Part 7

Absolutely impulsive doings, such as the indulgence of an appetite, blows struck in passion, or even in self-defence, we separate from our volitions proper, and call them irrational and instinctive. In educating children we check displays of impulse, we bid them pause and reflect. And it is obvious that education presupposes an educable power or principle, which principle self-education (the most important training of all) will place in a clear light before you. Interrogate yourselves, then. You will see that the mental power you most wish to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest affairs of life. Take a case of feeling. Some object--no matter what--kindles an emotion within you--anger, wish affection, pursuit, dislike, avoidance--and you feel strongly impelled to take action thereupon. This would be the movement which was imaged to our minds as a simple line. But to launch along it inconsiderately you would feel neither proper _per se_--nor yet doing what is due to yourself, because it is your human prerogative to act, not according to impulse, but according to reason. And observe, to do, or to forbear doing, is a question by no means determined by finding whether another emotion be or be not stronger than the first. What reason demands is that the impulse you feel, or it may chance the strongest of a dozen impulses, shall become to you an object of careful scrutiny. You are bound in honesty to scrutinize it; not only because it exists as an incitement felt within yourself, but much, much more because it is felt to be your actual self. It is your character which gave the spring, and lives in the movement to action. Perchance this point of character is a hidden nook, an unknown depth of feeling or desire, undiscovered, unsuspected by your fellow-creatures--a secret of your inner self. Nevertheless it is amenable to the tribunal of a more inward self still, to be brought before it as an object that shall be examined and cross-examined, sentenced either to vivid freedom or present suppression--it may be even to extinction evermore! Each human being possesses this wonderful self-objectivizing power. He is able to look at himself as a NOT-self--a something partitioned off, and external; to be thought about, felt about, reasoned about; to be controlled, chastened, corrected. This power is our inalienable heritage; we cannot resign it if we would; we cannot finally suspend its exercise. Mountains could not crush, nor oceans drown it; flames of fire never burned it out from the breast of one single martyr. Whether we use our birthright for good or for evil, it still remains with us; when we act, our will is not a feeling, an appetition, travelling simply from one point to another. It is a movement of our world within, a movement of that microcosm called Man.

Suppose a person resolves to employ this power aright. Some wish or feeling, such as might drive a lower creature to instinctive action, stirs within him, and becomes the object of his contemplation. To the sessions of silent thought he summons whatever assistants he can get; the witnesses of experience, prudence, duty, the golden rules of the Gospel; whatever seems most proper to determine the question at issue,--fitness or unfitness, to act or to abstain from acting. He says to himself (as all here have done a thousand times), "This longing, thought, state of mind, is wise or foolish, good or bad, right or wrong; nay, 'tis I myself that am so!" And in thus saying he is conscious of that sort of freedom to will or not to will, which makes up responsibility. He does not deny--contrariwise, with the might of his whole essential humanity he asserts--that the act of will is thus taken out of the direct line of inevitable antecedency, away from the physico-mechanical series, and enabled to commence a series of its own. In a word, his consciousness evidences to him that functional law which makes the human soul a thing more wonderful than all the inorganic or all the animated universe besides. And the law thus evidenced is the law of moral causation.

I said that our own soul thus becomes to us more wonderful than all the known universe besides. I might have said more mysterious; so truly _sui generis_ and different from all things not ensouled, as to be inexplicable by human sciences, an enigma to itself, dwelling alone in its own awful isolation. Do but think what _cause_ is--nothing less than originating power; what then must it be in stern and sad reality for a soul to originate a sin! Yet we cannot deny the fact. We confess it every day, not only in our hearts and deeper utterances, but in the commonest though most tremendous of words, the word responsibility. If a man were in no true sense the cause of his own actions, he could never be held responsible either by God or Man. But as long as Justice maintains her seat, each criminal will be so held, so judged, so recompensed. And the only principle under which Justice can justify her judgments is the reality of moral causation.

If, then, this law be established, we have proved our point. Just as we recognize a material world by mechanical law--and indeed our knowledge of matter itself is only a knowledge of its laws--so in like manner, and _pari passu_, we recognize a moral world by its distinctive law. We live, therefore, not in one world, but in two:

"Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."

The point is of surpassing importance! Upon it turns the whole issue. "Can mechanism--or, as it is vaguely called, materialism--be or be not accepted, with its attendant theories, as the truth; that is, _our_ whole truth, all we have to live by and to die by?" Infinitely important issue! having much to do at this very moment with the happiness and real good of millions amongst our fellow-creatures and fellow-countrymen. It is for this reason we must not spare pains to demonstrate our moral law, for this reason also we will give some passing sentences to show how worthless in argument is the sophism most commonly circulated against it. Men speak of a "law of motives," with complete assurance, and without seeming to be aware of the twofold fallacy underlying it. Writers on the subject furnish statistics of suicide, murder, and the like; and then ask how the freedom of moral cause can be compatible with so visible a law? But what sort of a law is this? Clearly not a law upon which the results are conditioned, as sunrise on the earth's rotation; but a mere generalization, like the laws of average before mentioned. Such a law does not govern the acts, but the acts the law, or, in plain words, they _are_ the law. It is an epitomized result, inferring no more consequence to our free moral causation, than a life assurance infers to the contingency of our individual life or death. The sophism would be readily detected if it were not for that unfortunate word "motive." People forget that a motive is not a power that compels us, but an object which we choose to seek. "Will," we are seriously told, "must be determined by the strongest motive." Now if, in thus speaking, the strongest motive _objectively_ be meant, that is the motive essentially and in its own nature the strongest, then indeed we may exclaim, "Would that this were true!" For are not right, justice, goodness, absolutely and in themselves the strongest? Yet men in general fail to pursue them; they are chosen by those of whom the world is not worthy. But if, on the other hand, the phrase "strongest motive" is to be understood _subjectively_, and means that which on each occasion is _felt_ to be the strongest; what form of sounding words has ever yielded a more barren sense, a simpler truism? "Will must be determined by the choice of will." It means this, and nothing more.

We may sum the whole matter of motive in a single sentence. Motives do not make the man, but the man his motives. To conceive it otherwise would be to imagine each man a mere bundle of instincts, such instincts as we calculate with certainty in the brute animals we wish to allure, to subdue, or to destroy.

"Be not like dumb driven cattle,"

says the Psalm of Life, and old Herbert exhorts--

"Not rudely, as a beast, To run into an action."

The beast feels an incitement, and rushes direct upon the pitfall. It is the prerogative of a true man to subsume (as logicians speak) each line of impulse into the circle of his own soul; to deliberate in the secret chambers of a being impenetrable even to his own understanding, and to put in force the result which becomes as it were the free manifestation of himself. When therefore you examine the actions of a fellow-creature, and discern his motives, you praise or blame what? not the motives, but the man.

Permit me to close this discussion by an example of the manner in which we make and unmake our own motives.

No one present is so young, or so careless, as never to have felt the pains of self-reproach. Some light or shade of life projects before us the outline of ourself. By virtue of the law described, we view and review it, as if it were the picture of another being. In contrast with it, we place our own ideal, all that our boyhood fondly fancied our manhood would become; the semblances of those we have loved and lost; of the father, who taught us to prize truth and virtue above earthly wealth and distinction; of the mother, at whose knee we knelt in prayer, and whose upraised eye imaged the serenity of that heaven to which she implored us to aspire. These beloved forms, robed in the unfading freshness of a love stronger than death, stir our heart of hearts, with accents unmistakable. They remind us of what we resolved and trusted one day to be found, in thought, in feeling, and in life. But, close to the glowing portrait of our purposed self stands the dwindled figure of what we actually are; and, oh, the shame, the anguish of that stern, disappointing comparison!

Among the lower creatures (we ask in passing) what is there to resemble this self-reforming principle? In the domesticated animal, both beast and bird, we see wounded affection, grief under a master's anger, and desire to win back his love. In the gregarious tribes we find respect for a common bond of what we almost may call utility; but has any sense of wrong as wrong, or sin as sin, ever been found educable? Man shows the mighty strength of this principle within him, even when he shows it in its most repulsive shapes. The remorseful wretch who throws himself beneath the wheel of Juggernaut, is a different _kind_ of being from the horse or dog. And considering the self-interest, self-flattery, and self-indulgence arrayed against it, may we not say that the root of such passionate remorse has something sound in it, else it would long ago have been trodden out from the life and heart of mankind?

For now, as always, our honest anguish and shame sow the appointed seed of our noblest attainments. Those steps by which we climb our steep ascent are hewn in the travail of our souls. David found it so, when he heard the voice of Nathan saying, "Thou art the man!" and wrote words which have come down near three thousand years;--"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit." "Of all acts," asks Mr. Carlyle, "is not, for a man, _repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is dead; it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below." Truest emblem indeed! In it, we see, as in a glass, how living in two worlds we cannot but have a sympathy with each; insomuch that every man feels himself to be two selves, not one; a spiritual and a psychical man. "There is," says Sir Thomas Browne, "another man within me, that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me." A _double_ consciousness which grows upon many a soul, until its truer choice and better motives are attained:

"The life which is, and that which is to come, Suspended hang in such nice equipoise A breath disturbs the balance; and that scale In which we throw our hearts preponderates."

This lecture started from the question, what is a phenomenon, and how do we know of its existence? Seeing that our knowledge rests primarily on the evidence of our own mind, we drew the inference that Comte committed a fatal error when he banished the science of mind, as mind, from his cycle. Reviewing his various devices, and some devices of his successors, for eliminating psychology, and reducing the study of mind to a study of bodily functions, we approached the stronghold of Positivism,--law. And, after discussing the theories maintained respecting it, we boldly threw down our challenge to this effect: law phenomenal or mechanical admitted, we assert, the existence of another kind of law. We say that the freedom of human choice between evil and good is utterly unlike the freedom of a stone which falls by mechanical law, and cannot choose but fall. The inference from phenomenal law is the existence of a phenomenal world. The inference from another existent law is that there is another existent world. Man, we affirm, lives in both; has sympathies with both; and, by virtue of his double nature, is a true citizen of both. The ultimate principle of man's higher nature is to us inscrutable; for, even as the eye sees not itself, so neither does the spirit of a man discern that which makes it spirit. But, though we cannot know the soul, we can know much and many things about it; things most important--nay, all-important for us to know, since they distinguish the spirit that burns within us from matter, from mechanism, and from mere animality. Hence we do not, with the Positivist, ignore the unknowable. Contrariwise, confessing our ignorance, where we are ignorant, we strive to observe and gather all we can.

One thing that can be thus known is the principle of moral causation; and this we have inductively investigated. We began by observing a process in our own minds, a process or law of self-objectivity. I am sorry to use such an uncouth word; but it saves a long description, and you will all remember the fact. That process carries, on the very face of it, adaptation to the purposes of moral choice, free from the material necessity which governs a falling stone, and disengaged from the control of such impulses as the incitement of ruling instincts. We next verify this law by observing its operation; _first_, in single acts of the Will accompanied, as you will recollect, by distinct consciousness of choice and responsibility. It was in respect of this conscious certainty that Dr. Johnson said, "We _know_ we are free, and there ends the matter." We verified, a _second_ time, the self-objectivising law, by its working and effects upon our motives, which it makes and unmakes; eliminating some, adopting others, so as to modify and alter our whole real character. Any one who is happy enough to recall the slow advances of successful self-education, or a less ordinary process by which old things passed away and all things became new, may recollect with pleasure how this law served as an instrument of change; how it placed himself before his own inward eye, even daily, in freshly instructive lights, awakening new self-questionings, emotions, aversions, desires, hopes, and stimulating to new exertions; how it opposed itself to the mastery of any single dominant passion, under which we say a man acts mechanically, because he has already surrendered himself a slave to its sway; how it became a check upon all day-dreaming or drifting with the tide, when again we are said to act mechanically because we yield to circumstances as they flow, and live a blind life, like creatures that cannot escape the chain of Instinct. For, observe: let any instinct, even the noblest, be ever so nobly developed, if we act from its impulse only, and not from a reflective choice of the prompting which it gives, we are living below the image of our true nature, because we are not striving to become a law unto ourselves.

You may verify our moral law in numberless ways among the common walks of life; and it really is a task of no great difficulty, if you take with you the truth that the whole issue is summed in one word--Responsibility. A falling stone cannot choose but fall; were a man subject to material law, he could have no choice whatever. Neither would it make any real difference, if the Will were impelled by overpowering motive, and did not make its motive to itself. The slate which slides from a roof, and kills a child, we do not accuse of murder; we do not attach moral accountability to the hungry tiger. It is because man is not impelled like stones or tigers, that we hold him responsible. And we praise or blame in the highest degree his most deliberate acts. The wrong he does with malice aforethought is a crime in the strongest sense; the good he works with considerate purpose we esteem his highest well-doing. In our time the wills of individual men have changed the destinies of nations; and any one who reads books, reviews, or newspapers sees a vigorous use of that word responsibility. No one doubts that these powerful wills are the true causes of effects felt throughout all Europe, effects which will remain when those who caused them are in the grave; nay, even when generations--perchance dynasties--shall have passed away.

In lower life, we honour the truly causative man who conquers a habit of intemperance or any evil passion: it is greater to overcome one's self than to conquer many cities. We deem every one accountable for what he allows, or disallows, in relation to his God, his fellows, or himself. In a word, we consider each man so far the true cause of his own conduct, as to load him with responsibility.

Yes, responsibility! Do not shrink from the thought; it is wholesome for all. Do but practise self-control enough to look yourself with honest purpose in the face when you are about to act, you will never suppose that you act mechanically, and you will seldom act amiss. If you wish to benefit your countrymen, inculcate the grand lesson of responsibility; for what well-informed person doubts that one main root of our present social and religious ailments lies in compromise with known immoralities, indolent acquiesence in hollow words, and lifeless outside shows, where ought to be heard and seen the rigid truths of accountability, duty, consistency?--all impossible without a practical law of self-scrutiny and self-control. Yet further: Responsibility is also an undeniable witness to a world of life beyond death. Just as even Herbert Spencer himself has remarked, that the idea of relativity involves the correlative idea of an absolute; even so, in thought, responsibility involves its correlative belief, a recompence! But, in morality, the evidence is stringent beyond expression. For, the idea of responsibility is fixed in the nature of things; unchangeable, eternal. And it contains in itself the loftier idea of personality. Leading us to look for a world of righteous recompence, it leads also to belief in a personal Being, before whom we are responsible, and who will award to each of us our recompence. David travelled the same road to the same conclusion, when he looked round upon men, who lacked mercy because they lacked justice, and said, "Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work."

Did I not feel that my strain upon your attention must now cease, I should have liked to show at length how the law by which we discover moral causation, may be verified everywhere in the whole province of mind. It is difficult, for instance, to look at the perplexing questions raised about language, without perceiving that there runs through its purely human formation the articulate results of an element resembling internal dialogue; in other words, a law of self-objectivising representation. In art, again, the perpetual efforts of ages is to present our human manifoldness of thought, feeling, and idea, before our one individual self. Hence the art formula of multeity in unity. And what is the true bond of society as distinguished from gregariousness? Is it not the Gospel's golden rule? But how can our neighbour be viewed as a second self, unless self has been already objectivised before our moral intuitions? We might follow the same thread throughout the conditions of all philosophy.

The one thing we have to remember in every research concerning man is that education, whether of self or others, implies an educable principle; a germ, of which education and attainment are the bud, the blossom, and the fruit. Therefore, if we want to know Humanity, we must look to the educated human being. The philosopher, the artist, the thinker of every sort, must have risen into clearness ere he can become a typical man. Is it not, therefore, a mistake to appeal for theories of human nature to the statistics (always statistics!) of ignorance and savagery? When modelling our physical form, Buonarotti did not seek his type in hospitals for maimed or distorted limbs, and exclaim, Behold, such is man! Curious too, and contradictory, the way in which appeals to barbarism have worked. In the 18th century we used always to hear of that golden age,

"When free in woods the noble savage ran, And man, the brother, lived the friend of man."

In the 19th, savage life is cannibalism, superstition, cruelty, terrible, revolting, loathsome; perchance, time must yet pass before we learn justice to our fellows of any age! Meanwhile, we may feel sure that our human ideal is not to be found in the frost-bitten rickety infant species; nor yet in its dwarfed and stunted adult; the cretin and the imbecile will not give its lineaments; and it may be hard to say which is least like a true man, the undeveloped or the perverted creature. For example, what superiority in moral height has the _savant_, whose self-satisfied science ignores or denies a God, over the poor pigmy barbarian, unskilled in the use of fire, and living upon berries and insects, who props himself against a tree with earthward face, and prays, saying, "_Yere_, if indeed thou art, why dost thou suffer us to be killed? Thou hast raised us up. Why dost thou cast us down?"[16] Better perhaps the rude stammering of our race's childhood than its half-speechless, half-paralyzed old age!

And here the argument of this lecture ends. Of causation in general, and the grand subject of design, it has not been my hint to speak. These vast topics have fallen into higher hands than mine. My aim was limited to finding the _differentia_ of man--the moral characteristic which places him in contrast with physico-mechanical laws.

It occurs to me, however, that you may employ ten minutes not unpleasantly, upon what we can hardly help calling the romance of Positivism. The story, taken from first to last--part comic, part tragic--is as wild and weird as one of the Frenchman Doré's pictures,--a story too strange to be thought true, if it did not happen to have been true! It has also its stinging lessons, and they follow naturally; evolved, as it were, from the motley and mystifying commencement.