Part 6

And this is the view which Mr Bradley takes when he proceeds to describe what he means by the 'good.' It is, he says, "that which satisfies desire. It is that which we approve of, and in which we can rest with a feeling of contentment."[1] "Desire"--"approval"--"feeling"--to these mental attitudes the good is relative: they are expressed in its definition. Mr Bradley, it will be seen, re-states Green's doctrine with a difference which makes it at once more logical and less ethical. Green had said that "the moral good is that which satisfies the desire of a moral agent"; and in so saying had simply walked round the difficulty, for he was unable to say wherein consisted the peculiarity of the moral agent without reference to the conception of moral good which he had started out to define. But Mr Bradley dispenses with the qualification, and says simply that the good "satisfies desire." And in so far his definition is more logical. The question is whether it distinguishes good from evil. Both the practical importance and the theoretical difficulty of the problem arise from the fact that evil is sometimes desired, and that the evil desire may be satisfied. The desire of a malevolent man may be satisfied by another's downfall, and his mind may even "rest with a feeling of contentment" in that result, much in the same way as the benevolent man is satisfied and content with another's happiness. Fortunately, the case is not so common: the dominant leanings of most men are in sympathy with good rather than with evil: but it is common enough to make the emotional characteristics of the individual an uncertain basis on which to rest the distinction of good from evil.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 402.]

There is also another way of putting the matter: "the good is coextensive with approbation."[1] If by 'approbation' we mean simply 'holding for good,' then the sentence will mean that the good is what we hold for good--that is to say, that our judgments about good are always true judgments,--a proposition which either ignores the divergence between different individual judgments about good, or else implies a complete relativity such that that is good to each man at any time which he at that time approves or holds to be good; and this latter view would make all discussion impossible. But this is not what Mr Bradley means. "Approbation is to be taken in its widest sense"; in which sense "to approve is to have an idea in which we feel satisfaction, and to have or imagine the presence of this idea in existence."[2] And here the criterion is the same as before, and equally subjective. In desire idea and existence are separated; they are united in the satisfaction of desire; and approbation is said to be just the feeling of satisfaction in an idea which is also present (or imagined as present) in existence. Not only actual satisfaction of the desire but also imagined satisfaction is covered by "approbation"; but this approval is still simply a feeling of some individual person.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 407]

[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 418.]

We need not concern ourselves at present with the adequacy of this statement as an account of the way in which we come to 'approve' or hold something as good. The point is, that it does not advance us at all towards determining the validity of this approval, or towards an objective criterion for distinguishing 'good' from evil.

Mr Bradley draws a distinction between a general and a more special or restricted meaning of goodness. For the former it is enough that existence be "_found_ to be in accordance with the idea"; for the latter, it is necessary that the idea itself produce the fact.[1] In the former sense "beauty, truth, pleasure, and sensation are all things that are good,"[2] quite irrespective of their origin; in the latter sense, only that is good which the idea has produced, or in which it has realised itself, which is the work, therefore, of some finite soul. In this narrower meaning goodness is the result of will: "the good, in short, will become the realised end or completed will. It is now an idea which not only _has_ an answering content in fact, but, in addition also, has _made_, and has brought about, that correspondence.... Goodness thus will be confined to the realm of ends, or of self-realisation. It will be restricted, in other words, to what is commonly called the sphere of morality,"[3] Even in its more general meaning, as we have seen, Mr Bradley has not succeeded in giving an objective account of good. For the correspondence of idea and existence in which it is said to consist is defined in relation to desire, and to some kind of feeling on the part of the conscious subject. Nor was his account successful in distinguishing good from evil: to that distinction feeling is a blind guide. When he goes on to discuss goodness in the narrower sense, in which it belongs to the results of finite volition, he adopts, as expressing the nature of goodness, that conception of 'self-realisation' which, as put forward by Green, has been found inadequate. The same conception was used by Mr Bradley, in his first work, as "the most general expression for the end in itself," "May we not say," he asked, "that to realise self is always to realise a whole, and that the question in morals is to find the true whole, realising which will practically realise the true self?"[4] It is easy to make the distinction between good and evil depend upon this, that in the former the true self is realised, and that what is realised in the latter is only a false self. But it is equally easy to see that this is only to substitute one unexplained distinction for another. This short and easy method is not that which Mr Bradley adopts in his later work. He has something of much greater interest to say regarding the nature of the self-realisation in which goodness is made to consist; and upon it he lays stress, "solely with a view to bring out the radical vice of all goodness."[5] Goodness, it is said, is self-realisation; and Reality--it was assumed at the outset--is harmonious and all-comprehensive. These last characters are also criteria of degrees of reality, and consequently of degrees of self-realisation. There are, therefore, two marks of self-realisation--harmony and extent; and these two may and do diverge. No doubt "in the end," they will come together; but "in that end goodness, as such, will have perished."[6] "We must admit," says Mr Bradley, "that two great divergent forms of moral goodness exist. In order to realise the idea of a perfect self a man may have to choose between two partially conflicting methods. Morality, in short, may dictate either self--sacrifice or self--assertion,"[7] "The conscious duplicity of the hypocrite," according to an outspoken adherent of Mr Bradley's, is "but the natural exaggeration of the unconscious duplicity which resides in the very heart of morality."[8]

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 412.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 410.]

[Footnote 3: Appearance and Reality, pp. 412, 413.]

[Footnote 4: Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 59, 63.]

[Footnote 5: Appearance and Reality, p. 414.]

[Footnote 6: Appearance and Reality, p. 414.]

[Footnote 7: Ibid., p. 415.]

[Footnote 8: A.E. Taylor, Problem of Conduct (1901), p. 65.]

It is worth while considering this view of the contradictions inherent in morality. To start with, goodness was defined by relation to desire: the good was said to be what satisfies desire. Desire is plainly a mental state in which idea and existence are separated. As such it cannot be attributed to the Absolute Reality. It will involve a contradiction, therefore, if we identify goodness with Absolute Reality; for goodness implies a distinction (between idea and existence) which cannot find place in the Absolute. But if "degrees" of reality be asserted, we must admit stages short of the Absolute, and goodness may belong to such a stage in which process or development is allowed as a fact. But Mr Bradley will have it not only that it is a contradiction to identify this process with the Absolute, but also that the conception of goodness is itself contradictory. "A satisfied desire," he says, "is, in short, inconsistent with itself. For, so far as it is quite satisfied, it is not a desire; and, so far as it is a desire, it must remain at least partly unsatisfied."[1] Of course, if the desire is satisfied, it ceases. It was and it is not. But there is no more contradiction here than in any other case of temporal succession. A satisfied desire is, it is true, no longer a desire. But the phrase is contradictory only in appearance; for it means that the desire has been satisfied and in its satisfaction has ceased to exist as a desire. A much more important discrepancy is asserted when it is said that "two great divergent forms of moral goodness exist." The fight for moral goodness is 'under two flags'--self-assertion and self-sacrifice. And the allies "seem hostile to one another," "at least in some respects and with some persons."[2] We have here the time-honoured opposition of egoism and altruism, with a difference. Mr Bradley's most notable adherent in the region of ethical enquiry prefers to overlook the difference and to return to the older opposition of conflicting ideals.[3] But Mr Bradley himself declines to rate the social factor in conduct so high. It is not altruism or social activity which is the opponent of self-assertion or egoism, but self-sacrifice; and both self-assertion and self-sacrifice are kinds of self-realisation: in the former the self seeks its realisation by perfecting its harmony; in the latter, by increasing its extent. It is not in content that the two modes of self-realisation differ: social factors, for instance, may enter into both; it is in the diverse uses made of the contents:[4] 'system' is aimed at in the one; 'width' in the other.[5] The harmony of these two methods is attained only when both morality and the individual self are "transcended and submerged."[6]

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 410.]

[Footnote 2: Appearance and Reality, p. 415.]

[Footnote 3: Taylor, Problem of Conduct, p. 179 ff.]

[Footnote 4: Appearance and Reality, p. 416.]

[Footnote 5: Ibid., p. 414.]

[Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 419.]

This discrepancy of aim, and then coming together of the hostile factors only in the annulling and disappearance of both, is a process quite in accordance with the general dialectic of Mr Bradley. But two things may be noted with regard to it. In the first place the effort after system is called self-assertion, and the effort after width or expansion is called self-sacrifice. Perhaps the author may claim a right to give what names he likes to the processes he describes. But in this case the names have a recognised meaning in the literature of morals, and no hint is given that they are used here in any meaning other than the ordinary. And surely the term 'self-sacrifice' is an inappropriate term for describing the conduct which seeks expansion by multiplying the objects of desire--by the pursuit of whatever offers a chance of widened interests, whether social or intellectual, aesthetic or sensual,--even although "my individuality suffers loss" thereby, and "the health and harmony of my self is injured."[1] Loss may be the result; but aggrandisement is what is sought, though the effort fails through lack of organisation or system. And again 'self' is not the only possible centre for the systematisation of conduct. System in conduct may be realised in other ways than as self-assertion. It is sought as truly by the man of science who gives up everything for the pursuit of truth or by the philanthropist who forgets himself in promoting the social welfare. Such modes of life as these--and not merely self-assertive conduct--may become centres of a moral activity which aims at system.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p, 417.]

The second remark which has to be made on this final point is, that neither on the method of system and self-assertion nor on the method of expansion and self-sacrifice has the author given or suggested any criterion for the distinction of good and evil. He has cast his net so wide as to include all conduct within it without discrimination of moral worth. His own result is that "the good is, as such, transcended and submerged."[1] But this result loses all significance if it is the case, as our enquiry seems to prove, that the good as such has never been reached at all, nor any tenable suggestion offered for distinguishing it from evil.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 419.]

This is the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the two schools may be instructive.

Mr Herbert Spencer has told us that since the time of his first essay, "written as far back as 1842," his "ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at large a scientific basis.... Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularisation of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it.... Those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, and that it must be filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief."[1] But more than fifty years after the publication of this first essay, as, with the completion of the 'Principles of Ethics,' his whole system of philosophy lay unrolled before him, he made the significant and pathetic confession that "the doctrine of evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped.... Right regulation of the actions of so complex a being as man, living under conditions so complex as those presented by a society, evidently forms a subject-matter unlikely to admit of definite conclusions throughout its entire range."[2] And the lack of confidence which the author himself felt in these parts, there is good reason to extend to the whole structure of evolutionary ethics.

[Footnote 1: Preface to Data of Ethics, 1879.]

[Footnote 2: Preface to Principles of Ethics, vol. ii., 1893.]

Neither the purpose of their structure nor its collapse is so explicitly proclaimed by the metaphysicians with whom this lecture has dealt. But we hardly need to read between the lines in order to see the prominence of the moral interest in all that Green wrote; and it was after he had shown the inadequacy of the empirical method in the hands of Hume to give any criterion or ideal for conduct that he made his significant appeal to "Englishmen under five-and-twenty" to leave "the anachronistic systems hitherto prevalent amongst us" and take up "the study of Kant and Hegel."[1] His call to speculation has been widely responded to; but, if we turn to the most important product of this speculative movement, we have to extract what enlightenment we can from the dictum that, in the only sense in which the Absolute is good, it "manifests itself in various degrees of goodness and badness."[2]

[Footnote 1: Green, Introduction to Hume's Treatise (1874), ii. 71.]

[Footnote 2: Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 411.]

The most notable recent systems of philosophy, idealist as well as naturalist, are thus presented to us, almost confessedly, as void of application to conduct. This result, and foresight of this result, have led to a widespread suspicion of any attempt at ethical construction which is based upon a theory of reality. In consequence, recourse is sometimes had to a purely empirical treatment of morality such as that indicated at the close of the second lecture. Such an account, however, can never rise from the description of conduct to setting up an ideal for life. And accordingly some thinkers have remained convinced of the necessity of ideals for the moral life, although unable to find an adequate ground for these ideals in their system of reality.

This attitude was adopted by F.A. Lange, who, at the close of his History of Materialism, declared that there was need for an Ideal of Worth to supplement the deficiencies of the facts of being. "One thing is certain," he said, "that man needs to supplement reality by an Ideal World of his own creation, and that in such creations the highest and noblest functions of his mind co-operate. But must this free act of the mind bear ever and ever again the deceptive form of demonstrative science? If it does so, materialism will always reappear and destroy the over-bold speculations."[1] It would thus seem that moral life postulates an ideal which the mind is able to frame, but for which it can establish no connexion with the world of reality.

[Footnote 1: Geschichte des Materialismus, 3rd ed., p. 545 f.]

More recently a brilliant French writer, who has attempted to establish a system of "morality without obligation or sanction," has suggested that the place of the categorical law of duty may be taken by a speculative hypothesis, and that hope may serve where there is no ground for belief. "The speculative hypothesis is a risk taken in the sphere of thought; action in accordance with this hypothesis is a risk taken in the sphere of will; and that being is higher who will undertake and risk the more whether in thought or action."[1] Thus, "for example, if I would perform an act of charity pure and simple, and wish to justify this act rationally, I must imagine an eternal Charity at the ground of things and of myself, I must objectify the sentiment which leads to my action; and here the moral agent plays the same _rôle_ as the artist.... In every human action there is an element of error, of illusion": and it is conjectured that this element increases as the action rises above the commonplace: "the most loving hearts are the most often deceived, in the highest geniuses the greatest incoherences are often found."[2]

[Footnote 1: Guyau, Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1885) p. 250.]

[Footnote 2: Ibid., pp. 226, 227.]

This solution can hardly be regarded as other than a counsel of despair. Its ethical value is merely apparent. What is of importance for ethics is not so much the presence of some ideal: it is the kind of ideal that matters. It is possible to have an ideal of selfishness as well as an ideal of love, a sensual ideal as well as a spiritual. Nietzsche's over-man is an ideal; the Mohammedan paradise is an ideal; and conduct can be modelled on them. But it is not enough to have system in conduct, irrespective of the worth of the ideal which determines the system. Some criterion is needed for deciding between competing ideals. As long as they are looked upon as mere illusions, as expressions of doubt, or as a hazard staked on the unknowable, caprice takes the place of law; where all is equally uncertain there is no security for the worth of the ideal itself.

Unsatisfactory as they are in this form, the opinions referred to are echoes of a pregnant doctrine of Kant's--the doctrine that the moral consciousness brings us into closer touch with reality than the merely theoretical reason can reach. Various lines of recent thought may be said to have been suggested by this view. Almost every idealist metaphysician has tended to look upon thought itself as constituting the inmost reality of the universe which it conceives or understands; and Kant's doctrine may make us pause and ask whether this tendency is not simply an assumption without warrant.

Again, the psychological analysis of knowledge has brought out the fact of its constant dependence upon practical interests. It is the need to perform or attain something, which is the motive that leads to the understanding of things; and the understanding of things with which alone we are satisfied is commonly that which helps us so to describe our experience as to be able to control some practical result. 'Knowledge is power'; and not only so, but in its early stages and in most of its later developments, knowledge is _for_ power: it is for purposes of his own that man becomes the 'interpreter of nature.'

It is to men of science rather than to philosophers that we owe the 'descriptive theory' of scientific concepts which, within the last few years, has gone far to revolutionise the prevailing attitude of philosophy to science. Concepts, such as 'mass,' 'energy,' and the like, are no longer held to express realities the denial of which would be treason to science; they are simply descriptive notions whose truth consists in their utility: that is to say, in their ability to comprehend all the relevant facts in a simple description. And, in the same way, scientific principles are of the nature of postulates, whose justification is no necessary law of thought, but must rather be sought in the results of scientific investigation.

These three doctrines--the descriptive theory of science, the practical nature of knowledge as it is brought out by psychological analysis, and the special claims of the moral consciousness--have combined to bring about a tendency strongly opposed to the older idealist tradition, the tendency to regard practical results as the sole test of truth.

This conception is put forward now in philosophical literature as a new and independent point of view. The point of view is only in process of being hardened into a theory; but, under the name of Pragmatism, it has already become the subject of a vigorous propaganda. With the value of this doctrine as a general theory of reality we need not at present concern ourselves. In spite of the high claims it makes for the theoretical significance of moral ideas, its adherents have not as yet devoted much attention to the question of the worth of these moral ideas and the criteria by which that worth may be determined. Yet this surely is the fundamental question for ethical theory. On the other hand, as against a merely theoretical interpretation of the universe, into which the moral element enters only as a sort of loosely-connected appendix, the pragmatists are amply justified. Practical ends are prior to theoretical explanations of what happens. But practical ends vary, and some measure of their relative values is needed.

There is one thing which all reasoning about morality assumes and must assume; and that is morality itself. The moral concept--whether described as worth or as duty or as goodness--cannot be distilled out of any knowledge about the laws of existence or of occurrence. Nor will speculation about the real conditions of experience yield it, unless adequate recognition be first of all given to the fact that the experience which is the subject-matter of philosophy is not merely a sensuous and thinking, but also a moral, experience. The approval of the good, the disapproval of the evil, and the preference of the better: these would seem to be basal facts for an adequate philosophical theory: and they imply the striving for a best--however imperfect the apprehension of that best may always remain. Only when these facts--the characteristic facts of moral experience--are recognised as constituents of the experience which is our subject-matter, are we in a position profitably to enquire what is good and what evil, and how the best is to be conceived.