (its behests being finally enforced
therein by His power), but is itself the reason why that creation
exists. The material universe, with all its laws, and all the events
which result therefrom, has one great purpose, and tends to one great
end. It is that end which infinite Love has designed, and which
infinite Power shall surely accomplish,—the everlasting approximation
of all created souls to Goodness and to God.”—(Pp. 62, 63.)

The second chapter undertakes to answer the question, _Where is the Moral Law Found?_ and begins by a brief analysis of the two great classes of human knowledge as a preliminary to ascertaining to which of these our knowledge of ethics belongs.

“All sciences are either Exact or Physical (or are applications of
Exact to Physical science).

“Exact sciences are deduced from axiomatic Necessary truths and
results in universal propositions, each of which is a Necessary Truth.

“Physical sciences are induced from Experimental Contingent truths,
and result in General Propositions, each of which is a contingent
truth.

“We obtain our knowledge of the Experimental Contingent Truths from
which Physical science is induced, by the united action of our bodily
senses and of our minds themselves, which must both in each case
contribute their proper quota to make knowledge possible. Every
perception necessitates this double element of sensation and
intuition,—the objective and subjective factor in combination.

“We obtain our knowledge of the axiomatic Necessary Truths from which
Exact science is deduced, by the _à priori_ operation of the mind
alone, and (_quoad_ the exact science in question) without the aid of
sensation (not, indeed, by _à priori_ operation of a mind which has
never worked with sensation, for such a mind would be altogether
barren; but of one which has reached normal development under normal
conditions; which conditions involve the continual united action
productive of perceptions of contingent truths).

“In this distinction between the sources of our knowledge lies the
most important discovery of philosophy. Into whatsoever knowledge the
element of Sensation necessarily enters as a constituent part, therein
there can be no absolute certainty of truth; the fallibility of
Sensation being recognised on all hands, and neutralising the
certainty of the pure mental element. But when we discover an order of
sciences which, without aid from sensation, are deduced by the mind’s
own operation from those Necessary truths which we hold on a tenure
marking indelibly their distinction from all contingent truths
whatsoever, then we obtain footing in a new realm....

“In the ensuing pages I shall endeavour to demonstrate that the
science of Morals belongs to the class of Exact sciences, and that it
has consequently a right to that credence wherewith we hold the truths
of arithmetic and geometry....”

The test which divides the two classes is as follows:—

“What truth soever is _Necessary_ and of universal extent is derived
by the mind from its own operation, and does not rest on observation
or experience; as, conversely, what truth or perception soever is
present to the mind with a consciousness, not of its Necessity, but of
its Contingency, is ascribable not to the original agency of the mind
itself, but derives its origin from observation and experience.”

After lengthened discussion on this head and on the supposed mistakes of moral intuition, I go on to say:

“The consciousness of the Contingency, or the consciousness of the
Necessity (_i.e._, the consciousness that the truth _cannot_ be
contingent, but must hold good in all worlds for ever), these
consciousnesses are to be relied on, for they have their origin in,
and are the marks of, the different elements from which they have been
derived.[9] We may apply them to the fundamental truths of any
science, and by observing whether the reception of such truths into
our minds be accompanied by the consciousness of Necessity or of
Contingency, we may decide whether the science be rightfully Exact or
Physical, deductive or inductive.

“For example, we take the axioms of arithmetic and geometry, and we
find that we have distinct consciousness that they are Necessary
truths. We cannot conceive them altered any where or at any time. The
sciences which are deduced from these and from similar axioms are
then, Exact sciences.

“Again: we take the ultimate facts of geology and anatomy, and we find
that we have distinct consciousness that they are Contingent truths.
We can readily suppose them other than we find them. The sciences,
then, which are induced from these and similar facts are not Exact
sciences.

“If, then, morals can be shown to bear this test equally with
mathematics,—if there be any fundamental truths of morals holding in
our minds the status of those axioms of geometry and arithmetic of
whose Necessity we are conscious, then these fundamental truths of
morals are entitled to be made the basis of an Exact science the
subsequent theorems of which must all be deduced from them.—(P.
76.)...

“Men like Hume traverse the history of our race, to collect all the
piteous instances of aberrations which have resulted from neglect or
imperfect study of the moral consciousness; and then they cry, ‘Behold
what it teaches!’ Yet I suppose that it will be admitted that Man is
an animal capable of knowing geometry; though, if we were to go up and
down the world, asking rich and poor, Englishman and Esquimaux, what
are the ratios of solidity and superficies of a sphere, a right
cylinder and an equilateral cone circumscribed about it, there are
sundry chances that we should hear of other ratios besides the
sesquialterate.

“He who should argue that, because people ignorant of geometry did not
know the sesquialterate ratio of the sphere, cylinder and cone,
therefore no man could know it, or that because they disputed it, that
therefore it was uncertain, would argue no more absurdly than he who
urges the divergencies of half civilised and barbarian nations as a
reason why no man could know, or know with certainty, the higher
propositions of morals.”

After analysing the Utilitarian and other theories which derive Morality from Contingent truths, I conclude that “the truths of Morals are Necessary Truths. The origin of our knowledge of them is Intuitive, and their proper treatment is Deductive.”

The third Chapter treats of the proposition, “That the Moral Law can be obeyed,” and discusses the doctrine of Kant, that the true self of Man, the _Homo Noumenon_, is free, self-legislative of Law fit for Law Universal; while as the _Homo Phenomenon_, an inhabitant of the world of sense, he is a mere link in the chain of causes and effects, and his actions are locked up in mechanic laws which, had he no other rank, would ensue exactly according to the physical impulses given by the instincts and solicitations in the sensory. But as an inhabitant (also) of the supersensitive world his position is among the causalities which taking their rise therein, are the intimate ground of phenomena. The discussion in this chapter on the above proposition cannot be condensed into any space admissible here.

The fourth Chapter seeks to determine _Why the Moral Law should be Obeyed_. It begins thus:—

“In the last Chapter (Chapter III.) I endeavoured to demonstrate that
the pure Will, the true self of man, is by nature righteous;
self-legislative of the only Universal Law, viz., the Moral; and that
by this spontaneous autonomy would all his actions be squared, were it
not for his lower nature, which is by its constitution unmoral,
neither righteous nor unrighteous, but capable only of determining its
choice by its instinctive propensities and the gratifications offered
to them. Thus these two are contrary one to another, ‘and the spirit
lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit.’ In the
valour of the higher nature acquired by its victory over the lower, in
the virtue of the tried and conquering soul, we look for the glorious
end of creation, the sublime result contemplated by Infinite
Benevolence in calling man into existence and fitting him with the
complicated nature capable of developing that Virtue which alone can
be the crown of finite intelligences. The great practical problem of
human life is this: ‘How is the Moral Will to gain the victory over
the unmoral instincts, the _Homo Noumenon_ over the _Homo Phenomenon_,
Michael over the Evil One, Mithras over Hyle?’”

In pursuing this enquiry of how the Moral Will is to be rendered victorious, I am led back to the question: Is Happiness “our end and aim?” What relation does it bear to Morality as a motive?

“I have already argued, in Chapter I., that Happiness, properly
speaking, is the gratification of _all_ the desires of our compound
nature, and that moral, intellectual, affectional, and sensual
pleasures are all to be considered as integers, whose sum, when
complete, would constitute perfect Happiness. From this multiform
nature of Happiness it has arisen, that those systems of ethics which
set it forth as the proper motive of Virtue have differed immensely
from one another, according as the Happiness they respectively
contemplated was thought of as consisting in the pleasures of our
Moral, or of our Intellectual, Affectional, and Sensual natures;
whether the pleasures were to be sought by the virtuous man for his
own enjoyment, or for the general happiness of the community.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of its intrinsic, _i.e._, Moral
pleasure, is designated EUTHUMISM.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of the extrinsic Affectional,
Intellectual, and Sensual pleasure resulting from it, is designated
EUDAIMONISM.

“Euthumism is of one kind only, for the individual can only seek the
intrinsic pleasure of Virtue for his own enjoyment thereof.

“Eudaimonism, on the contrary, is of two most distinct lands. That
which I have called PUBLIC EUDAIMONISM sets forth the intellectual,
affectional, and sensual pleasures of _all mankind_ as the proper
object of the Virtue of each individual. PRIVATE EUDAIMONISM sets
forth the same pleasures of the _individual himself_ as the proper
object of his Virtue.

“These two latter systems are commonly confounded under the name of
‘UTILITARIAN ETHICS.’ Their principles, as I have stated them, will be
seen to be wide asunder; yet there are few of the advocates of either
who have not endeavoured to stand on the grounds of both, and even to
borrow elevation from those of the Euthumist. Thus, by appealing
alternately to philanthropy[10] and to a gross and a refined
Selfishness, they suit the purpose of the moment, and prevent their
scheme from deviating too far from the intuitive conscience of
mankind. It may be remarked, also, that the Private Eudaimonists
insist more particularly on the pleasure of a _Future Life_; and in
the exposition of them necessarily approach nearer to the Euthumists.”

I here proceeded to discuss the three systems which have arisen from the above-defined different views of Happiness; each contemplating it as the proper motive of Virtue: namely, 1st, Euthumism; 2nd, Public Eudaimonism; and 3rd, Private Eudaimonism.

“1st. Euthumism. This system, as I have said, sets forth the _Moral
Pleasure_, the peace and cheerfulness of mind, and applause of
conscience enjoyed in Virtue, as the proper motive for its practice.
Conversely, it sets forth as the dissuadent from Vice, the pain of
remorse, the inward uneasiness and self-contempt which belong to it.

“Democritus appears to have been the first who gave clear utterance to
this doctrine, maintaining that Εύθυμία was the proper End of human
actions, and sharply distinguishing it from the ‘Ηδονή’ proposed as
such by Aristippus. The claims of a ‘_mens conscia recti_’ to be the
‘Summum Bonum,’ occupied, as is well known, a large portion of the
subsequent disputes of the Epicureans, Cynics, Stoics and Academics,
and were eagerly argued by Cicero, and even down to the time of
Boethius. Many of these sects, however, and in particular the Stoics,
though maintaining that Virtue alone is sufficient for Happiness (that
is, that the inward joy of Virtue is enough to constitute Happiness in
the midst of torments), yet by no means set forth that Happiness as
the sole _motive_ of Virtue. They held, on the contrary, the noblest
ideas of ‘living according to Nature,’ that is, as Chrysippus
explained it, according to the ‘Nature of the universe, the common Law
of all, which is the right reason spread everywhere, the same by which
Jupiter governs the world’; and that both Virtue and Happiness
consisted in so regulating our actions that they should produce
harmony between the Spirit in each of us, and the Will of Him who
rules the universe. There is little or no trace of Euthumism in the
Jewish or Christian Scriptures, or (to my knowledge) in the sacred
books of the Brahmins, Buddhists, or Parsees. The ethical problems
argued by the mediæval Schoolmen do not, so far as I am aware, embrace
the subject in question. The doctrine was revived, however, in the
seventeenth century, and besides blending with more or less
distinctness with the views of a vast number of lesser moralists, it
reckons among its professed adherents no less names than Henry More
and Bishop Cumberland. Euthumism, philosophically considered, will be
found to affix itself most properly on the doctrine of the ‘Moral
Sense’ laid down by Shaftesbury as the origin of our _knowledge_ of
moral distinctions, which, if it were, it would naturally follow that
it must afford also the right _motive_ of Virtue. Hutcheson, also,
still more distinctly stated that this Moral Pleasure in Virtue (which
both he and Shaftesbury likened to the æsthetic Pleasure in Beauty)
was the true ground of our choice. To this Balguy replied, that ‘to
make the rectitude of moral actions depend upon instinct, and, in
proportion to the warmth and strength of the Moral Sense, rise and
fall like spirits in a thermometer, is depreciating the most sacred
thing in the world, and almost exposing it to ridicule.’ And Whewell
has shown that the doctrine of the Moral Sense as the foundation of
Morals must always fail, whether understood as meaning a sense like
that of Beauty (which may or may not be merely a modification of the
Agreeable), or a sense like those of Touch or Taste (which no one can
fairly maintain that any of our moral perceptions really resemble).