Chapter 15

Those who desire to prove that at the present day morality can exist apart from religion, and that in the future it will do so, finding its basis in humanitarianism and not in religion, are moved to show that as a matter of historic fact religion and morality have been things apart. We have examined the assertion that religion in its lowest forms is not concerned with morality; and we have attempted to show that the god of a community, or the spirit worshipped by a community, is necessarily a being conceived as concerned with the interests of the community and as hostile to those who violate the customs--which is to transgress the morality--of the community. But even if this be admitted, it may still be said that it does not in the least disprove the assertion that {222} morality existed before religion did. The theory we are examining freely admits that religion is supposed, in certain stages of the history of humanity, to reënforce morality and to be necessary in the interest of morals, though eventually it is found that morality needs no such support; and not only needs now no such support but never did need it; and the fact that it did not need it is shown by demonstrating the existence of morality before religion existed. If, then, it be admitted that religion from the moment it first appeared reënforced morality, and did not pass through a non-moral period first, still morality may have existed before religion was evolved, and must have so existed if morality and religion are things essentially apart. What evidence then is there on the point? We find Mr. Hobhouse saying (I, 80) that "at almost, if not quite, the lowest stages" of human development there are "certain actions which are resented as involving the community as a whole in misfortune and danger. These include, besides actual treason, conduct which brings upon the people the wrath of God, or of certain spirits, or which violates some mighty and mysterious taboo. The actions most frequently regarded in this light are certain breaches of the marriage law and witchcraft." {223} These offences, we are told (_ib._, 82), endanger the community itself, and the punishment is "prompted by the sense of a danger to the whole community." Here, then, from the beginning we find that offences against the common good are punished, not simply as such, but as misconduct bringing on the community, and not merely on the offender, the wrath of gods or spirits. In other words--Mr. Hobhouse's words, p. 119--"in the evolution of public justice, we find that at the outset the community interferes mainly on what we may call supernatural grounds only with actions which are regarded as endangering its own existence." We may then fairly say that if the community inflicts punishments mainly on supernatural grounds from the time when the evolution of public justice first begins, then morality from its very beginning was reënforced--indeed prompted--by religion. The morality was indeed only the custom of the community; but violation of the custom was from the beginning regarded as a religious offence and was punished on supernatural grounds.

The view that morality and religion are essentially distinct, that morality not only can stand alone, without support from religion, but has in reality always stood without such support--however much {224} the fact has been obscured by religious prepossessions--this view receives striking confirmation from the current and generally accepted theory of the origin and nature of justice. That theory traces the origin of justice back to the feeling of resentment experienced by the individual against the particular cause of his pain (Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, I, 22). Resentment leads to retaliation and takes the form of revenge. Vengeance, at first executed by the person injured (or by his kin, if he be killed), comes eventually, if slowly, to be taken out of the hands of the person injured or his avengers, and to be exercised by the State in the interests of the community and in furtherance, not of revenge, but of justice and the good of society. Thus not only the origin of justice, but the whole course of its growth and development, is entirely independent of religion and religious considerations. Throughout, the individual and society are the only parties involved; the gods do not appear--or, if they do appear, they are intrusive and superfluous. If this be the true view of the history and nature of justice, it may--and probably must--be the truth about the whole of morality and not only about justice. We have but {225} to follow Dr. Westermarck (_ib._, p. 21) in grouping the moral emotions under the two heads of emotions of approval and emotions of disapproval, we have but to note with him that both groups belong to the class of retributive emotions, and we see that the origin and history of justice are typical of the origin and history of morals: morality in general, just as much as justice in particular, both originates independently of religion and developes--where moral progress is made--independently of religion.

Let us now proceed to examine this view of the relation of religion and morality and to consider whether their absolute independence of each other is historic fact. It traces back justice to the feeling of resentment experienced by the individual; but if the individual ever existed by himself and apart from society, there could neither then be justice nor anything analogous to justice, for justice implies, not merely a plurality of individuals, but a society; it is a social virtue. The individual existing by himself and apart from society is not a historic fact but an impossible abstraction--a conception essentially false because it expresses something which neither exists nor has existed nor could possibly {226} exist. The origin of justice--or of any virtue--cannot be found in the impossible and self-contradictory conception of the individual existing apart from society; it cannot be found in a mere plurality of such individuals: it can only be found in a society--whether that society have the organisation of a family, a tribe, or a nation. Justice in particular and morality in general, like religion, imply the existence of a society; neither is a merely individual affair. Justice is, as Mr. Hobhouse states, "public action taken for the sake of public safety" (I, 83): it is, from the outset of its history, public action; and back of that we cannot go, for the individual did not, as a matter of history, exist before society, and could not so have existed.

In the next place, justice is not the resentment of any individual, it is the sentiment of the community expressing itself in public action, taken not for the sake of any individual, but for the sake of public safety. Its object from the beginning is not the gratification of individual resentment, but the safety and welfare of the community which takes common action. Proof of this, if proof were needed, would be found in the fact that the existence of the individual, as such, is not recognised. Not only does {227} the community which has suffered in the wrong done to any of its members take action as a community; it proceeds, not against the individual who has inflicted the wrong, but against the community to which he belongs. "The wrong done," is, as Mr. Hobhouse says (I, 91), "the act of the family or clan and may be avenged on any member of that family or clan." There is collective responsibility for the wrong done, just as there is collective responsibility for righting it.

If, now, we enquire, What are the earliest offences against which public action is taken? and why? we may remember that Mr. Hobhouse has stated them to be witchcraft and breaches of the marriage law; and that the punishment of those offences corresponds, as he has said, "roughly to our own administration of justice" (I, 81). Now, in the case of breaches of the marriage laws--mating with a cousin on the mother's side instead of with a cousin on the father's side, marrying into a forbidden class--it is obvious that there is no individual who has suffered injury and that there is no individual to experience resentment. It is the community that suffers or is expected to suffer; and it expects to suffer, because it, in the person of one of its {228} members, has offended. Collectively it is responsible for the misdeeds of its members. Whom, then, has it offended? To whom is it responsible? Who will visit it with punishment, unless it makes haste to set itself right? The answer given by a certain tribe of the Sea Dyaks makes the matter clear: they, Mr. St. John tells us in his _Life in the Forests of the Far East_ (I, 63, quoted by Westermarck, I, 49), "are of opinion that an unmarried girl proving with child must be offensive to the superior powers, who, instead of always chastising the individual, punish the tribe by misfortunes happening to its members. They therefore on the discovery of the pregnancy fine the lovers, and sacrifice a pig to propitiate offended heaven, and to avert that sickness or those misfortunes that might otherwise follow." That is, of course, only one instance. But we may safely say that the marriage law is generally ascribed to the ordinance of the gods, even in the lowest tribes, and that breaches of it are offences against heaven. It is unnecessary to prove, it need only be mentioned, that witchcraft is conspicuously offensive to the religious sentiment, and is punished as an offence against the god or gods. When, then, we consider the origin and nature of justice, not from {229} an abstract and _à priori_ point of view, but in the light of historic fact, so far from finding that it originates and operates in complete independence of religion, we discover that from the beginning the offences with which the justice of the primitive community deals are offences, not against the community, but against heaven. "In the evolution of public justice," as Mr. Hobhouse says, "at the outset the community interferes mainly on what we may call supernatural grounds." From the beginning misdeeds are punished, not merely as wrongs done to society, but as wrong done to the gods and as wrong-doing for which the community collectively is responsible to the gods. Justice from the beginning is not individual resentment, but "public action taken for the public safety." It is not, as Mr. Hobhouse calls it, "revenge guided and limited by custom." It is the customary action of the community taken to avert divine vengeance. The action taken assumes in extreme cases the form of the death penalty; but its usual form of action is that of taboo.

If the origin of justice is to be sought in something that is not justice, if justice in particular and morality in general are to be treated as having been evolved out of something which was in a way different {230} from them and yet in a way must have contained them, inasmuch as they came forth from it, we shall do well to look for that something, not in the unhistorical, unreal abstraction of an imaginary individual, apart from society, but in society itself when it is as yet not clearly conscious of the justice and morality at work within it. Such a stage in the development of society is, I think, to be discerned.

We have seen that, "at almost, if not quite, the lowest stages" of human development, there is something which, according to Mr. Hobhouse, corresponds "roughly to our own administration of justice" (I, 81). But this rough justice implies conscious, deliberate action on the part of the community. It implies that the community as such makes some sort of enquiry into what can be the cause of the misfortunes which are befalling it; and that, having found out the person responsible, it deliberately takes the steps it deems necessary for putting itself right with the supernatural power that has sent the sickness or famine. Now, such conscious, purposive, deliberate action may and probably does take place at almost the lowest stage of development of society; but not, we may surmise, at quite the lowest. What eventually is done {231} consciously and deliberately is probably done in the first place much more summarily and automatically. And--in quite the lowest stage of social development--it is by means of the action of taboo that summary and automatic punishment for breaches of the custom of the community is inflicted. Its action is automatic and immediate: merely to come in contact with the forbidden thing is to become tabooed yourself; and so great is the horror and dread of such contact, even if made unwittingly, that it is capable of causing, when discovered, death. Like the justice, however, of which it is the forerunner, it does not result always in death, nor does it produce that effect in most cases. But what it does do is to make the offender himself taboo and as infectious as the thing that rendered him taboo. Here, too, the action of taboo, in excommunicating the offender, anticipates, or rather foreshadows, the action of justice when it excludes the guilty person from the community and makes of him an outlaw. Again, in the rough justice found at almost, though not quite, the lowest stages, the earliest offences of which official notice, so to speak, is taken, are offences for which the punishment--disease or famine, etc.--falls on the community as a whole, because the {232} community, in the person of one of its members, has offended as a whole against heaven. In the earlier stage of feeling, also, which survives where taboo prevails, it is the community as a whole which may be infected, and which must suffer if the offender is allowed to spread the infection; it is the community, as a whole, which is concerned to thrust out the guilty person--every one shuns him because he is taboo. Thus, in this the earliest stage, the offender against the custom of the community is outlawed just as effectively as in later stages of social development. But no formal sentence is pronounced; no meeting of the men or the elders of the community is held to try the offender; no reason is given or sought why the offence should thus be punished. The operation of taboo is like that of the laws of nature: the man who eats poisonous food dies with no reason given. A reason may eventually be found by science, and is eventually discovered, though the process of discovery is slow, and many mistakes are made, and many false reasons are given before the true reason is found. So, too, the true reason for the prohibition of many of the things, which the community feels to be forbidden and pronounced to be taboo, is found, with the progress of society--when it does {233} progress, which is not always--to be that they are immoral and irreligious, though here, too, many mistakes are made before true morality and true religion are found. But at the outset no reason is given: the things are simply offensive to the community and are tabooed as such. We, looking back at that stage in the evolution of society, can see that amongst the things thus offensive and tabooed are some which, in later stages, are equally offensive, but are now forbidden for a reason that can be formulated and given, viz. that they are offences against the law of morality and the law of God. That reason, at the outset of society, may scarcely have been consciously present to the mind of man: progress, in part at least, has consisted in the discovery of the reasons of things. But that man did from the beginning avoid some of the things which are forbidden by morality and religion, and that those things were taboo to him, is beyond the possibility of doubt. Nor can it be doubted that in the prohibition and punishment of them there was inchoate justice and inchoate religion. Such prohibition was due to the collective action and expressed the collective feeling of the community as a whole. And it is from such social action and feeling that {234} justice, I suggest, has been evolved--not from the feeling of resentment experienced by the individual as an individual. Personal resentment and personal revenge may have stimulated justice to action. But, by the hypothesis we have been examining, they were not justice. Neither have they been transformed into justice: they still exist as something distinct from justice and capable of perverting it.

The form which justice takes in the period which is almost, but not quite, the lowest stage of human evolution is the sense of the collective responsibility of the community for all its actions, that is to say, for the acts of all its members. And that responsibility in its earliest shape is felt to be a responsibility to heaven, to the supernatural powers that send disease and famine upon the community. In those days no man sins to himself alone, just as, in still earlier days, no man could break a taboo without becoming a source of danger to the whole community. The wrong-doer has offended against the supernatural powers and has brought down calamity upon the community. He is therefore punished, directly as an offender against the god of the community, and indirectly for having involved the {235} community in suffering. In Dr. Westermarck's words (I, 194), there is "genuine indignation against the offender, both because he rebels against God, and because he thereby exposes the whole community to supernatural dangers." But though society for many long centuries continues to punish rebellion against God, still in the long run it ceases, or tends to cease, doing so. Its reason for so ceasing is interpreted differently by different schools of thought. On the one hand, it is said in derision, let the gods punish offences against the gods--the implication being that there are no such offences to punish, because there is no god. On the other hand, it is said, "I will repay, saith the Lord"--the implication being that man may not assume to be the minister of divine vengeance. If, then, we bear in mind that the fact may be interpreted in either of these different ways, we shall not fall into the fallacy of imagining that the mere existence of the fact suffices to prove either interpretation to be true. Yet this fallacy plays its part in lending fictitious support to the doctrine that morality is in no wise dependent upon religion. The offences now punished by law, it is argued, are no longer punished as offences against religion, but solely as offences {236} against the good of the community. To this argument the reply is that men believe the good of the community to be the will of God, and do not believe murder, theft, adultery, etc., to be merely offences against man's laws. Overlooking this fact, which is fatal to the doctrine that morality is in no wise dependent on religion, the argument we are discussing proceeds to maintain that the basis for the enforcement of morality by the law is recognised by every one who knows anything of the philosophy of law to be what is good for the community and its members: fraud and violence are punished as such, and not because they are offences against this or that religion. The fact that the law no longer punishes them as offences against God suffices to show that it is only as offences against humanity that there is any sense, or ever was any sense, in punishing them. Religion may have reënforced morality very usefully at one time, by making out that moral misdeeds were offences against God, but such arguments are not now required. The good and the well-being of humanity is in itself sufficient argument. Humanitarianism is taking the place of religion, and by so doing is demonstrating that morality is, as it always has been, {237} independent of religion; and that in truth religion has built upon it, not it upon religion. As Höffding puts it (p. 328): "Religious faith ... assumes an independent human ethic developed historically under the practical influence of the ethical feeling of man." That is to say, morality is in Höffding's view independent of religion, and prior to religion, both as a matter of logic and of history. As a matter of history--of the history of religion--this seems to me, for the reasons already given, to be contrary to the facts as they are known. The real reason for maintaining that morality is and must be--and must have been--independent of religion, seems to me to be a philosophical reason. I may give it in Höffding's own words: "What other aims and qualities," he asks (p. 324), "could man attribute to his gods or conceive as divine, but those which he has learnt from his own experience to recognise as the highest?" The answer expected to the question plainly is not merely that it is from experience that man learns, but that man has no experience of God from which he could learn. The answer given by Mr. Hobhouse, in the concluding words of his _Morals in Evolution_ is that "the collective wisdom" of man "is all that we directly know of the Divine." {238} Here, too, no direct access to God is allowed to be possible to man. It is from his experience of other men--perhaps even of himself and his own doings--that man learns all he knows of God: but he has himself no experience of God. Obviously, then, from this humanitarian point of view, what a man goes through in his religious moments is not experience, and we are mistaken if we imagine that it was experience; it is only a misinterpretation of experience. It is on the supposition that we are mistaken, on the assumption that we make a misinterpretation, that the argument is built to prove that morality is and must be independent of religion. Argument to show, or proof to demonstrate, that we had not the experience, or, that we mistook something else for it, is, of course, not forthcoming. But if we hold fast to our conviction, we are told that we are fleeing "to the bosom of faith."

Until some better argument is produced, we may be well content not merely to flee but to rest there.

{239}

CHRISTIANITY

The subject dealt with in this lecture will be the place of Christianity in the evolution of religion; and I shall approach it by considering the place of religion in the evolution of humanity. It will be therefore advisable, indeed necessary, for me to consider what is meant by evolution; and I wish to begin by explaining the point of view from which I propose to approach the three ideas of evolution, of the evolution of humanity and the evolution of religion.

The individual exists, and can only exist, in society. Society cannot exist without individuals as members thereof; and the individual cannot exist save in society. From this it follows that from one point of view the individual may be regarded as a means--a means by which society attains its end or purpose: every one of us has his place or function in society; and society thrives according as each member performs his function and discharges his duty. From another point of view {240} the individual may be regarded as an end. If man is a social animal, if men live in society, it is because so alone can a man do what is best for himself: it is by means of society that he realises his end. It is then from this proposition, viz. that the individual is both a means and an end, that I wish to approach the idea of evolution.