In this chapter we pass the dividing line between the two great parts of ethics. Thus far we have considered only the facts and manifestations of our moral nature. We have traced the unquestionable phenomena of moral distinctions and obligation in human thinking, feeling, and conviction. We have found the explanation of these phenomena in the action of a faculty or complex of faculties of the human soul, that discerns and affirms these distinctions. We have studied this power and marked its data from its initial perception of the ethical distinction through its further discernments, emotions and judgments to its full assertion of moral responsibility. We have seen its unique authority explained by the supremacy of the law of right and duty which it reveals, and have noted the aggregate of endowments belonging to man's moral agency.

But the mere registry of these moral phenomena is not the full explanation of them. We must examine yet what they imply. From the faculty that perceives we must turn to look at the nature of that which is perceived. We may call the part already traversed the science of ethics, as dealing with and systematizing the facts of experience. The part that remains takes us into the metaphysics of ethics, as exhibiting the abiding verities so perceived and to which we find ourselves so responsibly related—not what is in us, but what is above and over us to which our moral consciousness corresponds. Having visited "the moral consciousness in its own home" and listened to its story of "right" and "duty" and "responsibility," we must go forth and explore the realm that answers to that story. This realm is the objective moral system to which human conduct is to be adjusted.

The precise question of this chapter is whether the distinction of right or wrong, subjectively and psychologically made, is also objectively true and real, marking an actual qualitative difference in the deeds and intentions of men, or is a mere appearance, a fiction and illusion of our own minds. Is the principle of duty a reality for right life, as something belonging to the constitution of the world, or only an idea which our minds have manufactured—only our own thought reflected back upon us, as is our face that seems so real in the mirror?

It would seem that the very asking of this question should be itself a sufficient answer. But doubt has been raised by speculative metaphysics. Hence we must examine it.

1. The doubt comes from misleading representations of the relativity of knowledge. Unquestionably there is a sense in which our knowledge may justly be said to be "relative." It is not absolute, unconditioned or unlimited. We can know only as we have facilities for knowing, and under the conditions and aspects in which objects are presented to them. We are restricted to the modes and degrees of our given capacities. There are probably many realities about us of which we can know nothing. We have no organs for their perception. Even the things that we do know reach off into transcendent relations. Philosophy has long confessed the relative character of our knowledge. Even the percepts of sense-experience, say for instance, of sight or hearing, when analyzed in physical science are found to be, in their objective cause or material conditions, somewhat different from the simple report of the organ of sense—color being the subjective sensation of light-rays on the retina of the eye, and sound the effect of vibrations of the atmosphere upon the sensorium. But in recent times various theories have represented our knowing faculties as largely untrustworthy and their data as invalid in spheres where their functions appear most certain and explicit. Locke gave basis for a movement in this direction by teaching that the immediate objects of the mind are not things, but "ideas." Berkeley's idealism repudiated the sufficiency of sense-perception to prove the objective existence of the material world. Hume questioned the substantial existence of both matter and mind. In the view of Kant human knowledge reaches only to "phenomena," the appearance of things, while the things as they are "in themselves" can not be known. The mind projects and imposes its own subjective forms of thought upon the universe. Sir Wm. Hamilton, Dean Mansel, J.S. Mill, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer have developed theories, variously modified but agreeing in this, that even our necessary forms of rational perception are not to be held as standing for more than relative truth, i. e. subjective impressions in our minds in the presence of environment. Doubt is cast upon the point whether what is true to our necessary or actual thought is also really true for the objective world.

The teaching will be best understood by several quotations. Sir Wm. Hamilton, though a natural realist, influenced by the speculations of Kant, while acknowledging an underlying reality for phenomena, taught that we can never know them except "under modifications determined by our own faculties."33

J. S. Mill, going further, says: "Our knowledge of objects, and even our fancies about objects, consist in nothing but the sensations they excite, or which we imagine them exciting in ourselves.... This knowledge is merely phenomenal.... The object is known to us only in one special relation, namely, as that which produces, or is capable of producing certain impressions on our senses; and all that we really know is these impressions."34

Herbert Spencer asserts the relativity of all knowledge, and says: "Clearly as we seem to know it, our apparent knowledge proves on examination to be utterly irreconcilable with itself. Ultimate religious ideas and ultimate scientific ideas, alike turn out to be merely symbols of the actual, not cognitions of it."35 Plainly these theories do not make our knowledge a genuine apprehension of reality, but merely internal and unreliable mental states. It is only a subjective phenomenon. We cannot know that it stands for the real truth of things. Rather, we are told, it does not. It is but an effect within the mind, determined, it may be, by things without, but modified, if not created, by the constitution and action of the mind itself. The receiving mind, like the receiving lens, determines the shape and color of the apprehended phenomenon. If there be any reality behind it and correspondent to it, we can never assure ourselves of it. The theory thoroughly discredits the trustworthiness of our faculties, both of sense-perception and of reason. They do not report the things of the world as they really are, but merely as they affect us. Our necessary conceptions, such as time, space, beauty, cause, moral law, cannot be proved to be anything else than phenomena within us. The conclusion is well stated in the language of Mr. Grote in his explanation of the views of the Greek sophists: "As things appear to me, so they are to me; as they appear to you, so they are to you."36 It is altogether a subjective matter. We can have only a relative morality—not conformed to an objective and universal standard, but to the particular impressions we find within us.

Evidently this doctrine of relativity lands us in universal intellectual skepticism. It gives us agnosticism. Nothing is sure in a single department of knowledge. If our minds are forever presenting to us internal "forms of thought" that stand not really for the "forms of being" in the real world, if they are actually creating or painting for us what we seem to perceive and what appear to be realities objective to our faculties and existing independently of them, there is no possibility of reaching truth of any kind. But in the domain of morals this theory would prove peculiarly destructive. If the qualities of right and wrong be not in very truth real, if they be not verities of conduct in the constituted relations of human life, if the ideas answer not to a true distinction set before us for our recognition and conformity, then virtue is a dream, obligation an illusion, and conscience a fraud.

Over against this false we must place the true conception of the relativity of knowledge. We must hold, as the spontaneous sense of mankind and the best sustained psychology and philosophy of the centuries affirm, that our cognitive powers are genuine faculties for discerning the truth of things, that, while not infallible nor unlimited, they give us substantially correct knowledge, as far as it goes, of the realities of the natural and moral world in which we are placed. These powers of intelligence are not set to act delusively and imprison us in phantasmagoria or a factitious system false to that which actually exists. The correct theory, the only one that is really rational and can be lived out, must ever be that, as far as we have faculties to know at all and use them loyally, we know what is and because it is. The true reason of our knowing is the real existence of knowable realities.37 Instead of knowing only appearances, we know the very things that appear—not perfectly, or without possibility of mistake, but yet truly. The end of knowledge is not to give us a phantasmagorical world for endless illusion, but the actual world, with its divine constitution and movement, in which we are to live, and with whose facts and laws, physical and moral, we are to harmonize our lives.

2. The false conception of the relativity of knowledge being thus set aside, and the psychological law, that the correlate of knowing is reality, being recognized, we are prepared to see the truth on the point of inquiry in this chapter, as follows:

(1) The qualities of right and wrong, involved in the ethical distinction, are not merely subjective impressions or appearances, imposed on conduct by the human mind, but are objective, belonging to the external world of relations and action, real for apprehension and conformity. They are without us as well as within us. And they come within us because they are realities without us for us to know and observe. The moral qualities, as real features of required behavior of free beings in their given relations to each other, belong to the constitution of the world as well as to the faculties of the human mind. They are real qualities of action and motives to action whether men perceive or take note of them or not. As truly as the starry sky is above us, before we open our eyes to see it, so the principle of righteousness is established for life before we enter it or our faculties awake to discover it. The principle of moral law is framed into the constitution of the world and human life. It is back of the discernment of it, imbedded in the demand which the constituted relations of nature make for proper behavior of free, intelligent beings. The law of duty is fixed in these relations. It abides there to be recognized and fulfilled by all beings endowed with moral perception and freedom. Moral law is a profounder and broader thing than a simple uncertain mental fiction in personal thinking. It belongs to the immense, almost infinite realm of creature inter-relations of the universe.

The reality, however, is not to be thought of as a material entity or substantive essence, but solely as a quality of the intentions and conduct demanded by and in the relations sustained by men and other moral beings. It is the reality of an established obligation. It belongs to character.

The right, as moral law, has ever been venerated as something supersensible, absolute, and divine. The early Egyptian teaching represented its home as in Deity. Buddhistic philosophy conceives of it as an imperishable dominion over gods and men. Christianity has enforced it as based in the very nature of God, and as a principle of order ordained for the whole universe of personal life and behavior. Not more real are the solid rocks of the mountain or the strong waves of the sea. Not more real for the material realm is the law of gravitation than is the law of ethical righteousness for the spiritual realm, the realm of free conduct. And the latter is superior and of higher value than the former. This truth speaks in the old apothegm: "fiat justitia, ruat coelum."

(2) The qualities of right and wrong in conduct are not dependent on the peculiar mental organization or temperament of the race. This results from the objectivity of the law of obligation. Only the perception of them is so dependent, while the moral qualities are abidingly real for all beings high enough in the scale of being to discern them. Just as we must believe that the sun exists as an extended body independently of our eyes or minds, and would have to be so apprehended by any inhabitant of Neptune or Jupiter endowed with capacity to perceive it as it is, so we must believe that truth and love and kindness are right, and falsehood, injustice, malignity and ingratitude are wrong, not as made so by our peculiar personal constitution, but per se, in any inhabited world of the stellar heavens; and that the only subjective condition for their so appearing is the possession of the faculty for perception of moral quality.

There may, indeed, be a doubt among finite moral agents, with limited knowledge, how far a certain thing may be true or false, kind or malignant, just or unjust, but the quality of truth or falsehood, kindness or malignity, justice or injustice being perceived in it, it is impossible that such truth, kindness and justice should not be judged right and their opposites wrong. The ethical distinction, objectively viewed, is an ethical difference, perceived as such, if perceived at all.

(3) The moral distinctions, with the moral qualities involved, being thus objective, and not the product of a special temporary organization of the percipient, are immutable and eternal. This is involved in the very nature of the qualities themselves. By eternal necessity of what they are, justice and love must be unchangeably and forever right. They are not thus right because we think or feel them so, but we think and feel them so because they are so, because of the immutable and enduring nature of justice and love themselves. They hold and carry the kind of motive and action that ought to prevail in the relations of intelligent personal life, everywhere and in all time. So malignity, injustice, falsehood, and cruelty are wrong by the very nature of the qualities that make and mark them; and the personal intentions and conduct that hold them can never be right any more than a thing can be itself and yet other than itself.

Men's judgments as to whether particular conduct is fair or just or kind or honest, may change and do change. Different nations and ages class certain acts and ways of men very differently. But these are only judgments of application, and so only secondary ethical judgments. This has already been pointed out in Chap. IV, pp. 67–68. They depend on the degree to which the moral qualities of the conduct may be discerned amid the complicated relations and obscurities that often perplex a right understanding of it. But while men change their judgments of the justice, benevolence, or truth of particular forms of behavior, they do not change their judgments that justice, love and truth are right—necessarily and immutably so. The behests of duty are imbedded in the necessary relations of intelligent free beings. Virtue is no shifting subjective illusion, shaped by our inner mental mould. No change of the percipient's intellectual constitution can change the realities of right and wrong. No removal from world to world can change them. No distant age in eternity can reverse them, and discover virtue to be wrong or sin right, or either as without moral quality. The distinction is eternal, and no future can arrest our responsibility with respect to it. God calls us to identify ourselves with what is right and shun all wrong, as realities with which we stand in immutable, unending relation, for good or evil.

3. The truth thus reached on this point is one of exceeding importance. It brings to view the grandeur of the moral law. It shows this law to be truly transcendental, belonging not to transient material forms or physiological structure, nor to special psychical constitutions of men or races, nor organized instinct, nor subjective mental illusion, nor peculiar hereditary experience, nor transformed sense of realized or supposed utility, nor any local adventitious circumstances and training, but to the supreme super-sensible realm of universal and necessary ideas and truth, in which the universe of rational thought and divine order lives and moves and has its being and welfare. In this truth, therefore, the moral law begins to appear in its true greatness and value, in its universal dominion and infinite importance. It comes down upon us with a mighty impression. It thrills us into enthusiasm. As long as the moral idea is accounted a mere product of environment and biological evolution or experienced utility, a blind hereditary instinct, an organized impulse, a fiction of education, or a temporary behest of individual or racial organization, it is a thing of but little dignity and of limited moment. It is worthy of no more reverence than a form of protoplasm or a passing mental impression. Not reflecting an objective reality of universal, supreme and permanent validity, but only a special phenomenon of the human organization and this transient life, it can inspire but small respect. Only in the truth here reached does the authority of the moral law stand out in its majesty and illimitable range and sweep. Only in it can that law be rightly effective for the good conduct of men and the safe formation of character in the mould of immortal excellence.

4. The recognition of the objective validity of the moral distinctions marks one of the chief dividing lines between true and false theories of moral philosophy. A failure to recognize this point not only leaves the point itself a blank, but usually means error both in the conception of the nature and function of conscience and of the grounds and claims of right and virtue. With respect to conscience the failure reduces it from a power of true discernment of what is, into an instinct acting blindly or a make-believe of obligation through judgments indistinguishable from those of utility, pleasure or advantage, or into a passing product of racial experience or education. So instead of explaining the unique authority of the conscience it undermine and dissolves that authority into non-moral elements. Obligation itself becomes but a synonym for an impulse toward certain forms of pleasure or advantage. As to the grounds and claims of right, these are thus caused to disappear in the non-moral elements into which right and wrong are dissolved. The ethical distinctions, the great moral phenomena of the ages, with all the interests of practical morality, instead of being explained and justified, are explained away. If, therefore, ethical theory is to exhibit the metaphysical validity of the moral consciousness of men, no view can reasonably be regarded as correct that dissipates the very reality which the conscience assumes to see and without which the moral judgments lose their rational foundations. For if the objective and transcendent character of the ethical distinction be denied, morality necessarily drops down into, at best, a temporary biological provision for the utilities of this ephemeral life, or, at worst, into a deep fraud of our faculties, estopping the use of our freedom by a phantom bugbear of moral distinctions. If, therefore, virtue is not to be disrobed of its honor, if righteousness is not to be cast down from the supreme place which the reason of mankind has ever accorded it, if the idea of duty is not to be belittled, invalidated and overthrown, ethical theory must recognize and emphasize the objective and permanent reality of the moral law as an unchanging law of obligation and responsibility for the conduct of free agents. Otherwise the so-called ethical theory is not a theory of the ethical reality, but one that sinks the supposed ethical reality into non-moral elements and illusion. To vindicate the authority of conscience, the immutable foundations of righteousness must be maintained, not dissolved.

5. The relation of this truth to the wide-spread hypothesis of the evolutionary origin of man dare not be ignored at this place. Frank admission has already been made that this hypothesis, as setting forth a mere mode of creation by God, does not appear to be necessarily inconsistent with the existence of conscience. Any mode that can produce a faculty of mental power capable of perceiving or making the ethical distinction, suffices on that point—though grave difficulties stand in the way of accounting for it under any evolutionist explanation thus far given. But how is it with respect to the supersensible reality of the moral law, as the reality perceived by the conscience? Can evolution account for it, or even allow any place for it?

To these questions, the answer must be, first, that evolution, in the theistic conception, if supposed capable of developing the faculty of conscience, must also be regarded as consistent with existence and place of the moral law. The infinite intelligence and purpose back of the creative evolution, and through it originating a power for ethical perception, must be conceded to be equally capable, in that method of forming the universe, of establishing the principle and law of duty in the relations in which rational and self-determining creatures are to live. Provided only that a rational first cause be assumed and the plan of the world be viewed as laid in aims of divine order, a moral system as well as moral agents may, surely, be created by slow advance of life no less completely than by instantaneous fiat of power. The theistic theory of evolution, assuming the cosmic system to be grounded in the will and power of God and filled with his ever-working presence does not necessarily bring any trouble into the question of fixed moral law. The moral law, resting in the same divine source whence arise the laws that are revealed in physical nature, comes into play as soon as moral agents are created in relations which call for right sentiments and conduct. The rational purpose which ordained physical laws, in necessity, for material order, ordains moral law for order of personal agents acting in freedom. The question, therefore, with respect to this kind of evolution need not embarrass the question of the reality of immutable moral law—at least when the theory of evolution is so shaped as to give its fundamental assumptions full and consistent place and force.

But, secondly, on the other hand, answer must be made, that under no theory of atheistic and merely materialistic and naturalistic evolution can the objective existence of moral law be logically or rationally maintained. This kind of evolutionism is not only helpless before the task of accounting for it, but logically excludes the possibility of it. For any theory that presents the cosmos as a pure naturalism of matter, or is agnostic as to an intelligent author of nature, furnishes no realm or materials for moral law. This becomes evident, beyond doubt, from the following considerations:

(1) According to the hypothesis "the potency of all things" is in matter with its energy and modes of motion. This is the "all and the one" t? p?? ?a? ?? ([Greek: to pan kai hen]) of the universe, at once the only essence and ground of its existence and ongoing. No intelligent first cause is assumed, no creative reason to begin or determine the evolution. There is no ordering mind or purpose in it—for its origin, in the process, or as to its end. It is avowedly a purely mechanical theory of the universe—matter and force acting in self-contained energy without design. All rational, purposive, or teleological idea is wanting. Now it is evident that this pure mechanism of matter and energy must be not only without any moral element whatever, but necessarily incapable of evolving the moral. It is an infinite and endless automatism. Though it should run on Æon after Æon it is still only a mechanism of atoms in eternally unfree material movement. The unmoral elements can never produce moral law; and, ex hypothesi, there is no intelligent free moral being behind or in the movement to create or establish moral law through it.

(2) Further, this form of evolutionism, returning, as it does, to the ancient notion of the universe as a perpetual flux, even if imagined to be able to evolve the moral out of non-moral elements, could present no permanent and stable ethical law. In such evolution, without beginning and without end, all things are only a continual becoming, "an eternal process moving on." There is and can be nothing fixed, whether of forms or relations, but only a shifting, necessitated, everlasting scene of aimless beginnings and disappearances. Could we even conceive—which we cannot, because the concept is possible only in connection with purpose and ideal order—that the ethical "ought" should momentarily appear, it would soon be broken up and passed by, like the bubble on a stream,

"A moment here, then gone forever."

Manifestly, this perpetual motion, forever changing and superseding its own forms and products, cannot be considered father to even a rational stable conscience, much less a sure abiding moral law for its steady recognition and eternally reverent regard. "The child of contingency remains contingent." And so the advocates of this empirical, materialistic, and atheistic evolutionism consistently maintain that there is no absolute moral law, and that what seems so is only shifting hereditary judgments generated by experience and utility or some instinct formed by biological processes.

(3) But further. In this merely naturalistic evolution all the essential presuppositions of moral law are wanting and excluded. This is easily seen. (a) It has already been pointed out that the action of conscience is theistic, its authority arising from its perception of a law of duty imposed on it and representing a moral law-giver (See Chap. IV, pp. 79–80; Chap. V, pp. 87–88). So moral law, as a rule of ethical righteousness, is necessarily theistic. It is thinkable only as a requirement made by rational intelligence for fitting conduct among personal agents. It rests in a world-system of rational ends and ideal requirements. The standard is established by intelligence. Should it be objected, that we may regard the standard as made by the mind of men only, and altogether a human and subjective thing, it is enough to remind the reader that according to the hypothesis, there is no human mind as a different entity from matter, the only "mentality" left being merely particular effects of molecular or brain activity, and therefore only successive passive products, simply revealing what, if it exists at all, must exist as the molecular matter behind them. The autocratic moral law which the conscience finds, but does not make, is conceivable therefore, only as part of intelligent ordering in a rational world-system. But according to the hypothesis no moral reason has framed or regulates the order of the physical forces that create the relations of life. (b) Moral law, with responsibility, is inconceivable except in connection with personal freedom in the subject of it. But in this kind of evolutionism, everything is reduced to the mechanism of matter; and its supporters agree that our personal freedom is an illusion. There can be no more morality in the thoughts, aims and conduct of men than in the digestion of food or the growth and decay of a tree.

While, therefore, theistic evolution does not present anything inconsistent with the reality and recognition of moral law, every hypothesis which exhibits the world, in its ground and processes, as the mere mechanism of material forces, stands in logical and irreconcilable antagonism. This antagonism, however, is not to be taken as overthrowing or even weakening the truth set forth in this chapter. Rather, the antagonistic hypothesis, which fails in so many other respects to meet the necessities of a rational or scientific account of the phenomena of the universe, discredits itself still further by its incongruity on this great point.