LECTURE III
ÆSTHETIC AND THEISM

I

In this lecture I have undertaken to consider certain beliefs and emotions relating to beauty, and to inquire how far their value is affected by our views as to their origin.

The poverty of language, however, makes it rather difficult to describe with any exactness the scope of such an inquiry. Beauty is an ill-defined attribute of certain members of an ill-defined class; and for the class itself there is no very convenient name. We might describe its members as “objects of Æsthetic interest” always bearing in mind that this description (as I use it) applies to objects of the most varying degrees of excellence—to the small as well as the great, the trifling as well as the sublime: to conjuring and dancing; to literature, art, and natural beauty.

It follows from this description that, while all things of beauty possess Æsthetic interest, not all things of Æsthetic interest would in common parlance be described as beautiful.3 They might, for example, display wit, or finish, or skill. They might, therefore, properly excite admiration. But beauty is a term whose use may well be confined to the qualities which excite only the highest forms of Æsthetic interest, and it is thus I propose to employ it.

Now what are the characteristics which distinguish objects of Æsthetic interest from interesting objects generally? I will mention two.

In the first place, the value of Æsthetic objects depends on the intrinsic quality of the emotions they arouse, and not upon the importance of any ulterior purpose which they may happen to subserve. In the second place, the emotions themselves, whatever be their value, must be contemplative. They must not prompt to action or reach forward to any end. They must be self-sufficient, and self-contained.

Of course, I do not suggest that works of art are useless. A building may be beautiful, although it is also convenient. A sword most delicately damascened may be an admirable engine of destruction. We may even go further and admit that utility unadorned may have about it an Æsthetic flavour. Nice adjustment and fitness exquisitely accomplished are without doubt agreeable objects of contemplation. But, in the first two of these cases, beauty is deliberately added to utility, not organically connected with it. An ill-proportioned building might have been equally fitted for its purpose; a plain sword might have been equally lethal. In the third case the connection between utility and Æsthetic interest is organic, yet undesigned. From the very nature of the case it forms no part of the purpose for which the mechanism was contrived.

Again—when I say that Æsthetic interest does not prompt to action, I am, of course, speaking of those who enjoy, not of those who are laboriously trying to enjoy, still less of those who create what is to be enjoyed. It commonly requires effort, conscious and unconscious, to be a good spectator; it always requires effort to become a good artist. Yet these are no real exceptions to the principle. Æsthetic interests, once aroused, do not prompt to action; and it is, I conceive, of their essence that they should not. The most emotional spectator does not rush to save Desdemona from Othello; and, though tragedy may (or may not) purify by “pity and terror,” the pity does not suggest a rescue, nor the terror urge to flight.

II

Now these characteristics of Æsthetic emotions and beliefs raise problems of great interest. How came they to be what they are? To what causal process are they due? In the case of ethics (to anticipate a discussion that will occupy us in the next lecture) the earlier stages at least are seemingly due to selection. They lead to action, and to action which has survival value. But what survival value have Æsthetic judgments and feelings at any stage of culture? It is true that actions which are sometimes represented as primitive forms of artistic creation play their part in the drama of animal courtship. Some animals dance, some sing, some croak; some flaunt colours, some exhale smells. Apes (it seems) make inarticulate noises which (according to Spencer) were the humble beginnings, not only of speech, but of music. I own that to me this sort of explanation leaves our Æsthetic interests quite unexplained. Grant, for the sake of argument that, were our knowledge sufficient, we could trace a continuous history of musical emotions from the simple satisfaction excited in the female ape by the howling of the male, down to the delicate delights of the modern musician, should we be nearer an answer to the problem of Æsthetic causation? I doubt it. Certainly we should not have succeeded in coupling the development of our feelings for beauty to the general process of organic evolution. Before this can be satisfactorily accomplished it must be shown, not merely that the tastes of anthropoid apes are useful to anthropoid apes, but that the tastes of men are useful to men, and in particular that the tastes of civilised men are useful to civilised men. Nor would even this be enough unless usefulness be carefully defined in terms of survival value. It must, in other words, be shown that communities rich in the genius which creates beauty and in the sensibility which enjoys it, will therefore breed more freely and struggle more successfully than their less gifted neighbours. And I am not aware that any attempt to establish such a doctrine has ever been seriously undertaken.

But, if so, our Æsthetic sensibilities must be regarded (from the naturalistic standpoint) as the work of chance. They form no part of the quasi design which we attribute to selection; they are unexplained accidents of the evolutionary process. This conclusion harmonises ill with the importance which civilised man assigns to them in his scheme of values. On this point, at least, there reigns a singular unanimity. However people may differ as to what we should admire, all are agreed that we should admire something. However they may differ about the benefits to be derived from Æsthetic, all are agreed that the benefits are great. The pessimist finds in art the solitary mitigation of human miseries. A certain type of agnostic treats it as an undogmatic substitute for religion. He worships beauty, but nothing else; and expects from it all the consolations of religious experience without the burdens of religious belief. Even those who would refuse to art and literature this exalted position, are prepared to praise them without stint. They regard the contemplative study of beautiful things as a most potent instrument of civilisation; in countless perorations they preach its virtues; delicacy of Æsthetic discrimination they deem the surest proof of culture, and the enjoyment of Æsthetic excellence its highest reward.

The case is apparently, but not really, different when we turn from beauty to the minor Æsthetic interests—the popular novel, the music-hall song, the cricket-match (as spectacle), the cinematograph, and so forth. Nobody, it is true, greatly praises these things, but multitudes greatly enjoy them. The space they occupy in the life of the community has increased beyond computation. As locomotion becomes easier and leisure greater that space will increase yet more. This may be good or bad; but none will deny that it is important. What a paradox this seems! Theories of selection were devised to explain the complex structures and the marvellous adjustments of the organic world without needlessly postulating design. We should think but poorly of them if they accounted for some organs by methods quite inapplicable to others—if they showed us, for example, how the eye had developed, but appealed to some wholly different principle (say special creation) when they set to work on the ear; or taught that the nose must be regarded as an evolutionary accident not to be explained on any general principle at all. If what required explanation was of small biological importance, this last hypothesis would not seem perhaps startling. The most convinced selectionist is not obliged to suppose that selection eliminates everything which does not make for survival. Useless variations may be spared if they be harmless. Even harmful variations may be spared if they be linked to variations so advantageous that their joint effect proves beneficial on balance. But is this the case with Æsthetic? Are we to treat as unconsidered trifles our powers of enjoying beauty and of creating it? Can we be content with a world-outlook which assigns to these chance products of matter and motion so vast a value measured on the scale of culture, and no value worth counting measured on the scale of race survival? If design may ever be invoked where selection fails and luck seems incredible, surely it may be invoked here.

III

These observations are applicable, more or less, to the whole body of our Æsthetic interests—whether they be roused by objects we deem relatively trivial, or by objects which are admittedly rare and splendid. But while neither fit comfortably into a purely naturalistic framework, it is only the second which, in virtue of their intrinsic quality, demand a source beyond and above the world of sense perception. Here, then, we are face to face with a new question. So far we have been concerned to ask whether that which is admittedly valuable can be plausibly attributed to chance. Now we must ask whether that which is attributed to chance can thereafter retain its value. Of these questions the first is germane to the ordinary argument from design. It is the second which chiefly concerns us in these lectures.

Perhaps an affirmative answer may seem to have been already given by implication. The admission that the second problem only touches the highest values in the Æsthetic scale may be thought to render the whole inquiry vain. And the admission cannot be avoided. No one supposes that when we are looking (for example) at an acrobat, it matters in the least what we think of the universe. Our beliefs and disbeliefs about the Cosmic order will not modify either in quantity or quality such satisfaction as we can derive from the contemplation of his grace and agility. Where, then, it will be asked, do we reach the point in the Æsthetic scale at which values begin to require metaphysical or theological postulates? Is it the point where beauty begins? If so, who determine where this lies; and by what authority do they speak?

Evidently we are here on difficult and delicate ground. On questions of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion. Nor, if we regard our Æsthetic interests simply as the chance flotsam and jetsam of the evolutionary tides, could it well be otherwise. If there be practically no “limits of deviation” imposed by selection; if, from a survival point of view, one taste be as good as another, it is not the varieties in taste which should cause surprise so much as the uniformities.

To be sure, the uniformities have often no deep Æsthetic roots. They represent no strong specific likes and dislikes shared by all men at a certain stage of culture, but rather tendencies to agreement (as I have elsewhere called them), which govern our social ritual, and thereby make social life possible. We rail at “fashion,” which by an unfelt compulsion drives multitudes simultaneously to approve the same dresses, the same plays, the same pictures, the same architecture, the same music, and the same scenery. We smile at the obsequious zeal with which men strive to admire what the prophets of the moment assure them is admirable. But admitting, as I think we must, that these prophets neither possess any inherent authority, nor can point to any standard of appeal, we must also admit that if in Art there were no orthodoxies, if the heresies themselves were unorganised, if every man based his Æsthetic practice on a too respectful consideration of his own moods and fancies, the world we live in would be even more uncomfortable than it is.

However this may be, it is clear that this second portion of my argument, which is not based, like the first, on any objective survey of the part played in human affairs by general Æsthetic interests, has special difficulties to surmount. For it rests on experiences of high emotion rare for all, unknown to many, roused in different men by different objects. How can any conclusions be securely based on foundations at once so slender and so shifting?

I agree that the values dealt with in this part of the argument are not values for everybody. Yet everybody, I think, would be prepared to go some way in the direction I desire. They would acknowledge that, in art, origin and value cannot be treated as independent. They would agree that those who enjoy poetry and painting must be at least dimly aware of a poet beyond the poem and a painter beyond the picture. If by some unimaginable process works of beauty could be produced by machinery, as a symmetrical colour pattern is produced by a kaleidoscope, we might think them beautiful till we knew their origin, after which we should be rather disposed to describe them as ingenious. And this is not, I think, because we are unable to estimate works of art as they are in themselves, not because we must needs buttress up our opinions by extraneous and irrelevant considerations; but rather because a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but as a matter of Æsthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient, unless it be understood by the sender. It must be expressive.

Such phrases are no doubt easily misunderstood. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that by an “expressive” message I do not mean a message which can be expressed in words. A work of art can never be transferred from one medium into another, as from marble to music. Even when words are the medium employed, perfect translation is impossible. One poet may paraphrase, in a different language, the work of another; and a new work of art may thus be produced. But however closely it follows the original, it will never be the same. On the other hand, if the medium used be (for example) colour, or sound, or stone, the work of art cannot be translated into words at all. It may be described; and the description may better the original. Yet it cannot replace it. For every work of art is unique; and its meaning cannot be alternatively rendered. But are we, therefore, to conclude that it has no meaning? Because its message cannot be translated, has it therefore no message? To put these questions is to answer them.

Many people, however, who would travel with me so far would refuse to go further. They would grant that a work of art must be due to genius, and not, in the first instance, to mechanism or to chance. But whether, in the last resort, mechanism or chance has produced the genius, they would regard as, from the Æsthetic point of view, quite immaterial. Music and poetry must have a personal source. But the musician and the poet may come whence they will.

And perhaps, in very many cases, this is so; but not, I think, in all, nor in the highest. If any man will test this for himself, let him recall the too rare moments when beauty gave him a delight which strained to its extremest limit his powers of feeling; when not only the small things of life, but the small things of Art—its technical dexterities, its historical associations—vanished in the splendour of an unforgettable vision; and let him ask whether the attribution of an effect like this to unthinking causes, or to an artist created and wholly controlled by unthinking causes, would not go far to impair its value.

To such an appeal it is not difficult to raise objections. It may be said, for example, that, under the stress of emotions like those I have described, no man troubles his head about problems of cosmology; thought is merged in feeling; speculation is smothered. But though this is true, it is not wholly true. As no pain, I suppose, is so intense as to exclude all reflections on its probable duration, so no rapture is so absorbing as to exclude all reflections on its probable source. I grant that at such moments we do not philosophise; we do not analyse a problem, turning it this way or that, and noting every aspect of it with a cool curiosity. Nevertheless, for those accustomed to reflect, reflection is never wholly choked by feeling. Nor can feeling, in the long run, be wholly unaffected by reflection.

Again, it may be said that such moments too seldom occur in any man’s experience to justify even the most modest generalisations—let alone generalisations that embrace the universe. But this objection seems to rest on a misapprehension. We must remember that the argument from Æsthetic values is not a scientific induction or a logical inference. There is here no question of truth and falsehood, or even of good taste and bad taste. We are not striving to isolate what is essential to beauty by well-devised experiments; nor are we concerned with psycho-physical determination of the normal relation between feeling and stimulus. If it be urged that some particular example of deep Æsthetic emotion quite outruns the merits of its object, so that sound canons of criticism require its value to be lowered, we need not deny it. We are not dealing with sound canons of criticism; though I may observe, in passing, that if they lower emotional values in one direction without raising them in others, good taste becomes a somewhat costly luxury. My point is different. I am not appealing to all men, but only to some men—to those and to those only who, when they explicitly face the problem, become deeply conscious of the incongruity between our feelings of beauty and a materialistic account of their origin.

The extreme individualism of this point of view may seem repulsive to many. Are the feelings (they will ask) of some transient moment to be treated as authentic guides through the mysteries of the universe, merely because they are strong enough to overwhelm our cooler judgment? And, if so, how far is this method of metaphysical investigation to be pressed? Are we, for example, to attach transcendental value to the feelings of a man in love? There is evidently a close, though doubtless not a perfect, parallel between the two cases. It is true that love is rooted in appetite, and that appetite has a survival value which I, at least, cannot find in the purely contemplative emotions. But romantic love goes far beyond race requirements. From this point of view it is as useless as Æsthetic emotion itself. And, like Æsthetic emotion of the profounder sort, it is rarely satisfied with the definite, the limited, and the immediate. It ever reaches out towards an unrealised infinity. It cannot rest content with the prose of mere fact. It sees visions and dreams dreams which to an unsympathetic world seem no better than amiable follies. Is it from sources like these—the illusions of love and the enthusiasms of ignorance—that we propose to supplement the world-outlook provided for us by sober sense and scientific observation?

Yet why not? Here we have values which by supposition we are reluctant to lose. Neither scientific observation nor sober sense can preserve them. It is surely permissible to ask what will. And if Naturalism be inimical to their maintenance, the fact should at least be noted.

It is true, no doubt, that these high-wrought feelings have worse enemies even than naturalism. When the impassioned lover has sunk into a good husband, and the worshipper of beauty has cooled into a judicious critic, they may look back on their early raptures with intelligent disdain. In that event there are for them no values to be maintained. They were young, they were foolish, they made a mistake, and there is no more to be said. But there is a higher wisdom. Without ignoring what experience has to teach, they may still believe that through these emotions they have obtained an authentic glimpse of a world more resplendent and not less real than that in which they tramp their daily round. And, if so, they will attribute to them a value independent of their immediate cause—a value which cannot be maintained in a merely naturalistic setting.4

This may seem a doctrine too mystical to suit the general tenor of these lectures. Let me, therefore, hasten to add that our ordinary and repeatable experiences of beauty seem to point in the same direction as these rarer and more intense emotions. It is, of course, true that even about these we cannot generalise as we may (for example) about the external world. We cannot, I mean, assume that there is a great body of Æsthetic experience which all normal persons possess in common. There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable. Many normal persons have no such feelings, or none worth talking about. Their Æsthetic interests may be great, but they lie at a lower level of intensity. They do not really care for beauty. Again, there are many who do care, and care greatly, who would yet utterly repudiate the doctrine that the highest Æsthetic values were in any sense dependent on a spiritual view of the universe. The fact that so much of the greatest art has been produced in the service of religion they would not regard as relevant. They would remind us that one great poet at least has been a passionate materialist; that many have been pessimists; that many have been atheists; that many have been in violent revolt against the religion of their age and country. Of these we cannot say that their art suffered from their opinions, for we cannot imagine what their art would have been like had their opinions been different. Neither can we say that the readers who shared their opinions, became, thereby, less qualified to enjoy their art. Such a paradox would be too violent. How, then (the objectors may ask), are facts like these to be harmonised with the views I am recommending?

Probably they cannot be harmonised. We are confronted with a difference of temperament which must be accepted as final. Yet the contradiction may often be less than at first appears. In the case which I brought forward just now, strong Æsthetic emotion was assumed to carry with it, both at the crisis of immediate experience and yet more in periods of reflective retrospect, a demand for some cause emotionally adequate to its effect. In other words, it was assumed that such an experience suggested the question—whence comes it? of matter? or of spirit? and required the answer—if it be not born of spirit it is little, or it is naught.

But in many cases this answer is not given because the question is not asked; or, if it be asked, is misunderstood. And there are many reasons why it should not be asked; and many why it should be misunderstood.

For there are two things which must, in this connection, be remembered. The first is that materialism has never been the prevailing creed among lovers of beauty. The second is that though (as I contend) a deep-lying incongruity infects theories which trace the ultimate genesis of beauty exclusively to causes which neither think, nor feel, nor will, such theories involve no contradiction, nor can those who hold them be taxed with inconsistency. There is, therefore, little in the ordinary routine of artistic criticism which raises the point which we are now discussing. A critic examining some artistic whole—a picture, a poem, a symphony—is much occupied in separating out the elements which contribute to the total effect, and in observing their character, value, and mutual relations. But it is only when we cease to analyse, when we contemplate, directly or in retrospect, the whole as a whole, that the problem of origin arises; and even then it need never become explicit. It may remain in the shape of an unsatisfied longing for a spiritual reality beyond the sensuous impression, or of a vaguely felt assurance that the spiritual reality is there. And in neither case has it developed into a question definitely presented—and pressing for a definite reply.

While, then, I am quite ready to believe that there are many persons whose enjoyment of beauty is quite independent of their world outlook, I am also convinced that there are some who count themselves among the number only because they have never put the matter to the proof. It may be that they have given but little thought to questions of theology or metaphysics. It may be that they are pantheists after the manner of Shelley, or pessimists after the manner of Schopenhauer. Perhaps, again, they hold one or other of the theosophies which pass current in the West as the esoteric wisdom of the East. In any case, they are averse from orthodoxy, or what they regard as such. A lover of the beautiful belonging to any type like these, if asked whether his estimate of Æsthetic values depended on his creed, might easily miss the point of the inquiry, and his negative reply would be worthless. Let the question, therefore, be put in different terms. Let him be asked whether beauty would not lose value for him if his world-outlook required him to regard it as a purposeless accident; whether the Æsthetic delights which he deems most exquisite would not be somewhat dimmed if reflection showed them to be as vain, as transitory, though not so useful, as the least considered pleasures of sense. If he replies in the negative, there is no more to be said. This lecture is not addressed to him. But I believe there are many to whom such an answer would be profoundly unsatisfying; and they, at least, can hardly deny that Æsthetic values are in part dependent upon a spiritual conception of the world we live in.

IV

So far I have been considering art and the beauty expressed by art. But there are two kinds of Æsthetic interest, which, though not artistic in the ordinary sense of the word, are so important that something must be said about them before this lecture closes.

The first of these is natural beauty. Hegel, if I rightly understand him, altogether excluded this from the sphere of Æsthetic. For him the point of importance was Spirit—the Idea—expressing itself in art; and since nature is not spirit, nor natural beauty art, the exclusion was logical. For me, on the other hand, the main thing is feeling roused by contemplation; and particularly feeling at its highest level of quality and intensity. Natural beauty, therefore, cannot be ignored; since no feelings of contemplation possess higher quality, or greater intensity, than those which natural beauty can arouse.

Evidently, however, there is, even from my point of view, a great difference between beauty in art and beauty in nature. For, in the case of nature, there is no artist; while, as I observed just now, “a work of art requires an artist, not merely in the order of natural causation, but in the order of Æsthetic necessity. It conveys a message which is valueless to the recipient unless it be understood by the sender. It must be significant.”

Are we, then, to lay down one rule for artistic beauty and another rule for natural beauty? Must the first be expressive, but not the second? Is creative mind necessary in one case, and superfluous in the other? And if in the case of nature it be necessary, where is it to be found? On the naturalistic hypothesis, it is not to be found at all. The glory of mountain and of plain, storm and sunshine, must be regarded as resembling the kaleidoscopic pattern of which I just now spoke; with this difference only—that the kaleidoscope was designed to give some pattern, though no one pattern more than another; while nature was not designed with any intention at all, and gives us its patterns only by accident.

I know not whether you will think that this train of thought is helped or hindered by bringing it into relation with our scientific knowledge of natural realities. The world which stirs our Æsthetic emotions is the world of sense, the world as it appears. It is not the world as science asks us to conceive it. This is very ill-qualified to afford Æsthetic delight of the usual type; although the contemplation of complicated relations reduced to law may produce an intellectual pleasure in the nature of Æsthetic interest. Yet none, I think, would maintain that mass and motion abstractly considered, nor any concrete arrangement of moving atoms or undulating ether, are beautiful as represented in thought, or would be beautiful could they become objects of perception. We have a bad habit of saying that science deals with nothing but “phenomena.” If by phenomena are meant appearances, it is to Æsthetics rather than to science that, on the principle of Solomon’s judgment, phenomena most properly belong. To get away from appearances, to read the physical fact behind its sensuous effect, is one chief aim of science; while to put the physical fact in place of its sensuous effect would be the total and immediate ruin of beauty both in nature and in the arts which draw on nature for their material. Natural beauty, in other words, would perish if physical reality and physical appearance became one, and we were reduced to the lamentable predicament of perceiving nature as nature is!

Now, to me, it seems that the feeling for natural beauty cannot, any more than scientific curiosity, rest satisfied with the world of sensuous appearance. But the reasons for its discontent are different. Scientific curiosity hungers for a knowledge of causes; causes which are physical, and, if possible, measurable. Our admiration for natural beauty has no such needs. It cares not to understand either the physical theories which explain what it admires, or the psychological theories which explain its admiration. It does not deny the truth of the first, nor (within due limits) the sufficiency of the second. But it requires more. It feels itself belittled unless conscious purpose can be found somewhere in its pedigree. Physics and psycho-physics, by themselves, suffice not. It longs to regard beauty as a revelation—a revelation from spirit to spirit, not from one kind of atomic agitation to the “psychic” accompaniment of another. On this condition only can its highest values be maintained.5

V

There is yet one other subject of Æsthetic interest on which I desire to say something before the course of these lectures carries me into very different regions of speculation. The subject I refer to is history.

That history has Æsthetic value is evident. An age which is both scientific and utilitarian occasionally pretends to see in it no more than the raw material of a science called sociology, and a storehouse of precedents from which statesmen may draw maxims for the guidance of mankind. It may be all this, but it is certainly more. What has in the main caused history to be written, and when written to be eagerly read, is neither its scientific value nor its practical utility, but its Æsthetic interest. Men love to contemplate the performances of their fellows, and whatever enables them to do so, whether we belittle it as gossip or exalt it as history, will find admirers in abundance.

Yet the difference between this subject of contemplative interest and those provided either by beauty in art or beauty in nature are striking.

In the first place, history is not concerned to express beauty. I do not deny that a great historian, in narrating some heroic incident, may rival the epic and the saga. He may tell a tale which would be fascinating even if it were false. But such cases are exceptional, and ought to be exceptional. Directly it appears that the governing preoccupation of an historian is to be picturesque, his narrative becomes intolerable.

This is because the interest—I mean the Æsthetic interest—of history largely depends upon its accuracy; or (more strictly) upon its supposed accuracy. Fictitious narrative, whether realistic or romantic, may suggest deeper truths, may tell us more about the heart of man, than all the histories that ever were written; and may tell it more agreeably. But fact has an interest, because it is fact; because it actually happened; because actual people who really lived and really suffered and really rejoiced caused it to happen, or were affected by its happening. And on this interest the charm of history essentially depends.

In this respect there is, I think, a certain analogy between the Æsthetic interest aroused by history and that aroused by natural beauty. Our pleasure in a landscape is qualified if we discover ourselves to have been the victims of an optical delusion. If, for example, purple peaks are seen on a far horizon, the traveller may exclaim, “What beautiful mountains!” Something thereupon convinces him that the mountains are but clouds, and his delight suffers an immediate chill. But why? The mountains, it is true, proved unreal; but they had as much reality as mountains in a picture. Where lies the essential difference between a representation accidentally produced by condensed vapour and a representation deliberately embodied in paint and canvas? It is not to be found, as might be at first supposed, in the fact that the one deceives us and the other does not. Were we familiar with this particular landscape, did we know that nothing but a level plain stretched before us to the limits of our vision, we might still feel that, if the clouds on the horizon were what they seemed to be, the view would gain greatly in magnificence. Here there is no deception and no shock of disillusionment. If, therefore, we remain dissatisfied, it is because in this case verisimilitude does not suffice us; we insist on facts.

It has, perhaps, not been sufficiently noticed that brute fact, truth as it is apprehended in courts of law, truth as it is given by an accurate witness speaking on oath, has for some purposes great Æsthetic value. That it is all-important in the dealings between man and man would be universally conceded; that it has no importance either in fine art or imaginative literature, and no meaning in music or architecture, most people would be ready to admit. But that it possesses worth where no practical issues are involved, and that this worth is of the contemplative or Æsthetic order, is perhaps not so easy of acceptance. Yet so it is. A tale which would be inexpressibly tedious if we thought it was (in the “law court” sense) false may become of absorbing interest if we think it true. And this not because it touches morals or practice, not because it has theoretic interest or controversial importance, but in its own right and on its own merits.

Now this Æsthetic quality is, it seems to me, required both from “natural beauty” and historic narrative; but if there is here a resemblance between them, in other respects they are profoundly different. Landscape appeals to us directly. I do not mean that our enjoyment of it, both in quality and quantity, is not largely due to the work of artists. Our tastes have, no doubt, been formed and our sensibilities educated by the interpretation of nature which we owe to painters and poets. But though this is true, it is also true that what we see and what we enjoy is not art but nature, nature at first hand, nature seen immediately, if not as she is, at least as she appears. In the case of history it is otherwise. Except when we happen to have been ourselves spectators of important events, there is always an artist to be reckoned with. It may be Thucydides. It may be Dr. Dryasdust. It may be a mediÆval chronicler. It may be Mrs. Candour at the tea-table. But there is always somebody; and though that somebody might repudiate the notion that his narrative was a work of art, yet he cannot evade responsibility for selection, for emphasis, and for colour. We may think him a bad artist, but, even in his own despite, an artist he is;—an artist whose material is not marble or sound, but brute fact.

There is another way in which the Æsthetic interest of history characteristically differs from the interest we feel in beauty, whether of art or of nature. It is massive rather than acute. Particular episodes may indeed raise the most poignant emotions. But, broadly speaking, the long-drawn story of man and his fortunes stirs feelings which (to borrow a metaphor from physics) are great in quantity but of low intensity. So it comes about that, whereas in the case of art the emotions stand out prominently above their associated judgments, in the case of history the positions are commonly reversed.

Yet this need not be so; and in particular it need not be so when we are contemplating the historical process as a whole. Details are then merged in a general impression; and the general impression drives us beyond the limits of history proper into questions of origin and purpose, into reflections about man and destiny, into problems of whence and whither. Speculations like these have an emotional as well as an intellectual value, which must be affected by the answers we give them.

Let me illustrate and explain. It is possible, indeed it is easy, to contemplate aspects of history with the coolest intellectual interest. In this mood we might, for instance, study the development of science and religion out of primitive magics and superstitions. In this mood we might observe the characteristics of the city state, or the growth and decay of feudalism, or the history of the Mongols. On the other hand, the interest often becomes tinged with stronger feelings when we sympathetically follow the changing fortunes of particular individuals or communities. We are then, as it were, spectators of a drama, moved by dramatic hopes and fears, dramatic likes and dislikes, dramatic “pity and terror.” And our emotions are not merely those appropriate to drama; they have, besides, that special quality (already referred to) which depends on the belief that they are occasioned by real events in a world of real people.

But there is yet a third case to be considered, in which the two previous cases are included and partially submerged. This occurs when the object of our contemplative interest is not episodic but general, not the fate of this man or that nation, this type of polity or that stage of civilisation, but the fate of mankind itself, its past and future, its collective destiny.

Now we may, if we please, treat this as no more than a chapter of natural history. Compared with the chapter devoted, let us say, to the Dinosaurs it no doubt has the disadvantage of being as yet unfinished, for the Dinosaurs are extinct, and man still survives. On the other hand, though the natural history of “Homo Sapiens” is incomplete, we may admit that it possesses a peculiar interest for the biologist; but this interest is scientific, not historical.

For what does historical interest require? Not merely “brute fact,” but brute fact about beings who are more than animals, who look before and after, who dream about the past and hope about the future, who plan and strive and suffer for ends of their own invention; for ideals which reach far beyond the appetites and fears which rule the lives of their brother beasts. Such beings have a “natural history,” but it is not with this that we are concerned. The history which concerns us is the history of self-conscious personalities, and of communities which are (in a sense) self-conscious also. Can the contemplative values which this possesses, especially in its most comprehensive shape, be regarded as independent of our world-outlook? Surely not.

Observe that history, so conceived, must needs compare faculty with desire, achievement with expectation, fulfilment with design. And no moralist has ever found pleasure in the comparison. The vanity of human wishes and the brevity of human life are immemorial themes of lamentation; nor do they become less lamentable when we extend our view from the individual to the race. Indeed, it is much the other way. Men’s wishes are not always vain, nor is every life too brief to satisfy its possessor. Only when we attempt, from the point of view permitted by physics and biology, to sum up the possibilities of collective human endeavour, do we fully realise the “vanity of vanities” proclaimed by the Preacher.

I am not, of course, suggesting that history is uninteresting because men are unhappy: nor yet that naturalism carries pessimism in its train. It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings. But this is not the question. I am not (for the moment) concerned with the miseries of the race, but with its futility. Its miseries might be indefinitely diminished, yet leave its futility unchanged. We might live without care and die without pain; nature, tamed to our desires, might pour every luxury into our lap; and, with no material wish unsatisfied, we might contemplate at our ease the inevitable, if distant, extinction of all the life, feeling, thought, and effort whose reality is admitted by a naturalistic creed.

But how should we be advanced? What interest would then be left in the story of the human race from its sordid beginnings to its ineffectual end? Poets and thinkers of old dimly pictured a controlling Fate to which even the Olympian gods were subject. The unknown power, which they ignorantly worshipped, any text-book on physics will now declare unto you. But no altars are erected in its honour. Its name is changed. It is no longer called Fate or Destiny, but is known by a title less august if more precise, the law of energy-degradation, or (if you please) “the second law of thermo-dynamics.” It has become the subject of scientific experiment; the physicists have taken it over from the seers, and its attributes are defined in equations. All terrestrial life is in revolt against it; but to it, in the end, must all terrestrial life succumb. Eschatology, the doctrine of the last things, has lapsed from prophecy to calculation, and has become (at least potentially) a quantitative science.

And, from a scientific point of view, this is quite satisfactory. But it is not satisfactory when we are weighing the Æsthetic values of universal history. Shakespeare, in the passionate indictment of life which he puts into the mouth of Macbeth, declares it to be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,” and (mark well the climax) “signifying nothing.” That is the point with which in this lecture we are chiefly concerned. It most clearly emerges when, in moments of reflection, we enlarge the circuit of our thoughts beyond the needs of action, and, in a mood untouched by personal hopes or fears, endeavour to survey man’s destiny as a whole. Till a period within the memory of men now living it was possible to credit terrestrial life with an infinite future, wherein there was room for an infinite approach towards some, as yet, unpictured perfection. It could always be hoped that human efforts would leave behind them some enduring traces, which, however slowly, might accumulate without end. But hopes like these are possible no more. The wider is the sweep of our contemplative vision the more clearly do we see that the rÔle of man, if limited to an earthly stage, is meaningless and futile;—that, however it be played, in the end it “signifies nothing.” Will any one assert that universal history can maintain its interest undimmed if steeped in the atmosphere of a creed like this?

Here, however, we are evidently nearing the frontier which divides Æsthetic from ethic. Before I cross it, and begin a new subject, let me very briefly touch on a difficulty which may have occurred to some of my hearers.

The line of thought followed in the last section of this lecture assumes, or seems to assume, that our only choice lies between history framed in a naturalistic, and history framed in a theistic, setting. In the first case we have a world-outlook which forbids the attribution of permanent value to human effort; in the second case we have a world-outlook which requires, or, at the least, permits it. But are these the only alternatives? What are we to say, for example, about those metaphysical religions which, whether they be described as theistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, agree in regarding all life as illusion, all desire as wretchedness, and deem the true end of man to be absorption in the timeless identity of the real? Such creeds have no affinity with naturalism. Philosophically they are in sharpest contrast to it. But even less than naturalism do they provide history with a suitable setting. For naturalism does, after all, leave untouched the interest of historical episodes, so long as they are considered out of relation to the whole of which they form a part. As we are content, in the realm of fiction, to bid farewell to the hero and heroine on their marriage, unmoved by anxieties about their children, so, in the realm of “brute fact,” we may arbitrarily isolate any period we choose, and treat the story of it without reference to any theories concerning the future destiny of man. But this process of abstraction must surely be useless for those who think of the world in terms of the metaphysical religions to which I have referred. In their eyes all effort is inherently worthless, all desire inherently vain. Nor would they change their opinion even were they persuaded that progress was real and unending; that effort and desire were building up, however slowly, an imperishable polity of super-men. For those who in this spirit face the struggling world of common experience the contemplative interest of universal history must be small indeed.

LECTURE IV
ETHICS AND THEISM

I

I turn now from contemplation to action; from Æsthetics to Ethics. And in so doing I must ask permission to stretch the ordinary meaning of the term which I use to describe the subject-matter of the present lecture, as I have already stretched the meaning of the term which described the subject-matter of the last. “Æsthetics” there included much besides beauty; “Ethics” here will include much besides morality. As, under the first head, were ranged contemplative interests far lower in the scale than (for example) those of art, so I shall extend the use of the word “Ethics” till it embraces the whole range of what used to be called the “springs of action,” from the loftiest love down to impulses which in themselves are non-moral, instinctive, even automatic.

The grounds for this procedure are similar in both cases. I am mainly, almost exclusively, concerned with beliefs and emotions touching beauty and goodness. Yet it is important to remember that, considered as natural products, these shade off by insensible gradations into manifestations of life to which the words “belief” and “emotion” are quite inapplicable, where “beauty” and “goodness” have little meaning or none. And as this larger class, when concerned with action, has at present no better name, I may be permitted to describe it as ethical.

I am mainly concerned, however, with that higher part of the ethical scale which all would agree to call Moral, and with the debatable region immediately below it. Of purposive action, or what seems to be such, of a still lower type, I need say little—but we must never forget that it is there.

Morals, as I conceive them, are concerned with ends of action: and principally with ultimate ends of action. An end of action, in so far as it is ultimate, is one which is pursued for itself alone, and not as a means to some other end. Of course an end may be, and constantly is, both ultimate and contributory. It is sought for on its own account, and also as an instrument for procuring something else. It is mainly in the first of these capacities, however, that it concerns morality.

For the purposes of this lecture I shall classify ultimate ends as either egoistic or altruistic—egoistic ends being those that are immediately connected with, or centred in, the agent; altruistic ends being those that are not. But I beg you to remember that this distinction does not correspond to that between right and wrong. Egoism is not necessarily vicious, nor is altruism necessarily virtuous. Indeed, as I shall have occasion to point out later, the blackest vices, such as cruelty and hatred, are often altruistic.

This is an unusual, though not, I think, an unreasonable, use of language. “Egoism” and “altruism” are terms historically associated with the moral theories which regard happiness as the only end of action, but are under the necessity of distinguishing between actions designed to secure the happiness of the agent and actions designed to secure the happiness of other people. I do not accept these theories, though I borrow their phraseology. Happiness may, or may not, be the highest of all ultimate ends, the one to which all others should give way. But it seems to me quite misleading to call it the only one. To describe the sensual man, the vain man, the merely selfish man, the miser, the ascetic, the man moved by rational self-love, the man absorbed in the task of “self-realisation,” the man consumed by the passion for posthumous fame, as all pursuing the same egoistic end by different means, is surely to confuse distinctions of great moral importance without any gain of scientific clarity. In like manner, to suppose that the man who spends himself in the service (say) of his family, his country, or his church, is only striving for the “happiness” of the human race, or of certain selected members of the human race, is (it seems to me) to ignore the plain teaching of daily experience. As there are many egoistic ends besides our own happiness, so there are many altruistic ends besides the happiness of others. The extended sense, therefore, in which I employ these terms seems justified by facts.

II

I shall not attempt to determine the point at which we can first clearly discriminate between the “egoistic” and “altruistic” elements in animal instinct. Evidently, however, it is anterior to and independent of any conceptual recognition either of an ego or an alter. It might be argued that there is an altruistic element in the most egoistic instincts. Eating, multiplying, fighting, and running away—acts plainly directed towards preserving and satisfying the individual—also conduce to the preservation of the race. But, however this may be, the converse is certainly untrue. There are altruistic instincts into which no element of egoism enters. Of these the most important is parental, especially maternal, love: the most amazing are the impulses which regulate the complex polity of (for example) a hive of bees. In these cases one organism will work or fight or endure for others: it will sacrifice its life for its offspring, or for the commonwealth of which it is a member. Egoism is wholly lost in altruism.

Now, I suppose that, in the order of causation, all these animal instincts, be they egoistic or altruistic, must be treated as contrivances for aiding a species in the struggle for existence. If anything be due to selection, surely these must be. This is plainly true of the egoistic appetites and impulses on which depend the maintenance of life and its propagation. It must also be true of the altruistic instincts. Take, for instance, the case of parental devotion. Its survival value is clearly immense. The higher animals, as at present constituted, could not exist without it; and though, for all we can say to the contrary, development might have followed a different course, and a race not less effectively endowed than man might flourish though parental care played no greater part in the life-history of its members than it does in the life-history of a herring, yet this is not what has actually happened. Altruistic effort, in the world as we know it, is as essential to the higher organisms as the self-regarding instincts and appetites are to organic life in general; and there seems no reason for attributing to it a different origin.

Can this be said with a like confidence about the higher portions of the ethical scale? Are these also due to selection?

Evidently the difference between primitive instincts and developed morality is immense; and it is as great in the egoistic as in the non-egoistic region of ethics. Ideals of conduct, the formulation of ends, judgments of their relative worth, actions based on principles, deliberate choice between alternative policies, the realised distinction between the self and other personalities or other centres of feeling— all these are involved in developed morality, while in animal ethics they exist not at all, or only in the most rudimentary forms.

Compare, for instance, a society of bees and a society of men. In both there is division of labour; in both there is organised effort towards an end which is other and greater than the individual good of any single member of the community. But though there are these deep-lying resemblances between the two cases, how important are the differences which divide them! In the bee-hive altruism is obeyed, but not chosen. Alternative ends are not contrasted. No member of the community thinks that it could do something different from, and more agreeable than, the inherited task. Nor in truth could it. General interest and individual interest are never opposed, for they are never distinguished. The agent never compares, and therefore never selects.

Far different are the ethical conditions requiring consideration when we turn from bees to men. Here egoism and altruism are not only distinguished in reflection; they may be, and often are, incompatible in practice. Nor does this conflict of ends only show itself between these two great ethical divisions; it is not less apparent within them. Here, then, we find ourselves in a world of moral conflict very faintly foreshadowed in animal ethics. For us, ultimate ends are many. They may reinforce each other, or they may weaken each other. They may harmonise, or they may clash. Personal ends may prove incompatible with group ends: one group end may prove incompatible with another. Loyalty may be ranged against loyalty, altruism against altruism; nor is there any court of appeal which can decide between them.

But there are yet other differences between the ethics of instinct and the ethics of reflection. Instincts are (relatively) definite and stable; they move in narrow channels; they cannot easily be enlarged in scope, or changed in character. The animal mother, for example, cares for its young children, but never for its young grandchildren. The lifelong fidelity of the parent birds in certain species (a fidelity seemingly independent of the pairing season, or the care of particular broods) never becomes the nucleus of a wider association. Altruistic instincts may lead to actions which equal, or surpass, man’s highest efforts of abnegation; but the actions are matters of routine, and the instincts never vary. They emerge in the same form at the same stage of individual growth, like any other attribute of the species—its colour, for instance, or its claws. And if they be, like colour and claws, the products of selection, this is exactly what we should expect. But then, if the loyalties of man be also the product of selection, why do they not show a similar fixity?

Plainly they do not. Man inherits the capacity for loyalty, but not the use to which he shall put it. The persons and causes (if any) to which he shall devote himself are suggested to him, often, indeed, imposed upon him, by education and environment. Nevertheless, they are his by choice, not by hereditary compulsion. And his choice may be bad. He may unselfishly devote himself to what is petty or vile, as he may to what is generous and noble. But on the possibility of error depends the possibility of progress; and if (to borrow a phrase from physics) our loyalty possessed as few “degrees of freedom” as that of ants or bees, our social organisation would be as rigid.

The most careless glance at the pages of history, or the world of our own experience, will show how varied are the forms in which this capacity for loyalty is displayed. The Spartans at ThermopylÆ, the “Blues” and the “Greens” at Byzantium, rival politicians in a hard-fought election, players and spectators at an Eton and Harrow Match, supply familiar illustrations of its variety and vigour. And do not suppose that in thus bringing together the sublime, the familiar, and the trivial, I am paradoxically associating matters essentially disparate. This is not so. I am not putting on a moral level the patriot and the partisan, the martyr to some great cause and the shouting spectator at a school match. What I am insisting on is that they all have loyalty in common; a loyalty which often is, and always may be, pure from egoistic alloy.

Loyalties, then, which are characteristically human differ profoundly from those which are characteristically animal. The latter are due to instincts which include both the end to be sought for and the means by which it is to be attained. The former are rooted in a general capacity for, or inclination to, loyalty, with little inherited guidance either as to ends or means. Yet, if we accept selection as the source of the first, we can hardly reject it as the source of the second. For the survival value of loyalty is manifest. It lies at the root of all effective co-operation. Without it the family and tribe would be impossible; and without the family and the tribe, or some yet higher organisation, men, if they could exist at all, would be more helpless than cattle, weak against the alien forces of nature, at the mercy of human foes more capable of loyalty than themselves. A more powerful aid in the struggle for existence cannot easily be imagined.

We are indeed apt to forget how important are its consequences, even when it supplies no more than a faint qualification of other and more obvious motives. It acts like those alloys which, in doses relatively minute, add strength and elasticity even to steel. The relation (for example) between a commercial company and its officials is essentially a business one. The employer pays the market price for honesty and competence, and has no claim to more. Yet that company is surely either unfortunate or undeserving whose servants are wholly indifferent to its fortunes, feeling no faintest flicker of pride when it succeeds, no tinge of regret when it fails. Honourable is the tie between those who exchange honest wage and honest work; yet loyalty can easily better it. And a like truth is manifest in spheres of action less reputable than those of commerce. Mercenaries, to be worth hiring, must be partly moved by forces higher than punishment or pay. Even pirates could not plunder with profit were their selfishness unredeemed by some slight tincture of reciprocal loyalty.

There are, however, many who would admit the occasional importance of loyalty while strenuously denying that social life was wholly based upon it. For them society is an invention; of all inventions the most useful, but still only an invention. It was (they think) originally devised by individuals in their individual interest; and, though common action was the machinery employed, personal advantage was the end desired. By enlightened egoism social organisation was created; by enlightened egoism it is maintained and improved. Contrivance, therefore, not loyalty, is the master faculty required.

This is a great delusion—quite unsupported by anything we know or can plausibly conjecture about the history of mankind. No one, indeed, doubts that deliberate adaptation of means to ends has helped to create, and is constantly modifying, human societies; nor yet that egoism has constantly perverted political and social institutions to merely private uses. But there is something more fundamental to be borne in mind, namely, that without loyalty there would be no societies to modify, and no institutions to pervert. If these were merely well-designed instruments like steam-engines and telegraphs, they would be worthless. They would perish at the first shock, did they not at once fall into ruin by their own weight. If they are to be useful as means, they must first impose themselves as ends; they must possess a quality beyond the reach of contrivance: the quality of commanding disinterested service and uncalculating devotion.

III

I should therefore be ready to admit, as a plausible conjecture, that the capacity for altruistic emotions and beliefs is a direct product of organic evolution; an attribute preserved and encouraged, because it is useful to the race, and transmitted from parents to offspring by physiological inheritance. On this theory loyalty in some shape or other is as natural to man as maternal affection is natural to mammals. Doubtless it is more variable in strength, more flexible in direction, more easily smothered by competing egoisms; but the capacity for it is not less innate, and not less necessary in the struggle for existence. But when we ask how far selection has been responsible for the development of high altruistic ideals out of primitive forms of loyalty, we touch on problems of much greater complexity. Evidently there has been a profound moral transformation in the course of ages. None suppose that ethical values are appraised in the twentieth century as they were in the first stone age. But what has caused the change is not so clear.

There are obvious, and, I think, insurmountable difficulties in attributing it to organic selection. Selection is of the fittest—of the fittest to survive. But in what consists this particular kind of fitness? The answer from the biological point of view is quite simple: almost a matter of definition. That race is “fit” which maintains its numbers; and that race is fittest which most increases them. The judge of such “fitness” is not the moralist or the statesman. It is the Registrar-General. So little is “fitness” inseparably attached to excellence, that it would be rash to say that there is any quality, however unattractive, which might not in conceivable circumstances assist survival. High authorities, I believe, hold that at this moment in Britain we have so managed matters that congenital idiots increase faster than any other class of the population. If so, they must be deemed the “fittest” of our countrymen. No doubt this fact, if it be a fact, is an accident of our social system. Legislation has produced this happy adaptation of environment to organism, and legislation might destroy it. The fittest to-day might become the unfittest to-morrow. But this is nothing to the purpose. That part of man’s environment which is due to man does no doubt usually vary more quickly than the part which is due to nature; none the less is it environment in the strictest sense of the word. The theory of selection draws no essential distinction between (say) the secular congelation of a continent in the ice age, and the workings of the English Poor Law in the twentieth century. It is enough that each, while it lasts, favours or discourages particular heritable variations, and modifies the qualities that make for “survival.”

What is more important, however, than the fact that heritable “fitness” may be completely divorced from mental and moral excellence, is the fact that so large a part of man’s mental and moral characteristics are not heritable at all, and cannot therefore be directly due to organic selection. Races may accumulate accomplishments, yet remain organically unchanged. They may learn and they may forget, they may rise from barbarism to culture, and sink back from culture to barbarism, while through all these revolutions the raw material of their humanity varies never a bit. In such cases there can be no question of Natural Selection in the sense in which biologists use the term.

And there are other considerations which suggest that, as development proceeds, the forces of organic selection diminish. While man was in the making we may easily believe that those possessing no congenital instinct for loyalty failed, and that failure involved elimination. In such circumstances, the hereditary instinct would become an inbred characteristic of the race. But in a civilised, or even in a semi-civilised, world, the success of one competitor has rarely involved the extinction of the other—at least by mere slaughter. When extinction has followed defeat, it has been due rather to the gradual effects of disease and hardship, or to other causes more obscure, but not less deadly. The endless struggles between tribes, cities, nations, and races, have in the main been struggles for domination, not for existence. Slavery, not death, has been the penalty of failure; and if domination has produced a change in the inherited type, it is not because the conquered has perished before the conqueror, but because, conquest having brought them together, the two have intermarried. There is thus no close or necessary connection between biological “fitness” and military or political success. The beaten race, whose institutions or culture perish, may be the race which in fact survives; while victors who firmly establish their language, religion, and polity may, after a few centuries, leave scarce a trace behind them of any heritable characteristics which the anthropologist is able to detect.

This observation, however, suggests a new point. Is there not, you may ask, a “struggle for existence” between non-heritable acquirements which faintly resembles the biological struggle between individuals or species? Religious systems, political organisations, speculative creeds, industrial inventions, national policies, scientific generalisations, and (what specially concerns us now) ethical ideals, are in perpetual competition and conflict. Some maintain themselves or expand. These are, by definition, the “fit.” Some wane or perish. These are, by definition, the unfit. Here we find selection, survival, elimination; and, though we see them at work in quite other regions of reality than those explored by the student of organic evolution, the analogy between the two cases is obvious.

But is the analogy more than superficial? Is it relevant to our present argument? Can it explain either the spread of higher moral ideals or their development? Let us consider for a moment some examples of this psychological “struggle for existence.” Take, as a simple case, the competition between rival inventions—between the spinning-jenny and the hand-loom, the breech-loader and the muzzle-loader, pre-Listerian and post-Listerian methods of surgery. Unless the environment be strongly charged with prejudice, ignorance, or sinister interests, the “fittest” in such cases is that which best serves its purpose. Measurable efficiency is the quality which wins. But this supplies us with no useful analogy when we are dealing with ethics. Morality, as I have already insisted, is not an invention designed to serve an external purpose. The “struggle for existence” between higher and lower ethical ideals has no resemblance to the struggle between the spinning-jenny and the hand-loom. It is a struggle between ends, not between means. Efficiency is not in question.

A like observation applies to that quality of our beliefs which might be described as “argumentative plausibility.” This is to abstract theorising what efficiency is to practical invention. It has survival value. Both, of course, are relative terms, whose application varies with circumstances. An invention is only efficient while the commodity it produces is in demand. A theory is only plausible while it hits off the intellectual temper of the day. But if efficiency and plausibility be thus understood, the more efficient invention and the more plausible doctrine will oust their less favoured rivals. They are the “fittest.” But as morality is not a means, so neither is it a conclusion. Whatever be its relation to Reason, reasoning can never determine the essential nature of its contents. Plausibility, therefore, is no more in question than efficiency.

I do not, of course, deny that ethics are always under discussion, or that the basis of moral rules and their application are themes of unending controversy. This is plainly true. But it is also true that there is no argumentative method of shaking any man’s allegiance to an end which he deems intrinsically worthy, except by showing it to be inconsistent with some other end which he (not you) deems more worthy still. Dialectic can bring into clear consciousness the implicit beliefs which underlie action, but it cannot either prove them or refute them. It is as untrue to say that there is no disputing about morals as to say that there is no disputing about tastes. But also it is as true; and the truth, properly understood, is fundamental.

What pass for opposing arguments are really rival appeals; and it is interesting to observe that the appeal which, to the unreflecting, seems the most rational is the appeal to selfishness. I am told6 that on any fine Sunday afternoon in some of our big towns you may find an orator asking why any man should love his country. “What,” he inquires, “does a man get by it? Will national success bring either to himself or to any of his hearers more food, more drink, more amusements? If not, why make personal sacrifices for what will never confer personal advantage?” To this particular question it might be replied (though not always with truth) that the antithesis is a false one, and that on the whole the selfish ideal and the patriotic ideal are both promoted by the same policy of public service. But there is another question of the same type to which no such answer is possible. We have all heard it, either in jest or in earnest. “Why” (it is asked) “should we do anything for posterity, seeing that posterity will do nothing for us?” The implication is infamous, but the statement is true. We cannot extract from posterity an equivalent for the sacrifices we make on its behalf. These are debts that will never be recovered. The unborn cannot be sued; the dead cannot be repaid. But what then? Altruism is not based on egoism; it is not egoism in disguise. The ends to which it points are ends in themselves; and their value is quite independent of argument, neither capable of proof nor requiring it.

In what, then, consists the psychological (as distinguished from the organic) “fitness” of the higher moral ideals? If it cannot be found in their practical efficiency, nor yet in their argumentative plausibility, where shall we seek it?

Sometimes, no doubt, the explanation is to be found in their association with a culture, other elements of which do possess both these kinds of “fitness.” Thus Western morality—or (to be accurate) Western notions of morality—find favour with backward races, because they are associated with Western armaments and Western arts. Again, they may be diffused, perhaps as part of some militant religion, by the power of the sword or by its prestige. They reach new regions in the train of a conqueror, and willingly or unwillingly the conquered accept them.

But these associations are seemingly quite casual. The prestige of Western arts and science may assist the diffusion of Western morals, as it assists the diffusion of Western languages, or Western clothes. Conquests by Mahommedan or Christian States may substitute a higher for a lower ethical creed in this or that region of the world. Such cases, however, leave us still in the realm of accident. The causes thus assigned for the spread of a particular type of ethical ideal have nothing to do with the quality of that type. They would promote bad morals not less effectively than good; as a hose will, with equal ease, scatter dirty water or clean. Moreover, the growth of the higher type in its place of origin is left wholly unexplained. Its “fitness” seems a mere matter of luck due neither to design nor to any natural imitation of design.

The rigour of this conclusion would be little mitigated even if we could connect psychological fitness with some quite non-moral peculiarity habitually associated with the higher morality, but not with the lower. If, for example, the former were found to lead normally to worldly success, its repute would need no further explanation. If, in private life, those endowed with Sir Charles Grandison’s merits usually possessed Sir Charles Grandison’s estate, if, in political or national life, victory and virtue went ever hand in hand, morality might be none the better, but certainly it would be more the fashion. Heaven would be wearied with prayers for an unselfish spirit, uttered by suppliants from purely selfish motives. Saints would become the darlings of society, and the book of Job would be still unwritten.7

I can devise no more extravagant hypothesis. But though, if it were true, the “fitness” of the higher morality might seem to have found an explanation, it is not the explanation we require. It is too external. It gives no account of the appeal which the nobler ends of action make to our judgments of intrinsic value. It suggests the way in which a higher ideal might increase the number of its possessors at the expense of a lower, but not the way in which the higher ideal might itself arise. Indeed, we must go further. Few are the moralists who would maintain that indifference to worldly triumphs was not, on the whole, a bar to their attainment. Few are the biologists who would maintain that care and kindness, lavished on the biologically unfit, will never tend to diminish the relative number of the biologically fit. But, if so, we must agree with Nietzsche in thinking that ethical values have become “denaturalised.” In their primitive forms the products of selection, they have, by a kind of internal momentum, overpassed their primitive purpose. Made by nature for a natural object, they have developed along lines which are certainly independent of selection, perhaps in opposition to it. And though not as remote from their first manifestations as is the Æsthetic of men from the Æsthetic of monkeys, no evolutionary explanation will bridge the interval. If we treat the Sermon on the Mount as a naturalistic product, it is as much an evolutionary accident as Hamlet or the Ninth Symphony.

IV

In what setting, then, are we to place morality so that these “denaturalised” values may be retained? Can we be content to regard the highest loyalties, the most devoted love, the most limitless self-abnegation as the useless excesses of a world-system, which in its efforts to adapt organism to environment has overshot its mark?

I deem it impossible. The naturalistic setting must be expanded into one which shall give the higher ethics an origin congruous with their character. Selection must be treated as an instrument of purpose, not simply as its mimic. Theistic teleology must be substituted for Naturalism. Thus, and thus only, can moral values, as it seems to me, be successfully maintained.

This would not, I suppose, have been denied by Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s predecessors in revolt. On the contrary, they would admit the interdependence of morals and religion, as these are commonly understood in Christendom, and they would condemn both. It would, however, have been vehemently denied by agnostics like Huxley; for Huxley accepted, broadly speaking, Christian ethics, while refusing to accept the Christian, or, indeed, any other form of theology.

In my opinion, this position is not permanently tenable. I do not mean that it involves a logical contradiction. I do mean that it involves an emotional and doctrinal incompatibility of a very fundamental kind. And this is a defect which may be even more fatal than logical contradiction to the stability of ethical beliefs.

For what was Huxley’s position? His condemnation of evolutionary ethics was far more violent than my own. He states categorically that “What is ethically best involves conduct which in all respects is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.” On a biological question I differ from him with misgiving; but, as I have already urged, selection may plausibly be credited with the earlier stages of the noblest virtues. I cannot think that the mother who sacrifices herself for her child, the clansman who dies for his chief, the generation which suffers for the sake of its posterity, are indulging in “conduct which is in all respects opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.” But, whether Huxley be right on this point or I, it is surely impossible for the mass of mankind to maintain, at the cost of much personal loss, an ideal of conduct which science tells us is not merely an evolutionary accident, but an evolutionary mistake; something which was, and is, contrary to the whole trend of the cosmic process which brought us into being, and made us what we are. It requires but a small knowledge of history to show how easily mankind idealises nature; witness such phrases as “the return to nature,” the “state of nature,” “natural rights,” “natural law,” and so forth. Appeals founded upon these notions have proved powerful, even when they ran counter to individualistic selfishness. When the two are in alliance, how can they be resisted? Is it possible for the ordinary man to maintain undimmed his altruistic ideals if he thinks Nature is against them?—unless, indeed he also believes that God is on their side?

V

Here are questions raised to which there is no parallel in the case of Æsthetics. Doubtless differences of Æsthetic judgment abound; but they do not produce difficulties quite matching those due to the collision of incompatible ends; nor is their solution so important. On this subject I must say a few words before bringing this lecture to a conclusion.

Possible collisions between ends are many, for ends themselves are many. And of these ends some are in their very nature irreconcilable;—based on essential differences which reflection only makes more apparent, and moral growth more profound.

Now these collisions are not always between altruism and egoism. Often they are between different forms of altruism—call them, if you please, the positive form and the negative. Enmity, hate, cruelty, tyranny, and all that odious brood whose end and object is the pain and abasement of others are not intrinsically egoistic. Though they be the vilest of all passions, yet they do not necessarily involve any taint of selfish alloy. Often as disinterested as the most devoted love or the most single-minded loyalty, they may demand no smaller sacrifices on the part of those whom they inspire, and the demand may be not less willingly obeyed. It is, perhaps, worth observing that these altruistic ends, the positive and the negative, the benevolent and the malevolent, irreconcilably opposed as they are in moral theory, have often been associated in ethical practice. Family affection has in many half-civilised communities produced the binding custom of family vendetta. Political loyalty, which has blossomed into some of the noblest forms of positive altruism, has also bred cruelty and hatred against those who are outside the pale of the tribe, the state, the party, or the creed. The brightest light has cast the deepest shadows. To torture and enslave, not because it brings profit to the victor, but because it brings pain to the vanquished, has, through long ages, been deemed a fitting sequel to victories born of the most heroic courage and the noblest self-sacrifice; while no small part of moral progress has consisted in expelling this perverted altruism from the accepted ideals of civilised mankind.

Egoism is far more reputable. The agent’s own good, considered in itself, is, what negative altruism can never be, a perfectly legitimate object of endeavour. When, therefore, there is a collision between egoism and positive altruism, problems of real difficulty may arise; the competing ends may both have value, and the need for a reconciliation, practical as well as speculative, of necessity impresses both moralists and legislators.

In practice the evils of this conflict arise largely from the fact that the end which has most worth has too often least power. This is not surprising if the account of ethical evolution, which I have provisionally adopted in this lecture, be near the truth. For the extra-regarding instincts are of later birth than the self-regarding. All animals look after themselves. Only the more developed look also after others. The germ of what, in reflection, becomes egoism is of far earlier growth than the germ of what, in reflection, becomes altruism. Being more primitive, it is more deeply rooted in our nature; and, even when recognised as morally lower, it tends, when there is conflict, to prevail over its rival. “The evil that I would not, that I do.”

Now this result has, as we all know, serious social consequences. Even the least stable society must be organised on some firm framework of custom, rule, and law; and these, in their turn, must find their main support in the willing loyalty of the general community. But, though loyalty is the great essential, it is not sufficient. Legislators, lawyers, moralists, all agree that in the collision between ends—especially between egoistic and altruistic ends—it is not always the highest end as judged by the agent himself, still less the highest end as measured by the standards of the community, which finally prevails. Therefore must law and custom have the support of sanctions: sanctions being nothing else than devices for bringing a lower motive to the aid of a higher, and so producing better conduct, if not8 better morals. Public approval and disapproval, the jailer and the hangman, heaven and hell, are familiar examples. Can they in any true sense effect a reconciliation between discordant ends, and, in particular, between altruism and egoism? I hardly think so. When they are effective they doubtless diminish ethical conflict; but it is by ignoring the intrinsic value of one set of ethical ends. In so far as we are honest because honesty is the best policy, in so far as we do not injure lest we should ourselves be injured, in so far as we benefit that we may be benefited ourselves—just in that proportion we treat altruistic actions merely as the means of attaining egoistic ends. The two competitors are not reconciled, but a working arrangement is reached under which the conduct appropriate to the higher ideal is pursued from motives characteristic of the lower.

Is any truer reconciliation possible? Scarcely, as I think, without religion. I do not suggest that any religious theory gets rid of ethical anomalies, or theoretically lightens by a feather-weight the heavy problem of evil. But I do suggest that in the love of God by the individual soul, the collision of ends for that soul loses all its harshness, and harmony is produced by raising, not lowering, the ethical ideal.

Kant, by a famous feat of speculative audacity, sought to extract a proof of God’s existence from the moral law. In his view the moral law requires us to hold that those who are good will also in the end be happy; and, since without God this expectation cannot be fulfilled, the being of God becomes a postulate of morality. Is this (you may ask), or any variant of this, the argument suggested in the last paragraph? It is not. In Kant’s argument, as I understand it, God was external to morality in the sense that He was not Himself a moral end. It was not our feeling of love and loyalty to Him that was of moment, but His guidance of the world in the interests of virtue and the virtuous. My point is different. I find in the love of God a moral end which reconciles other moral ends, because it includes them. It is not intolerant of desires for our own good. It demands their due subordination, not their complete suppression. It implies loyal service to One who by His essential nature wills the good of all. It requires, therefore, that the good of all shall be an object of our endeavour; and it promises that, in striving for this inclusive end, we shall, in Pauline phrase, be fellow-workers with Him.

I will not further pursue this theme. Its development is plainly inappropriate to these lectures, which are not directly concerned with personal religion. In any case, this portion of my argument, though important, is subsidiary. My main contention rests, not upon the difficulty of harmonising moral ends in a Godless universe, but upon the difficulty of maintaining moral values if moral origins are purely naturalistic. That they never have been so maintained on any large scale is a matter of historic fact. At no time has the mass of mankind treated morals and religion as mutually independent. They have left this to the enlightened; and the enlightened have (as I think) been wrong.

They have been wrong through their omission to face the full results of their own theories. If the most we can say for morality on the causal side is that it is the product of non-moral, and ultimately of material agents, guided up to a certain point by selection, and thereafter left the sport of chance, a sense of humour, if nothing else, should prevent us wasting fine language on the splendour of the moral law and the reverential obedience owed it by mankind. That debt will not long be paid if morality comes to be generally regarded as the causal effect of petty causes; comparable in its lowest manifestations with the appetites and terrors which rule, for their good, the animal creation; in its highest phases no more than a personal accomplishment, to be acquired or neglected at the bidding of individual caprice. More than this is needful if the noblest ideals are not to lose all power of appeal. Ethics must have its roots in the divine; and in the divine it must find its consummation.