Part 23

The Utilitarian school, therefore, judged by its name, and by its favourite shibboleth, has no distinctive character; and its chosen appellation merely shows an utter deficiency of the first principles of a scientific nomenclature. To say that morality consists in happiness, falls logically under the same category with the proposition that a cat is an animal--we {269} knew that; but what we wish to know is, by what differentiating marks a cat is distinguished from other animals, and specially from others of the feline family. Wherein does the special happiness of the creature called Man consist? Aristotle, to my thinking, answered that question with as much precision as it ever can be answered, and neither Hume nor Bentham added anything to his definition. So far as these spokesmen of modern ethics said that virtue consisted in acting according to reason, as necessarily involving the greatest happiness of the reasonable being called Man, they said what was quite true, but nothing that was new; they merely repeated the Stagirite, putting the element of εὐδαιμονία into the van, which he had wisely kept in the rear. So far as they went beyond this, they said what was neither new nor true, but only a refurbishment of the old doctrine of Epicurus, that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good, and there is no need of a distinctive phraseology for the happiness of creatures so essentially the same. What then is the distinctive character of Utilitarianism, if we fail to discover it in its name? for that the school, as a matter of fact, does stand on a very distinct basis, and in an attitude of very decided antagonism to other systems, is unquestioned. Between Paley, the model churchman of the eighteenth century, and Bentham, the stereotyped hater of all churchmen, churches, and creeds, there is no doubt a great gap; still there is a strong family likeness even between these two extremes of the school; and the point in which this likeness asserts itself we think may be best expressed by the phrase EXTERNALISM. From Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury {270} down to Alexander Bain of Aberdeen, the morality of the Utilitarians is a morality in which the moral virtue of the inner soul is as much as possible denied, and the moral virtue of outward institutional or other machinery as much as possible asserted. Look everywhere for the origin of right and wrong--only not in the soul. The kingdom of heaven, according to the prophets of this gospel, is not within you, but without. This, if I am not mistaken, is the keynote which gives a unity and a significance to all the variations of Utilitarianism from Bentham to Bain. Let us hear it in their own words: “What one expects to find in an ethical principle is something that points out some _external_ consideration as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and disapprobation:” so Bentham. “Conscience is moulded on _external_ authority as its type.” “Utility sets up an _outward_ standard in the room of an inward, being the substitution of a regard to _consequences_ for a mere _unreasoning sentiment_ or feeling:” so Bain. “The contest between the morality which appeals to an _external_ standard and that which grounds itself on _internal_ conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary; of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit:” so Mill. The assumptions implied in these last sentences, no less than the proposition stated, are peculiarly interesting. They are redolent of all that narrowness, exclusiveness, and dogmatism, which we have already noticed as so characteristic of Bentham. It is assumed that the advocates of an innate morality hold it to be a thing that acts apart from, or contrary to reason. It is assumed that moral progress is possible only {271} under the action of an ethical system founded on the doctrine of consequences, whereas experience has proved that a morality of motives, such as Christianity contains, is as much capable of expansion and of new applications as any other morality. It is assumed that all our sentiments and feelings, that is, the whole emotional part of our nature, is to be supposed false, till its right to exist and to energize shall have been approved by reason. But what if emotions be primary sources of all moral life, which reason indeed may examine, but which it has no more authority to disown than it has power to create? What if the emotions and the sentiments, which you treat with such disrespect, really supply the steam without which your curious ratiocinative machinery were utterly worthless? But these questions anticipate part of our coming argument. Meanwhile let EXTERNALISM stand here as the only significant designation for the system of ethics which we are now to examine; and let the word UTILITY be remitted to that limbo of vagueness and confusion whence it originally came forth.

It will be most convenient to treat this subject historically, because this method will display in the clearest light the operation of that one-sided reaction out of which the Lockian philosophy, no less than the Benthamite Ethics took its rise. And here it will be manifest that we cannot altogether escape metaphysics, however odious that word may sound to the general English ear; for in our inquiry we must find or assert certain first principles which form the foundation of all reason, whether practical or speculative; and though metaphysics, like clouds, are apt to be misty, they are just as certainly the {272} fountain of all moral science, as the clouds are the fathers of the rain, which supplies the water that moves the useful machinery of the mill. We must therefore start from Mr. Locke, the acknowledged father of whatever school of British thinking deserves the name of a philosophy. No doubt before him came Hobbes; but this man stands alone, like a huge trap-rock bolt up in a flat country; and therefore we shall let him lie over for a separate treatment, if opportunity should occur; but in tracing up the main line of Utilitarian Ethics from Mill to Hartley, I found that they ended naturally and legitimately in Locke, just as a net-work of waters may often be traced to one common well-head. Now Locke is the father of what the Germans call the empirical philosophy. What does this mean? It simply means, as any one may see by a superficial glance cast on the first chapter of the “Essay on the Human Understanding,” that he commenced his philosophy by a formal declaration of war against the doctrine of INNATE IDEAS inherited by modern thinkers from the Platonists of Athens, Alexandria, and Florence; and, if all innate sources of true knowledge are denied, then there remains for morality, as for everything else, only the source of external experience, which comes to us not by nature but by acquisition; for according to the use of the English language, whatever things a man does not originally possess, he acquires. Locke, therefore, in the language of Plato and Aristotle, denied the existence of ἐπιστήμη, or science properly so called, which is founded on necessary principles of internal reason, and asserted that all knowledge is to be got by ἐμπειρία or experience, in other words, is what the {273} Germans call empirical. That Locke’s ideas on this fundamental question of all speculation were anything but clear we shall see immediately; but on the face of the matter the very noticeable thing is, that in rejecting the doctrine of innate ideas the Englishman does not go directly to Plato and Plotinus, the sources from which this doctrine had come, but he goes to war with certain floating loose notions of Herbert and other dreamy speculators of his own or the previous generation. Now, this is evidently a method of proceeding altogether unphilosophical. If a man means to refute Christianity scientifically, he does not go to the books of the Jesuits, but to the New Testament. So the refutation of the doctrine of innate ideas should have commenced with the examination of Plato, its original promulgator. But it was Locke’s destiny to fight against Plato as Bacon fought against Aristotle, without knowing his adversary. The consequence was in both cases the same; a real battle against a real adversary, and a real victory on the one side against a real defeat on the other; but not the victory and not the adversary supposed. The world, however, always willing to be deceived by names, gave the combatants credit for having done a much greater thing than they had really achieved; it was not the mock image of Æneas, but the real Æneas that Diomede had routed in the fight. And so it came to be an accepted fact in this country with large classes of persons that Locke had driven Plato out of the field, just as Bacon had quashed Aristotle. And the deception in the case of Locke has lasted longer; and that for a very obvious reason. The physical science movement {274} inaugurated by Bacon led much more naturally to a recognition of the true Aristotle than to a recovery of the genuine Plato. It suited the practical genius of John Bull to regard the severe Idealist as a transcendental dreamer; and Mr. Locke taught him to put this shallow prejudice into dignified and grave language. A thinker who does such a service to any nation is pretty sure to be overrated; and so it fared with Mr. Locke, who besides being a thinker was a sensible man, and on public affairs held liberal opinions in harmony with the progressive element of the age. Accordingly a recent juridical writer of the Utilitarian school has not scrupled to call him in the most unqualified terms, “the greatest and best of philosophers.”[274.1] With this partial verdict, however, we do not find that foreign writers agree; and the following estimate of the merits of our typical English Philosopher by a recent German writer, is unquestionably nearer the truth. “Precision and clearness, perspicacity and distinctness, are the characteristic of Locke’s writings. Acute rather than deep in thinking, he is true to the character of his nationality.”[274.2] So much for the position of our great English “empiric.” Let us now look more nicely at his doctrine, and the reasons of it.

The philosophy against which Locke argues is, that there exist “certain innate principles, primary notions, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι, characters, as it were, stamped on the mind, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it”--(i. 2.) And the assertion of the belief in these innate ideas, he afterwards indicates to have approved itself “a {275} short and easy way for lazy people, and of no small advantage for those who affect to be masters and teachers. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truth, and to make men swallow that for an innate principle which may serve his purpose who teacheth them”--(i. 4. 24.) From these words it is plain that Locke protested against the doctrine of innate ideas, in the same spirit, and with the same object, that Luther did against the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope; his mission, he considered, was to rouse reason from its lethargy, and to teach men to think with open eyes, not blindly to believe; and, in so far as he meant this, the mission of the philosophical, as of the religious reformer, was unquestionably right. But, as above remarked, in making this protest, he was fighting against the language of Plato without knowing, or, so far as we can see, ever attempting to know the ideas of Plato. This will be more manifest from the arguments which he uses. “If there be such innate principles,” says he, “it is strange that children and idiots have no apprehension of them; children do not join general abstract speculations with their sucking bottles and rattles”--(i. 2.) “If we attentively consider young children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them”--(i. 4. 2.) These are Mr. Locke’s words, and they certainly indicate a conception of the doctrine of innate ideas the most crass and crude that could well be conceived. Assuredly neither the Athenian, nor the Alexandrian, nor the Florentine Platonists, ever dreamt of anything so absurd. Surely Plato knew that children {276} did not march into the world with Euclid’s axioms in their mouth, nor did he believe that even a miraculous baby, like himself, came out of his mother’s womb armed cap-à-pie with all the principles of the ideal philosophy, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Jove. What Plato actually said was, that everything was what it grew to be by virtue of a divine type, which lay in the germ, and which type was the expression of an energizing thought in the Divine mind; and this type, form, or idea (εἶδος), he called innate, because it was possessed originally as part of the internal constitution of the thing, not acquired from without. Who the men were who in Locke’s day or before him, maintained the existence of ready-made, panoplied, and full-grown ideas in the minds of idiots and babies, I do not know; but, so far as the Platonists were concerned, the Englishman was fighting with a shadow. Idiots, in any case, as imperfect and abnormal specimens of their kind, have nothing to do with the argument; and as to children, the things that sleep within them cannot, in the nature of things, be known till they grow up into full leafage and burst in perfect blossom. Inborn ideas are not the less inborn because they do not exist full-grown at the moment of birth. They did exist for ever in the original self-existent Divine mind; they do exist in the derived existence of the human mind the moment it awakens into consciousness of its individualism. In either case they are not acquired; they are possessed. Plato’s doctrine, therefore, was, that the germ of all human ideas lies in the human mind, and is developed from within, not derived from anything external. In this, there cannot be the slightest doubt that he spoke wisely; {277} as little that Mr. Locke wrote most unwisely, when, in accounting for the origin of our ideas, he said, “the senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish _the empty cabinet_.” Here we fall in with one of Mr. Locke’s short similes, which have proved more effective in spreading his doctrine than his diffuse and somewhat wearisome chapter. “One of the most common forms of fallacious reasoning,” says Mr. Mill, “is that of arguing from a metaphysical expression as if it were literal.”[277.1] This is precisely the error which seems to have run away with the wits of the sensation-philosophers, when they read Mr. Locke’s chapter on the Origin of Ideas. The mind was “an empty cabinet,”--if empty, it had merely a holding or containing power, before it was filled and furnished altogether and absolutely from without. But a single word will show the inadequacy and the utter falsity of this style of talking. The senses (as Plato long ago showed in the _Theætetus_) let in no _ideas_, they let in _impressions_, which the plastic power of mind elaborates into ideas; and again, the mind is in nowise like an empty cabinet, in which the senses hang up ready-painted pictures; but the mind, in so far as it creates ideas, and not merely experiences sensations, both paints the pictures and hangs them up, and this it does by an inherent divine power and divine right, of which no mere sensation can give any account. In fact there is nothing more hopeless than an attempt to explain the genesis of ideas, connected as it is with the miraculous fact of consciousness, by any sensuous process. It were much nearer the truth to adopt the strong language of a distinguished Scotch metaphysician, and say that {278} “man becomes an I or a conscious being, not in consequence of or even on occasion of his sensations, but actually in spite of them.”[278.1] The real fact of the matter is, as any one may observe in the reasonings of young persons, that in the formation of ideas the mind is active, not passive; and this distinction is strongly expressed in the very structure of some languages, in which verbs, expressive of mere sensation, such as verbs of smelling, are followed by the case which belongs to the passive voice, whereas verbs which express both a sensation and an intellectual idea, imposed on the sensuous expression by the plastic mind, demand the case which belongs to the presence of an active and transitive force. The healthy instincts of the human race manifested in the common uses of language, are often more to be trusted in such matters than the subtleties of metaphysicians. Nature, at least, which the popular instinct follows, is always complete; speculation is apt to be one-sided. If we will have a simile that may express both sides of the wonderful fact of knowledge, we may say sensation supplies the materials, but the manufacturer of ideas is MIND.

I said above that Mr. Locke was a sensible man; and it is nothing contrary to this to admit that by the incautious use of one or two strong similes--“the empty cabinet, the sheet of blank paper, and the dark room,”--he became the originator of a school which made itself famous by the ingenious maintenance of the nonsense that judgment and sensation are the same thing. A vain Frenchman, pleased to utter glittering paradoxes in gay saloons, might say this, might even go so far as to parade the proposition {279} that if horses had only possessed human hands they would have been men, and if men had been armed with equine hoofs they would have been horses; such paradoxes were, no doubt, a logical deduction from the doctrine that sensation is the father of ideas, and that all internal faculties are the result of mere external forces; but Mr. Locke was too much of a solid and sober Englishman to allow himself to be led into sheer nonsense by the charm of mere logical consistency, and chose rather to prove his good sense by his inconsistency. After asserting in the strongest terms that the only origin of ideas is sensation, he goes on to divide ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, which division instantly suggests the question--_What is reflection, and whence comes the reflecting power?_ And by raising this question the empirical speculator at once brings in the whole of Platonism and innate ideas by a side gate, just after they had been driven out at the grand entrance; for how can this question be answered except in the well-known words of Leibnitz--“_Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_, NISI INTELLECTUS IPSE.” Mr. Locke’s successors, however, have shown no inclination to follow his example in this respect. They have been ambitious of the cheap popular virtue of consistency, which even thieves and murderers may achieve; and verily they have had their reward. Their master may be compared to a man who held out a poison in his right hand, and administered forthwith the antidote with his left. His followers, from Helvetius to Mill, thinking--naturally enough perhaps--that the right hand contained the right thing, instantly snapt it up and ran away with it, not choosing to encumber {280} themselves with the incongruous bounty of the left. The fruit has been that climax of nonsense in which half truths always issue when left to blossom by themselves. The one-sidedness of the philosophy taken from Locke’s right hand, which, in a popular way we may call Materialism, culminates in the Nihilism of John Stuart Mill. Under his cunning manipulation not only mind vanishes but the outward world also. “It may be safely laid down as a truth that of the outward world we know and can know nothing, except the sensations which we experience from it; ontology therefore is not possible.” So what Plato called the human mind and the New Testament the human soul, becomes only a bundle of sensations. But the fallacy involved in this phraseology is easily pointed out. Instead of saying, We know nothing but sensations, he ought to have said, Nothing but sensations, and the thoughts or ideas vulgarly called classes of things and laws of nature which we recognise in the outward world, by virtue of the thoughts and ideas that arise out of the necessary action of the thinking Unity, the Creator of thoughts and ideas within us; and an ontology therefore is possible, because we know what we are as thinking beings by the very act of thinking, and we know what the world is as the general and absolute thought, or rather the product and manifestation of absolute thought, by the recognised identity of its working and products with the working and products of our own minds. In other words, Thought, or Reason, or Mind--God the absolute thought, and man in his little world of limited thinking, is the only thing that is or can be meant by an ontology, and is known partly as direct fact, partly as indirect, but {281} assured inference from unequivocal manifestation. This is the common sense of the whole matter; and whosoever will not accept this may content himself with Nihilism and Atheism. I cannot.