MR. TOLLEMACHE ON THE RIGHT TO DIE.
MR. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE has written a paper in the Fortnightly of this month on what the school to which he belongs call, by a wise euphemism, Euthanasia,'—a paper of which we would say, that while it is able enough in relation to all the really clear considerations of which it treats, it shows that total indifference to feelings and instincts the roots of which are half hidden from our own consciousness, which is the great vice of the purely rationalistic school. Mr. Tollemache wants to defend the right of suicide, and the right to terminate also the sufferings of others, for it appears to be quite evident, though we do not think it is expressly stated in Mr. Tolle- macho's article, that much the strongest arguments to be alleged for putting an end to human sufferings apply to cases where you cannot by any possibility have the consent of the sufferer to that course,—cases of lingering paralysis, where the power of commu- nication between the patient and the outer world is quite cut off, and yet the vegetable functions of the body appear to go on without any hope of the return of the intel- ligent powers. Whether Mr. Tollemache demands the right to despatch others as well as the right to despatch ourselves, we cannot say ; but his argument requires it, and requires it in a much higher degree. You cannot say what a man who has all his powers of thought left to him may not gain by continued life. He has not, at least as yet, lost that which may make even suffering a blessing. Bat if we are to judge solely by what we see,—and that is what Mr. Tollemache and his school always maintain that it is our duty to judge by,—the paralytic who can digest food, but cannot utter a word or give a sign of intelli- gence, is of all others the person to whom the doctrine of this paper applies most strongly ; and yet to him it must be applied without even the possibility of getting his own consent. We only mention this because what Mr. Tollemache calls, by a grim and not very happy joke, "the new cure for incurables," has certainly no claim to be represented as sanctioning only the power of sufferers to take their own destinies into theirown hands. It sanctions, on far stronger grounds, the right of bystanders to take the destinies of sufferers who have lost all chance of declaring their own wish as to them- selves, into their hands. And this it is important to remember at the outset, for in point of fact, one of the greatest dangers of the line of argument Mr. Tollemache adopts, is, that if we gave way to it, and it ever became the adopted standard of social duty, it would radically change the moral atti- tude of society towards all sufferers from what appear to be hopeless diseases, and begin to make people eager for that stage of their sufferings at which it might be legitimate to ask whether their lives were not a mere burden to them, and they should not be put out of the way. Indeed, the gravest of the merely rational objections we can bring against Mr. Tollemache is that the ideas of which he is the advocate would plainly lead to two entirely new phases of feeling,— impatience of hopeless suffering instead of tenderness towards it, where there was any legal difficulty in the way of getting rid of it by the proposed new law,—and farther, a disposition to regard people as 'selfish' who continued burdens upon others with- out any near and clear chance of the complete restoration of their own powers. Suppose it were permitted, as Mr. Tollemache wishes, that on receiving the testimony of two or three physicians that a man's case is hopeless, he might, if he chose, elect to die, and that popular feeling came to sanction that choice as the right choice ; what can be clearer than that, in the absence of any relations to whom each patients were dear, and who took pleasure therefore in prolonging their life, there would spring up a tone of habitual displeasure and irritation towards all who chose to go on giving unnecessary trouble to the world, and that very soon the standard of "unnecessary" trouble would begin inevitably to become lower and lower, so that all the organised charity which now expresses itself in our Hospital system would gradually suffer "a sea-change" into something by no means "rich or strange,"—a sort of moral pressure on poor invalids with anything like a prospect of long-continued helplessness to demand the right of ridding the world of them- selves? We say that it is in this reflex effect of the new code of feeling upon our thoughts of disease, in the transforma- tion it would certainly make of pure pity into impatience and something like reproachful displeasure, that the extreme danger of arguing out this sort of question on the superficial considera-
■ tions of the balance of pain and pleasure for each individual case, is best seen.
But we do not put the argument on that ground chiefly. We regard the considerations we have suggested, weighty as we believe they are, as the mere indices of feelings going far deeper, and whose real roots in our nature it is impossible to trace, but which are not on that account the lees worthy of honour. The whole defence of suicide, and of this happy or unhappy "despatch," which seems to belts complement, seats on the doctrine that we are free masters of our own existence, and have the full right to say that as soon as the prospect of living begins to be a prospect of mere pain, we may use the power we certainly have of ceasing to live. Mr. Tollemache argues that if we are under any passive obedience to live, in spite of the fact that we have the remedy in our own hands of ceasing to live at any moment, it is quite as reasonable to say that we are under passive obedience to bear pain, though we have the means at hand (chloroform or other safer sedatives) of soothing or stopping the pain,—in short, that there is no human evil to which the same argument might not apply. For instance, if we walk out and rain comes on, it might be argued equally, he says, that we were under an obligation of passive obedience to get wet, whereas we use our own discretion, and put up umbrellas. This is the sort of argument that makes us feel how very super- ficial is Mr. Tollemache's theory of duty. Is it not perfectly obvious that we have the full means of weighing the opposite alternatives in these cases, and know at least as much of one of them as of the other ? We know what will result from our keeping dry at least as well as we know what will result from our getting wet. We know, perhaps, but little of the possible indirect consequences of either result, but we know as much of one as of the other, and choose that which is best in keeping both with our wishes and with our duties. So with regard to medical remedies for pain ; we know, or our doctors know, as much of one alternative as of the other, and can choose whichever on the whole is most consistent with our wishes and aims in life. But is it possible to say we know what we choose in choosing death? On the contrary, it is the one thing which we certainly do not know ; nay, we all,— probably even Mr. Tollemache and Mr. Williams and their school, —have a profound doubt whether we are at liberty to choose it at all. The advocates of suicide compare a perfectly unknown alternative,—for of course we are assuming, what it is necessary to assume for the sake of the argument, that there is no known divine law against suicide,—with a known ; the only motive being repulsion to what they are bearing here, and though admitting themselves to be without knowledge of what they seek there. Now it is perfectly true, as Mr. Tollemache argues, that those who feel most horror of suicide are often those who feel most contempt for death, wherever the cause in which they risk death is one of duty. Doubtless, but that is the precise element which makes the difference. Set a duty before a man in the course of which he risks death, be he a ship's captain, like the captain of the Northfleet, or a heroic fireman, or a soldier, or a doctor in time of plague, and then he is choosing not death, but the duty which brings him face to face with death. He is choosing a known obligation, not an escape from a known misery into the unknown. The horror felt of suicide is due to the fact that you are not nerved by the sense of obligation. Mr. Tollemache appears to think that the mere disinterested desire to relieve your fellow-creatures and friends of very painful and trouble- some duties unsweetened by hope that they can do you any good, almost brings up the act to the level of a duty. But he cannot argue this without holding that at any moment of a man's life the same duty may possibly lie upon him. If a man were quite well, but were obviously the cause of more pain than pleasure to others and to himself,—as many doubt- less are,—and had not, whether from an unhappy disposition or any other cause, the hope of altering himself in this respect, he woula be just as much bound to commit suicide as hi is if he be suffering from a hopeless disease. And this seems to us a reductio ad absurdum of the whole principle. The truth is, that life itself, like many of the conditions of living, is not a matter of the value of which we have any power or right to form _a judgment. We do not know with what to compare it ; we do not know the other term in the comparison ; we are in hands higher than our own, and are bound to remain in them. If we begin to appre- ciate for ourselves the value of life, we may just as well begin to appreciate for ourselves the value of parents, and claim the right to emancipate ourselves from all the moral claims of the filial relation on our own estimate of its importance. The truth is, we do not and cannot
■
know with what to compare any conditions of being of which it is impossible to strip ourselves in imagination for the purposes of the comparison. A child is not com- petetat to say what it would be without its parents, though it may feel some of the frets of the filial relation very painfully. These ties run too deep into its unconscious nature to be weighed by it in the balance ; and so precisely it is with the condition of life itself. The sufferer knows the agony of the conditions under which he lives, but he does notand cannot know when he chooses death with what to compare that agony ; and hence, we say, the very legitimate dread and awe with which he shrinks from what is called taking his life in his hand, and throwing it away. A man takes his life in his hand, with a great duty upon him, without any such hesita- tion, and very rightly ; he does then know what he chooses, and he does know that duty is more sacred than life, that life is given for the sake of duty. But even Mr. Tollemache hardly ventures to talk of the duty of suicide ; and till he does, we trust he will not be able to remove by the ruthless sweep of his rather irreverent rationalistic brush the sort of awful scruples which even Shakespeare put into the mouth of the not too scrupulous Prince of Denmark, when contemplating the expedient of relieving himself of a lot which he felt too hard for him, and of relieving a world which was "out of joint" of one who was not strong enough to set it right. We have kept as far as possible on Mr. Tollemache's own ground, in this criticism. We need hardly say that those who hold with us that one of the principal pur- poses of life is the discipline it yields, must believe that, even in the idiotic and paralytic, much more in the merely suffering life, there is some hidden experience going on which justifies the infliction of so much misery. Bat this is a faith of which we can give no evidence except that which would be evidence of the rule of God. We have desired to confine ourselves to reasons which might have weight even with Mr. Tollemache.
Previous page
