Chapter 3
There may be disinterested motives in our constitution; but Appetite is not in any sense one of these. We may have instincts answering to the traditional phrase used in defining instinct, "a blind propensity" to act, without aiming at anything in particular, and without any expectation of pleasure or benefit. Such instincts would conform to Butler's notion of appetite: they would be entirely out of the course of self-love or self-seeking of any sort. Whether the nest-building activity of birds, and the constructiveness of ants, bees, and beavers, comply with this condition, I do not undertake to say. There is one process better known to ourselves, not exactly an instinct, but probably a mixture of instinct and acquirement--I mean the process of Imitation--which works very much upon this model. Although coming under the control of the Will, yet in its own proper character it operates blindly, or without purpose; neither courting pleasure, nor chasing pain. In like manner, Sympathy, in its most characteristic form, proceeds without any distinct aim of pleasure to ourselves.
Nothing of this can be affirmed of the Appetites. In them, nature places us, as Bentham says, under the government of two sovereign masters, _pain_ and _pleasure_. An appetite would cease to move us, if its painful and pleasurable accompaniments were done away with. It matters not that we remit our attention, at times, to the pain or the pleasure; these are always in the background; and the strength of the appetite is their strength.
So far as concerns Butler's example of the Appetites, there is no case for the view that to obtain happiness we must avoid aiming at it directly. If we do not aim at the pleasure in its own subjective character, we aim at the thing that immediately brings the pleasure; which is, for all practical purposes, to aim at the pleasure.
The prescription to look away from the final end, Happiness, in order to secure that end, may be tested on the example of one of our intermediate pursuits, as Health. It is not a good thing to be always dwelling on the state of our health: by doing so, we get into a morbid condition of self-consciousness, which is in itself pernicious. It does not follow that we are to live at random, without ever giving a thought to our health. There is a plain middle course. Guided by our own experience, and by the experience of those that have gone before us, we arrange our plan of life so as to preserve health; and our actions consist in adhering to that plan in the detail. So long as our scheme answers expectation, we think of nothing but of putting it in force, as occasion arises; we do not dwell upon our states of good health at all. It is some interruption that makes us self-conscious; and then it is that we have to exercise ourselves about a remedial course. This, when found, is likewise objectively pursued; our only subjectiveness lies in being aware of gradual recovery; and we are glad to get back to the state of paying no attention to the workings of our viscera. We do not, therefore, remit our pursuit; only, it is enough to observe the routine of outward actions, whose sole motive is to keep us in health.
The pursuit of the still wider end, Happiness, has much in common with the narrower pursuit. When we have discovered what things promote, and what things impede our happiness, we transfer our attention to these, as the most direct mode of compassing the end. If we are satisfied that working for other people brings us happiness, we work accordingly; this is no side aim, it is as direct as any aim can be. It may involve immediate sacrifice, but that does not alter the case; we can get no considerable happiness from any source without temporary sacrifice.
[HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE DISTINCT AIMS.]
If it be said that the best mode of attaining happiness is to put ourselves entirely out of account, and to work for others exclusively, this, as already noted, is a self-contradiction. It is to tell people not to think of their own happiness, and yet to know that they are securing that in the most effectual way. It is also very questionable, indeed absolutely erroneous, in fact. The most apparent way to secure happiness is to ply all the known means of happiness, just as far as, and no farther than, they are discovered to produce the effect. We must keep a check upon the methods that we employ, and abandon those that do not answer. So long as we find happiness in serving others, so long we continue in that course. And it is a melancholy fact that Pope's bold assertion--"Virtue alone is happiness below,"--cannot be upheld against the stern realities of life. Life needs to be made up of two aims--the one, Happiness, the other Virtue, each on its own account. There is a certain mutual connection of the two, but all attempts at making out their identity are failures.
It is of very great importance to teach men the bearings of virtue on happiness, so far as these are known. There will, however, always remain a portion of duty that detracts from happiness, and must be done as duty, nevertheless. Men are entitled to pursue happiness as directly as ever they please; only, they must couple with the pursuit their round of duties to others; in which they may or may not reap a share of the coveted good for self.
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Let us, next, consider some of the difficulties and mistakes attaching to the WILL. Here there are the questions of world-renown, questions known even in Pandemonium--Free-will, Responsibility, Moral Ability, and Inability. It is now suspected, on good grounds, that, on these questions, we have somehow got into a wrong groove--that we are lost in a maze of our own constructing.
[A STRONG WILL THE GIFT OF NATURE.]
I. We shall first notice a misconception akin to some of the foregoing mistakes respecting the feelings. In addressing men with a view to spur their activity, there is usually a too low estimate of what is implied in great and energetic efforts of will. Here, exactly as in the cheerful temperament, we find a certain constitutional endowment, a certain natural force of character, having its physical supports of brain, muscle, and other tissue; and neither persuasion, nor even education, can go very far to alter that character. If there be anything at all in the observations of phrenology, it is the connection of energetic determination with size of brain. Lay your hand first on the head of an energetic man, and then on the head of a feeble man, and you will find a difference that is not to be explained away. Now it passes all the powers of persuasion and education combined to make up for a great cranial inequality. Something always comes of assiduous discipline; but to set up a King Alfred, or a Luther, as a model to be imitated by an ordinary man, on the points of energy, perseverance, endurance, courage, is to pass the bounds of the human constitution. Persistent energy of a high order, like the temperament for happiness, costs a great deal to the human system. A large share of the total forces of the constitution go to support it; and the diversion of power often leaves great defects in other parts of the character, as for example, a low order of the sensibilities, and a narrow range of sympathies. The men of extraordinary vigour and activity--our Roman emperors and conquering heroes--are often brutal and coarse. Nature does not supply power profusely on all sides; and delicate sympathies, of themselves, use up a very large fraction of the forces of the organisation. Even intellectually estimated, the power of sympathising with many various minds and conditions would occupy as much room in the brain as a language, or an accomplishment. A man both energetic and sympathetic--a Pericles, a King Alfred, an Oliver Cromwell--is one of nature's giants, several men in one.
There is no more notable phase of our active nature than Courage. Great energy generally implies great courage, and courage--at least in nine-tenths of its amount--comes by nature. To exhort any one to be courageous is waste of words. We may animate, for the time, a naturally timid person, by explaining away the signs of danger, and by assuming a confident attitude ourselves; but the absolute force of courage is what neither we nor the man himself can add to. A long and careful education might effect a slight increase in this, as in other aspects of energy of character: we can hardly say how much, because it is a matter that is scarcely ever subjected to the trial; the very conditions of the experiment have not been thought of.
The moral qualities expressed by Prudence, Forethought, Circumspection, are talked of with a like insufficient estimate of what they cost. Great are the rewards of prudence, but great also is the expenditure of the prudent man. To retain an abiding sense of all the possible evils, risks and contingencies of an ordinary man's position--professional, family, and personal--is to go about under a constant burden; the difference between a thorough-going and an easy-going circumspection is a large additional demand upon the forces of the brain. The being on the alert to duck the head at every bullet is a charge to the vital powers; so much so, that there comes a point when it is better to run risks than to pile up costly precautions and bear worrying anxieties.
Lastly, the attribute of our active nature called Belief, Confidence, Conviction, is subject to the same line of remark. This great quality--the opposite of distrust and timidity, the ally of courage, the adjunct of a buoyant temperament--is not fed upon airy nothings. It is, indeed, a true mental quality, an offshoot of our mental nature; yet, although not material, it is based upon certain forces of the physical constitution; it grows when these grow, and is nourished when they are nourished. People possessed of great confidence have it as a gift all through life, like a broad chest or a good digestion. Preaching and education have their fractional efficacy, and deserve to be plied, provided the operator is aware of nature's impassable barriers, and does not suppose that he is working by charm. It is said of Hannibal that he dissolved obstructions in the Alps by vinegar; in the moral world, barriers are not to be removed either by acetic acid or by honey.
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[PREJUDICES DUE TO PERSONAL DIGNITY.]
II. The question of Free-will might be a text for discoursing on some of the most inveterate erroneous tendencies of the mind.
For one thing, it gives occasion to remark on the influence exerted over our opinions by the feeling of Personal Dignity. Of sources of bias, prejudices, "Idola," "fallacies _a priori_" this may be allowed precedence. For example, the maxim has been enunciated by some philosophers, that, of two differing opinions, preference is to be given (not to what is true, but) to what ennobles and dignifies human nature. One of the objections seriously entertained against Darwin's theory is that it humbles our ancestral pride. So, to ascribe to our mental powers a material foundation is held to be degrading to our nobler part. Again, a philosopher of our own day--Sir W. Hamilton--has placed on the title-page of his principal work this piece of rhetoric: "On earth, there is nothing great but man; in man, there is nothing great but mind". Now one would suppose that there are on earth many things besides man deserving the appellation of "great"; and that the mechanism of the body is, in any view, quite as remarkable a piece of work as the mechanism of the mind. There was one step more that Hamilton, as an Aristotelian, should have made: "In mind, there is nothing great but intellect". Doubtless, we ought not to dissect an epigram; but epigrams brought into a perverting contact with science are not harmless. Such gross pandering to human vanity must be held as disfiguring a work on philosophy.
The sentiment of dignity has much to answer for in the doctrine of Free-will. In Aristotle, the question had not assumed its modern perplexity; but the vicious element of factitious personal importance had already peeped out, it being one of the few points wherein the bias of the feelings operated decidedly in his well-balanced mind. In maintaining the doctrine that vice is voluntary, he argues, that if virtue is voluntary, vice (its opposite) must also be voluntary; now to assert virtue not to be voluntary would be to cast an _indignity_ upon it. This is the earliest association of the feeling of personal dignity with the exercise of the human will.
[FALSE PRIDE IN CONNECTION WITH FREE-WILL.]
The Stoics are commonly said to have started the free-will difficulty. This needs an explanation. A leading tenet of theirs was the distinction between things in our power and things not in our power; and they greatly overstrained the limits of what is in our power. Looking at the sentiment about death, where the _idea_ is everything, and at many of our desires and aversions, also purely sentimental, that is, made and unmade by our education (as, for example, pride of birth), they considered that pains in general, even physical pains and grief for the loss of friends, could be got over by a mental discipline, by intellectually holding them not to be pains. They extolled and magnified the power of the will that could command such a transcendent discipline, and infused an emotion of _pride_ into the consciousness of this greatness of will. In subsequent ages, poets, moralists, and theologians followed up the theme; and the appeal to the pride of will may be said to be a standing engine of moral suasion. This originating of a point of honour or dignity in connection with our Will has been the main lure in bringing us into the jungle of Free-will and Necessity.
It is in the Alexandrian school that we find the next move in the question. In Philo Judaeus, the good man is spoken of as free, the wicked man as a slave. Except as the medium of a compliment to virtue, the word "freedom" is not very apposite, seeing that, to the highest goodness, there attaches submission or restraint, rather than liberty.
The early Christian Fathers (notably Augustine) advanced the question to the Theological stage, by connecting it with the great doctrines of Original Sin and Predestination; in which stage it shared all the speculative difficulties attaching to these doctrines. The Theological world, however, has always been divided between Free-will and Necessity; and probably the weightiest names are to be found among the Necessitarians. No man ever brought greater acumen into theological controversy than did Jonathan Edwards; and he took the side of Necessity.
Latterly, however, since the question has become one of pure metaphysics, Free-will has been the favourite dogma, as being most consonant to the dignity of man, which appears to be its chief recommendation, and its only argument. The weight of reasoning is, I believe, in favour of necessity; but the word carries with it a seeming affront, and hardly any amount of argument will reconcile men to indignity.
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III. Another weakness of the human mind receives illustration from the free-will controversy, and deserves to be noticed, as helping to account for the prolonged existence of the dispute: I mean the disposition to regard any departure from the accustomed rendering of a fact as denying the fact itself. The rose under another name is not merely less sweet, it is not a rose at all. Some of the greatest questions have suffered by this weakness.
[ANALYSIS DOES NOT DESTROY THE FACT.]
The physical theory of matter that resolves it into _points of force_ will seem to many as doing away with matter no less effectually than the Berkeleyan Idealism. A universe of inane mathematical points, attracting and repelling each other, must appear to the ordinary mind a sorry substitute for the firm-set earth, and the majestically-fretted vault of heaven, with its planets, stars, and galaxies. It takes a special education to reconcile any one to this theory. Even if it were everything that a scientific hypothesis should be, the previously established modes of speech would be a permanent obstruction to its being received as the popular doctrine.
But the best illustrations occur in the Ethical and Metaphysical departments. For example, some ethical theorists endeavour to show that Conscience is not a primitive and distinct power of the mind, like the sense of colour, or the feeling of resistance, but a growth and a compound, being made up of various primitive impulses, together with a process of education. Again and again has this view been represented as denying conscience altogether. Exactly parallel has been the handling of the sentiment of Benevolence. Some have attempted to resolve it into simpler elements of the mind, and have been attacked as denying the existence of the sentiment. Hobbes, in particular, has been subjected to this treatment. Because he held pity to be a form of self-love, his opponents charged him with declaring that there is no such thing as pity or sympathy in the human constitution.
A more notable example is the doctrine of the alliance of Mind with Matter. It is impossible that any mode of viewing this alliance can erase the distinction between the two modes of existence--the material and the mental; between extended inert bodies, on the one hand, and pleasures and pains, thoughts and volitions, on the other. Yet, after the world has been made familiar with the Cartesian doctrine of two distinct substances--the one for the inherence of material facts, and the other for mental facts--any thinker maintaining the separate mental substance to be unproved, and unnecessary, is denounced as trying to blot out our mental existence, and to resolve us into watches, steam-engines, or speaking and calculating machines. The upholder of the single substance has to spend himself in protestations that he is not denying the existence of the fact, or the phenomena called mind, but is merely challenging an arbitrary and unfounded hypothesis for representing that fact.
[PERCEPTION OF A MATERIAL WORLD.]
The still greater controversy--distinct from the foregoing, although often confounded with it--relating to the Perception of a Material World, is the crowning instance of the weakness we are considering. Berkeley has been unceasingly stigmatised as holding that there is no material world, merely because he exposed a self-contradiction in the mode of viewing it, common to the vulgar and to philosophers, and suggested a mode of escaping the contradiction by an altered rendering of the facts. The case is very peculiar. The received and self-contradictory view is exceedingly simple and intelligible in its statement; it is well adapted, not merely for all the commoner purposes of life, but even for most scientific purposes. The supposition of an independent material world, and an independent mental world, created apart, and coming into mutual contact--the one the objects perceived, and the other the mind perceiving--expresses (or over-expresses) the division of the sciences into sciences of matter and sciences of mind; and the highest laws of the material world at least are in no respect falsified by it. On the other hand, any attempt to state the facts of the outer world on Berkeley's plan, or on any plan that avoids the self-contradiction, is most cumbrous and unmanageable. A smaller, but exactly parallel instance of the situation is familiar to us. The daily circuit of the sun around the earth, supposed to be fixed, so exactly answers all the common uses that, in spite of its being false, we adhere to it in the language of every-day life. It is a convenient misrepresentation, and deceives nobody. And such will, in all likelihood, be the usage regarding the external world, after the contradiction is admitted, and rectified by a metaphysical circumlocution. Speculators are still only trying their hand at an unobjectionable circumlocution; but we may almost be sure that nothing will ever supersede, for practical uses, the notion of the distinct worlds of Mind and Matter. If, after the Copernican demonstration of the true position of the sun, we still find it requisite to keep up the fiction of his daily course; much more, after the final accomplishment of the Berkeleyan revolution (to my mind inevitable), shall we retain the fiction of an independent external world: only, we shall then know how to fall back upon some mode of stating the case, without incurring the contradiction.
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IV. To return to the Will. The fact that we have to save, and to represent in adequate language, is this:--A voluntary action is a sequence distinct and _sui generis;_ a human being avoiding the cold, searching for food, and clinging to other beings, is not to be confounded with a pure material sequence, as the fall of rain, or the explosion of gunpowder. The phenomena, in both kinds, are phenomena of sequence, and of _regular_ or _uniform_ sequence; but the things that make up the sequence are widely different: in the one, a feeling of the mind, or a concurrence of feelings, is followed by a conscious muscular exertion; in the other, both steps are made up of purely material circumstances. It is the difference between a mental or psychological, and a material or physical sequence--in short, the difference between mind and matter; the greatest contrast within the whole compass of nature, within the universe of being. Now language must be found to give ample explicitness to this diametrical antithesis; still, I am satisfied that rarely in the usages of human speech has a more unfortunate choice been made than to employ, in the present instance, the antithetic couple--Freedom and Necessity. It misses the real point, and introduces meanings alien to the case. It converts the glory of the human character into a reproach (although its leading motive throughout has been to pay us a compliment). The _constancy_ of man's emotional nature (but for which our life would be a chaos, an impossibility) has to be explained away, for no other reason than that, at one time, a blundering epithet was applied to designate the mental sequences. Great is the difference between Mind and Matter; but the terms Freedom and Necessity represent the point of agreement as the point of difference; and this being made familiar, through iteration, as the mode of expressing the contrast, the rectification is supposed to unsettle everything, and to obliterate the wide distinction of the two natures.
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[SEIZING A QUESTION BY THE WRONG END.]
V. What is called Moral Ability and Inability is another artificial perplexity in regard to the will, and might also be the text for a sermon on prevailing errors. More especially, it exemplifies what may be termed _seizing a question by the wrong end_.