Chapter 6

(1) It throws light on the relations between Religion and Morality. The champions of ethical {70} education as a substitute for Religion and of ethical societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, but actually destructive of, the intrinsic authority of the moral law. If we supposed with a few theologians in the most degenerate periods of Theology (with William of Occam, some extreme Calvinists, and a few eighteenth-century divines like Archdeacon Paley) that actions are right or wrong merely because willed by God--meaning by God simply a powerful being without goodness or moral character, then undoubtedly the Secularists would be right. If a religious Morality implies that Virtue means merely (in Paley's words) 'the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness' (so that if God were to will murder and adultery, those practices would forthwith become meritorious), then undoubtedly it would be better to teach Morality without Religion than with it. But that is a caricature of the true teaching of Christ or of any considerable Christian theologian. Undoubtedly we must assert what is called the 'independence' of the moral judgement. The judgement 'to love is better than to hate' has a meaning complete in itself, which contains no reference whatever to any theological presupposition. It is a judgement which is, and which can intelligibly be, made by people of all religions or of none. But {71} we may still raise the question whether the validity of that judgement can be defended without theological implications. And I am prepared most distinctly to maintain that it cannot. These moral judgements claim objective validity. When we say 'this is right,' we do not mean merely 'I approve this course of conduct,' 'this conduct gives me a thrill of satisfaction, a "feeling of approbation," a pleasure of the moral sense.' If that were all that was meant, it would be perfectly possible that another person might feel an equally satisfactory glow of approbation at conduct of a precisely opposite character _without either of them being wrong_. A bull-fight fills most Spaniards with feelings of lively approbation, and most Englishmen with feelings of acute disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere feelings, neither of them would be wrong. There could be no question of objective rightness or wrongness. Mustard is not objectively nice or objectively nasty: it is simply nice to some people and nasty to others. The mustard-lover has no right to condemn the mustard-hater, or the mustard-hater the mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a matter of feeling or emotion, actions would not be objectively right or objectively wrong; but simply right to some people, wrong to others. Hume would be right in holding the morality of an action to consist simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who {72} contemplates it. Rightness thus becomes simply a name for the fact of social approbation.[2] And yet surely the very heart of the affirmation which the moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right and wrong are not matters of mere subjective feeling. When I assert 'this is right,' I do not claim personal infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I may be wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I do mean that I think I am right; and that, if I am right, you cannot also be right when you affirm that this same action is wrong. This objective validity is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or moral obligation. That is why it is so important to assert that moral judgements are the work of Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any other kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men without any of them being in the wrong; red really is the same as green to a colour-blind person. What we mean when we talk about the existence of Duty is that things are right or wrong, no matter what you or I think about them--that the laws of Morality {73} are quite as much independent of my personal likings and dislikings as the physical laws of Nature. That is what is meant by the 'objectivity' of the moral law.

Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be asserted by those who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?' Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be, we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may be thought about physical laws) the moral law, {74} which expresses not any matter of physical fact but what _ought_ to be thought of acts, cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought' can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is _asserted_, believed in, acted upon without reference to any theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be _that_, unless we assume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when analysed, implies the idea of God. Whatever else Plato meant by the 'idea of the good,' this at least was one of his meanings--that the moral law has its source in the source of all Reality.

And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right in holding that religious belief is necessary to Morality. Of course I do not mean to say that, were {75} religious belief to disappear from the world, Morality would disappear too. But I do think Morality would become quite a different thing from what it has been for the higher levels of religious thought and feeling. The best men would no doubt go on acting up to their own highest ideal just as if it did possess objective validity, no matter how unable they might be to reconcile their practical with their speculative beliefs. But it would not be so for the many--or perhaps even for the few in their moments of weakness and temptation, when once the consequences of purely naturalistic Ethics were thoroughly admitted and realized. The only kind of objective validity which can be recognized on a purely naturalistic view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. The tendency of all naturalistic Ethics is to make a God of public opinion. And if no other deity were recognized, such a God would assuredly not be without worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the temptation to follow a debased public opinion--the opinion of our age, our class, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous God whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of God a postulate of Morality.

From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching it--especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons--seems to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of God. Would that it were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the twin ideas of God and of Duty!

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of God is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when the idea of a righteous God has once been accepted, the idea of Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will of a rational and moral Being without the assumption of a future life for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage, argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary deduction from their belief in God.

I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief--not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death--is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea; and an ethical conception of God carries with it the idea of Immortality.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky; Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate without which most of us cannot {79} believe in God. Even for its own sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It is rather,' in the noble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally constituted that the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration, does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability. Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death? Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element in life.

(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of God is this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height--the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy--it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly righteous Being? In only one way that I know of--by supposing they are means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81} Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be amused.

I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. A human being may, it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition. To apply the same explanation to the evil which God causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested that the limit to the power of God must necessarily spring from the existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so. Everybody admits that God cannot change the past; few Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that God could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain His ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is no limitation of God not to be able to change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for God to change the past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited quantity--a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much pleasure and so much virtue--when he could have created twice that number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would not be perfectly good or loving. And so on _ad infinitum_, no matter how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this--that God possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that are in their own nature possible.[5]

But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose God not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from the fact of God's goodness. A limited God might be a defeated God. I admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by God. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a greater good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose that the world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient reason for assuming that, at least for the higher order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More than that I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual conscious being--at least each individual capable of any high degree of good--there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.

I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a God who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with God.

LITERATURE

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_, and Kant's _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_ and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my _Theory of Good and Evil_.

[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.

[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (_Treatise_, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' (_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 311.)

[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without Metaphysic, _i.e._ a theory about the ultimate nature of things.