BOOKS.
MR. GURNEY'S " TERTIUM QUID."
Mn. GURNEY is a very competent thinker and a very clever writer who never writes without having something to say, nor without saying that something well. His rather odd title expresses, however, both the merits and the defects of his book. He manages, as a rule, to hit upon some view intermediate between that of the most conspicuous controversialists with whom he deals, that is, upon an intellectual tertium quid; and as a fresh view is always interesting, that is one of his merits. At the same time, he gives the impression of aiming at this third • Tertium Quid: Chapters on Various Disputed Questions. By Edmund Gurney, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.
and previously nnexpounded view a little too laboriously. The tertium quiddity of the view to be adopted by himself seems not nnfrequently to be almost essential to his caring to treat any question at all. And hence the view adopted often looks a little strained, cleverly as it is always defended and maintained. For example, in his first essay, on "The Human Ideal," the novelty of the view appears to depend upon the writer's assuming Mr. Frederic Harrison's position so far as regards agnosticism and the rejection of all interference with uniform law (that is, we suppose, the rejection of both miracle and of human free-will), and yet pleading that even if it is impossible to be sure that the present life is not all, it is equally impossible to be sure that it is all, whence he infers that the "religion of humanity" which Mr. Harrison presses upon our ac- ceptance, can never really satisfy even the kind of men to whom Mr. Harrison makes his appeal. Mr. Gurney's conten- tion is that speculation about the future of man after death is natural to man, and is not a habit of mind that need interfere in any way with human duty even as Mr. Harrison understands it, and that this being so, you cannot shut out elements of this kind from the ideal of man, even though you should admit the creed of science as scientific men now expound it. We quite agree with Mr. Gurney, but we cannot say that this specimen of the tertium quid view is a very valuable one. Once let Mr. Harrison's view of the absolute uniformity of universal nature, including, of
course, the human will, be regarded as demonstrated, and practi- cally acted upon, and though we quite admit that the hypothesis of a personal immortality will remain not only admissible, but in all probability an hypothesis of high interest to man, and one which will enter profoundly into the dreams of the race, yet, the resulting human ideal will remain a vast deal nearer to the Positivist's ideal than to that of the Christian or even that of the theistic morality. Mr. Gurney may perhaps admit as much as this, for he says in his essay on Mr. Mallock's query whether "Life is worth living," that it seems to him much easier to believe in immortality without answering the question of the personality of the Creator at all, than to believe in it as a consequence of
the faith in a personal God. Alter pointing out the commonplace difficulties which have been repeated over and over again, involved in holding God to be at once perfectly good and perfectly respon- sible for the universe as we know it, Mr. Gurney proceeds :—
"But if now we turn to the notion of personal continuance after death, we are met by none of these moral and metaphysical difficulties. The notion is in itself perfectly imaginable. We have never once during our lives been conscious of the material movements inside our skulls which accompany thought ; and it is as easy to picture the continuance of our mental operations a hundred years hence as to transport ourselves in imagination to some familiar scene, in doing which we forget all about our bodies and brains. Indeed, the difficulty is the other way ; it is to realise the existence of an association between two things—our psychical life and its cerebral basis—which never have been and never can be simultaneously present in our conscious- ness. However essential we may suppose the association to be, we can easily picture the positive evidence which, conveyed in the ordinary way to our intelligence through our senses, would convince us of the possibility of thought and volition apart from brain ; and our power of doing this is quite irrespective of any assurance we may feel that such evidence will never present itself. The point is that the notion is clear : the act of imagination by which I picture future mental experience is no more hindered or obscured by considerations about brain-substance, than the act of imagination by which, sitting in London, I enjoy the details of a view on the Lago Maggiore is hindered or obscured by the physical difficulties of instantly getting there. And where a notion is clear, the external testimony which would prove the imagined thing to exist is representable to the mind ; whereas in trying to represent to my mind what conclusive external testimony to a personal God would be like, I find myself necessarily as lost as in trying to grasp intellectually some tangible meaning in the term."
And then he further argues that even a mere hope of immortality has an enormous influence in diminishing the burden of the present state. He compares the situation to that of a convict under penal servitude who is told that at the end of the year there will be a pardon granted to a given proportion of the prisoners, and whose mind will therefore dwell during the whole intervening time on his own chance of being liberated, greatly to the attenuation of his sufferings. What Mr. Gurney seems to us to fail to take into account is, that while immortality as the gift of God is an inestimable blessing, immortality with a tremendous uncertainty whether there be a God at all, or, if there be, whether he be wholly good, would become the most fearful of nightmare dreams, under the spell of which it would,
indeed, be very possible to lose one's reason altogether. The thought of an unconscious power that had not created but evolved millions upon millions of immortal beings,—some of them good,
some bad, mostly a mixture of the two, but with the good in them in a great measure dependent on the belief in the rule of good, and therefore liable to be dissipated if that belief should turn out a fiction,—transcends, to our minds, in its horror, and transcends a million times, the belief in annihilation. Immor- tality secured by a perfectly holy power is a belief to live and die upon. But the chance of an immortality with or without such a controlling power, far from immensely relieving the burden of existence, would, to our minds, add fearfully to that burden. Even the mere suggestion that the reasons for expecting immorality are altogether independent of any belief in God, seems to us a ghastly suggestion, which, unless one rejects it with all one's heart and mind, would make life one long and passionate desire,—it could not, of course, be a prayer,—that if there were no God, there might be no immortality.
The essay which we have read with the most interest, though with almost total disagreement, is, however, that on the utili- tarian "ought," in which Mr. Gurney tries to derive the nature of duty from a rational axiom not involving the "categorical imperative" of duty at all. This is, of course, a very bold un- dertaking, and, as it seems to us, a very hopeless one, and we must say that after reading the essay, ingenious as it is, the attempt appears as unsuccessful to us when we look back upon it, as it seemed hopeless when we entered upon it. It is, however, very ingenious :— " The primary fact is, I feel a desire (not only for my but) for your happiness.' This statement is clearly psychological and scientific, announcing no obligation. A similar description applies to the more extended form I feel a desire for the general happiness,' which is just as much an assertion of scientific fact as Sugar gratifies my palate.' For simplicity's sake let me reduce this latter form to I feel a desire for the happiness of x, y, and z, all strangers to me.' I now go on to say desire the happi- ness of x and y more than the equal happiness of z.' But I now claim to bring in the axiomatic ought, and say that I ought so to -desire; the fact which justifies my doing so being simply the fact that a comparison has been instituted, and an alternative presented which needs to be reasonably decided one way or the other You find (experientially) that a pound has weight ; you ought (theoretically and rationally) to hold that two pounds have more weight ; if you wish to avoid absurdity, you ought (practically and rationally) to sink a plummet with the latter rather than the former.' You find (experientially) that the happiness of an individual is an end ; you ought (theoretically and rationally) to hold that the happi- ness of a plurality of individuals is more of an end ; if you wish to avoid absurdity, you ought (practically and rationally) to promote the latter rather than the former.' In the second series, no less than the first, the final imperative is in form hypothetical : but in the second it becomes truly categorical, in so far as every one whose mind acts at all shrinks inevitably from the jar of being consciously absurd."
It appears to us not only possible but easy to drive a coach- and-six, as the lawyers say, through that reasoning. In the first place, no rational man does desire the happiness of two abstract persons more than the happiness of a third abstract person, because he cannot attach any idea to the happiness of an abstraction at all. Fill up a: and y with the names of an individual worm and an individual black- beetle, and z with the name of a Newfoundland dog,—all, let us suppose, strangers to the wisher,—and does any rational person suppose it to be a matter of intuition that he should desire the happiness of a worm and a blackbeetle more than the happiness of a noble dog ? And even if you keep to the race of man, the difficulty is the same. How in the world am I to concede rationally that because I regard the happiness of A as a de- sirable thing, and the happiness of B and C as also desirable things, that I must needs regard the happiness of A and B as more desirable than the happiness of C, until I can form some notion of the comparative intellectual, moral, and spiritual scale of A's, B's, and C's natures ? Indeed, before I can answer the question, I must know something of these persons' moral histories, and of the way in which they have acted upon that sense of obligation in themselves of which Mr. Gurney is trying by his theory to help to explain the origin. If I knew that C was a deserving person, but that A and B were either wholly without deserts, or deserving of blame, I should, without the slightest hesitation, prefer to give happiness to C even though A and B must go without, rather than to give it to A and B if C must go without ; so that instead of Mr. Gurney's dictum explaining the genesis of the "ought," a reasonable man would not grant it at all until he had some means of weighing A's and B's moral claims to happiness against C's.
But, next, even if we could grant Mr. Gurney's axiom,—which seems to us wholly impossible, for we would as soon grant that we ought to prefer conferring two arbitrary and spontaneous gifts, to making a payment which might turn out to be the dis-
charge of a debt, or that we ought to prefer giving two lazy tramps a pot of beer each, to giving one to a hard-working agri- cultural labourer,—there would still be this in the way of con- ceding that because the happiness of two is assumed to be more worthy of an effort to produce, than the happiness of one, any human agent is rationally bound to produce the former rather than the latter. Surely even on Mr. Gurney's hypothesis, it may be said that what will best secure the largest number of indi- vidual creatures' happiness, is for each to look after his own first ; and that if that is not to be the rule, a great deal more happiness will be lost than if it is the rule. If there be no " ought " in the case except the rational calculation that 2 is more than 1, there remains none the less the consideration that even on purely selfish principles there are two to look after the happiness of the two, and only one to look after the happiness of one ; and therefore that, if C happens to be the moral agent himself, C will be best securing the happiness of all by securing his own happiness before he looks after that of the other two,— the same concession, of course, being made to the other two. Nor do we see any possible reply. Once concede that " ought " is not an original element in our mental structure, that it is nothing but arithmetic in another form, and the rejoinder is easy, Of course, I should prefer the happiness of two to the happi- ness of one, if I had no closer relation to the two than to the one ; but if it be otherwise, then it is no more reasonable to say that I ought to prefer the happiness of two to whom I have no special relation, to the happiness of one in whom I am deeply interested, than it is to say that I ought to be more anxious to send troops to two already garrisoned forts, than I ought to be to send them to one fort that is lid garrisoned.' The whole essay, ingenious as it is, seems to us to want soundness from beginning to end.
We are quite incompetent to criticise the musical essays in the second volume; but we will say of the two literary essays in that volume, that they appear to us the least fine-drawn and the most solid in these volumes, and they certainly contain some very admirable literary criticism. Nobody can read Tertium Quid without recognising Mr. Gurney's ability and skill.
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