2 FEBRUARY 1867, Page 17

TWO INAUGURAL LECTURES ON ETHICS.*

THESE two fine introductory lectures on Ethics, in which the young commencing Professor at Glasgow compares, without dis- credit to himself, with the veteran philosopher and theologian who, after a long life of noble and eager pursuit of the highest truth, has just been welcomed as a teacher into the University of Cambridge, suggest to us in the first instance anything but agreeable COM- pans°. ns befA4een the freedom with which the noblest speculative- inquiries are prosecuted in Cambridge and in Scotland, and the 1. • Casuistry, Moral Philosophy. and Moral Theology. An Inaugural Lecture delivered in the Senate House, Cambridge, on Tueadv, uecember 4, little. By F. D. Maurice, M.A. London: Macmillan. 1665. 2. Ethical Philosophy. An Introductory Lecture delivered in the Common Hall of Glasgow College, on November 6, 1866. By Edward Caird, B.A. Edinburgh: Edmonton and Douglas; London: Elamilton and Adams. 1416.

artificial restrictions to which they are subjected in what is some- to neglect, but which, if it desires to remain truly liberal, it should times supposed to be the most liberal of our academical institutions, never cease to teach. For our parts, we feel no doubt that Pro- University College, London. The theological aspects of ethics fessor Maurice and Professor Caird are right, and that any Uni- which are regarded here as all but disqualifying moral philosophy versity which begins by discouraging the study of moral obliga- for any place among the branches of liberal culture at all, are tion, will end by underrating the value of moral and (therefore) considered both in Glasgow and Cambridge as giving to ethics political liberty.

not only their intellectual dignity, but their special fitness as a Both Mr. Maurice and Mr. Caird, again, widely different as are liberal study, that is, as a study which tends to liberate the mind their lines of thought, agreein this,—that the ethical creeds which from all sorts of bondage and superstitions, political and personal. start from the most apparently humble and earthly point of view, Upon this point emphatically both Professor Maurice and Professor are precisely those which, by curtailing the true proportions of Caird, in lectures in other respects widely dissimilar in method, human duty, and laying too much stress on outward circumstances, coincide and concur. They areboth most eager in the assertion that drive their disciples into the most dangerous, violent, and revolu- the profoundest feeling of duty has given rise to the deepest feeling tionary attitudes of mind towards the moral and social constitu- of liberty,—that liberty would have been lost over and over again tion under which they live. Thus, Mr. Maurice in discussing but for that sense of divine duties to be fulfilled which has corn- Paley's treatment of the law of honour,' shows that by emptying palled men to claim the rights which are the correlatives of these honour of its deepest element, of all that gives it a real claim on duties. Thus Professor Caird says, in one of the noblest pas- the conscience, Paley has almost compelled himself to handle con- sages of his lecture,—one which will remind oar readers of the main temptuously also, and in the spirit of a moral revolutionist, the idea in S. Mazzini's letter on the suffrage printed in our columns ' law of the land' :-

last week :— " ' The law of honour is a system of rules constructed by people of "This teaching of Christianity led to two things, a higher notion of fashion, and calculated to facilitate their intercourse with each other, and

man's rights, and a higher notion of his duties—thoughts accidentally for no other purpose. Consequently, nothing is adverted to by the law separated, but never without distortion both of the one and of the other. of honour but what tends to incommode this intercourse.' Assuming this maxim, he proceeds very courageonsly, very usefully, to show that Kant perhaps has the merit of bringing these two conceptions for the idea of first time face to face, and a code permitted 'profaneness, cruelty to servants, rigorous treat- freedom from the baser meat of tenants and other dependents, injuries done to tradesmen by ilser ingredients that had gathered around thereby clearing the great modem und it. Christianity, it has been said, had expanded the finite ideal of ancient insolvency or delay of payment &o. Nothing, I think, can be better -ethics into an infinite law of duty. Kant adopts this view in the full extent, and draws one consequence from it. In order to discharge the infinite task which the moral law sets before him, man must be gifted refer were the result of obedience to the law of honour, not of the moat with an unconditioned freedom. What the law of our being commands gross and flagrant departure from it. That it cannot enforce its decrees

because he has this moral destiny to fulfil. In this utterance Kant gave

violence to troth, and a great injury to moral practice. Paley shows the interpretation to that long struggle for freedom which makes up modern danger of the course which he has followed in this instance by his feeble

and scarcely respectful treatment of what he calls the law of the land;' history. Luther, when he set individual faith against Church authority and tradition, uttered the principle of a greater emancipation than he himself knew—the emancipation of man's life and soul from external ll bondage—the breaking of every chain of mind as of body. All modern glishmen. '

life is the corollary of this truth; all modern culture seems to consist And Mr. Caird, in a passage of great truth and force on the in expelling from the mind-what is discordant with it ; all modern liters- excesses of the French Revolution, traces them ultimately to the tare is its expression. Yet Luther was far from uttering it in its universality : he gave it merely a theological application. It was with him a description of personal religion, rather than a general law of life. rending and breaking of everything that seemed like an external It had still a self-defensive rather than an aggressive attitude : it sought bond, everything that chafed the spirit of man,—nay, to a pas- not to bring the world under its dominion, but to save the soul of man sionate superstition, that if, when all such external chains were from the dominion of the world. But it is the universal law that a principle must begin with the inner life and work outward, and what is spoken by the still small voice of religion in one generation is heard in there must be a treacherous conspiracy lurking somewhere, thunder in the next. What first came as a religious reformation came which showed its evil influence by poisoning the liberty to obtain again as a political revolution. What the German Reformation whis- which such vast sacrifices had been made :— pared in the ear the French Revolution shouted on the house-top--that man would be free. It was the same demand for freedom, though "The freedom, for which Rousseau longed, was too much in danger speaking in another language, and mingled with many jarring notes. of being mistaken for an infinite caprice, the right he claimed for the The spirit of thetimes, it has been said, like the Ghost in Hamlet, is a right of self-will and passion. Man has no more rights than the other mole that works underground, and is long in coming to the surface. animals, except in so far as he has a moral life to realize, a duty to fill- And so it was with this Protestant principle. It appeared in many and fil which they have not : and when the nature of man is viewed only as diverse forms, between which, to the outward eye, there was little an irresistible title .to the satisfaction of his desires, it can produce no- similitude,—now as a claim for private judgment, now as a protest thing but anarchy and destruction. This is the secret of the tragedy of against privileges, now as a theory of the 'rights of man' ; but it first the French Revolution—of its greatness and its failure. That revolu- unveiled its divinity and manifested its true nature in the philosophy tion was not merely a desire to get rid of a practical grievance, which of Kant. I say that in the philosophy of Kant the demand for freedom, had grown intolerable. Beneath and beyond this, there was a feeling for rights of man, or whatever else it might call itself, first manifested of deeper than outward slavery—the desire of a higher than outward its true nature, because in that philosophy the claim of right was based freedom. Men felt in themselves the possibility of an infinite happiness, on the idea of duty." which somehow was kept from them, and they were led to attribute And Mr. Maurice, in comparing the false casuistry of the abstract their loss to the same cause that produced their outward and material systematizers of cut-and-dried formulae —the Jesuitic casuistry,— tradition, which the oppression of many generations has piled upon our with what he considers the true casuistry, namely, the full ex- heads,' so it seemed natural to say, we should at once step forth into position of all the conflicting claims made on every man's inward the enjoyment of our liberty. Get rid of this or that oppressive class, life and will, by the various solicitations of opposite reasons, motives, framework of law and government, the actual organization of life, and and affections, speaks in exactly the same strain :— we will be at once and for ever free.' Vague generalities, that usually "The Schoolmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seemed to are left to the theorist, came forth into the market-place, and possessed themselves, and to their disciples, most accomplished Casuists. For with an infinite passion masses of men who might have seemed confined they set ao statements one against the other: they produced ingenious by circumstance to ordinary cares and wants, and incapable of an aspi- and subtle arguments and authorities in favour of each ; then they ration beyond them. For in these grand abstractions of rights of man, determined which was right, which was to be rejected. Laborious and of liberty, equality, and fraternity, they seemed to see the dawn of a honest thoughts were spent in these discussions; they have been most better day for humanity, a day which should bring satisfaction not valuable in raising, even in resolving, some great intellectual problems. merely to his finite wants, but to the infinite cravings of his soul. It But precisely those problems which these reasoners could not reach was this picture that rose before the eyes of men, and made them trample, were the problems of Casuistry. Everything about the man, and his in a frenzy of destruction, on all the actual attainments of humanity. relations with heaven and earth, •could be stated, discussed, plausibly It was this that led them to confuse the future hopes of man with his determined. Only the man himself was lost: he lay crushed under the past, to suppose the state of nature ' a state of perfection, and to turn huge mass of opinions and propositions that settled what he was, and the noble savage' into the ideal of humanity. Nature was to them what was to become of him. The great movement of the fifteenth freedom from convention, and freedom from convention seemed all that century, the recovery of the old literature, the opening of the New World, was necessary to deliver our higher from our lower selves. And hence shook this mass, but could not raise the man who was buried under it. also that madness of suspicion and blood, in which the Revolution finally To assert his right to live—to show how he might claim his life, by consumed its own offspring.' We have got rid of our corrupt courts, looking above himself, by disclaiming the fetters of his evil nature— our arbitrary nobles, and our partial laws—how is it that we are not this was the work of the Reformation. Luther has often been repre- free—do not enjoy that life of ideal brotherhood and liberty that seemed seated as the enemy and destroyer of casuistry. He seems to me to so near us ? There must be traitors still. This was the secret of the have restored casuistry—to have vindicated the reality and the hopeful- Reign of Terror. The finite benefits of deliverance from oppression, of ness of the conflict between the man himself and the oppressors that freedom of person and property, could not console them for the loss of hold him down, which is the very root and ground of casuistry." that infinite prize which they had promised themselves. They could Clearly, if such thinkers as these may be trusted, ethics in the not see that the release from external restraints will never do anything to make man really free, that the true freedom is not freedom from law, widest sense is not only a science which liberal culture ought not but from ourselves, and that the destruction of a corrupt organization of

f man's rights, and a higher notion of his duties—thoughts accidentally for no other purpose. Consequently, nothing is adverted to by the law separated, but never without distortion both of the one and of the other. of honour but what tends to incommode this intercourse.' Assuming this maxim, he proceeds very courageonsly, very usefully, to show that Kant perhaps has the merit of bringing these two conceptions for the first time face to face, and a code permitted 'profaneness, cruelty to servants, rigorous treat- freedom from the baser meat of tenants and other dependents, injuries done to tradesmen by , ' Christianity, it has been said, had expanded the finite ideal of ancient insolvency or delay of payment &o. Nothing, I think, can be better

than these warnings in themselves ; nothing, I am sure, in our days

could be worse than to assume that the consequences to which they infinite task which the moral law sets before him, man must be gifted refer were the result of obedience to the law of honour, not of the moat with an unconditioned freedom. What the law of our being commands gross and flagrant departure from it. That it cannot enforce its decrees w

must be capable of fulfilment, and the outward limits of life which seem without appealing to a higher principle, these transgressions may abun- to contradict this must be merely phenomenal. Man must be free dantly prove ; that they are its decrees can never be affirmed without .a violence to troth, and a great injury to moral practice. Paley shows the interpretation to that long struggle for freedom which makes up modern danger of the course which he has followed in this instance by his feeble

and scarcely respectful treatment of what he calls the law of the land;' history. Luther, when he set individual faith against Church authority a reverence for which, altogether apart from its mere decrees and punishments, has been one of the great pillars of morality among En

sufferings. If we could but rid ourselves of this weight of custom and emancipate ourselves from this or that corrupt institution, overturn the

society—however good that may be in its way—will never do more than sweep and garnish the house for the entrance of seven devils worse than the one expelled, unless we learn also that the only infinite emancipa- tion for man is the absolute subjection of his will to the law of duty."

This is a curious concurrence of testimony, in lectures so different, to show that the recognition of the divine side of man, of the infi- nite element of his moral nature, —is, not the fanatical and excit- ing, but the sobering and realizing element in ethics, since it checks the useless attempt to begin constructing a new life from outside, a total remodelling of circumstances, and teaches us that the only circumstantial changes needed are changes in the direction of enabling men to express their own highest life more freely,—that the changes needed are not changes tending directly to renovate life,—but only to do away with the artificial obstruc- tions opposed to the free development of man's own spirit. These are the great points on which Mr. Maurice and Mr. Caird, the greatest of our older, the most promising of our younger, philoso- phers, concur. We have set them down here as teaching a lesson of great interest to the most advanced self-styled Liberalism of our own day.

We have only to add, in criticism of Mr. Maurice's deeply interesting lecture, that the new and better meaning which he has found for "Casuistry,"—the full exposition of the conflicting moral solicitations which beset the individual will,—though it gives a very useful and important method to his lectures, appears to us a little strained. Casuistry was undoubtedly first applied to the dis- cussion of " cases " of conscience,—that is, examples of abstract moral rules where there was some difficulty in knowing to which abstract rule the ' case' really belonged. The word, too, is a bar- barous and technical one, which scarcely admits of a higher set of associations with it. We are seriously afraid that Mr. Maurice, by choosing to include the noblest part of ethics,—all its indi- vidual root,—under this repulsive term, will give his lectures on ethics at a needless disadvantage, from which, neither in their oral nor in their published form, they can well fail to suffer. Mr. Maurice uses casuistry' as the term describing the whole investiga- tion into problems of individual duty. He calls Plato and Butler casuists rather than moral philosophers, because they start from the individual conscience. He keeps the phrase " moral philosophy" for the science of collective moral habits,—the laws which bind together families, nations, the human race. This is, of course, in strict accordance with the original meaning of mores, from which our ' moral' philosophy is derived, but it strikes us as susceptible

rather of an etymological than of a practical defence. Moral philosophy has got a much higher and deeper and wider meaning

than the science of domestic, national, and human mores; it includes undoubtedly, in common speech, the theory of the deepest indivi- dual obligations, and to empty moral philosophy of this deeper meaning; to pour it back into casuistry '—with which so many repulsive moral associations are connected,—strikes us an experi- ment on philosophical language which may not only fail, but, by failing, prejudice very deep and noble thoughts. For the rest, we have nothing but admiration to express for these introductory lec- tures. Both of them happily combine the true pride and the true humility of the best ethical philosophy,—the pride which con- sists in asserting that man is not.the creature of circumstances,— the humility which consists in asserting with equal vigour that circumstances are not the creatures of man, but conditions which he may modify and transform by his spirit within certain limits, but the yoke of which he never throws off so completely as when, within those limits, he most heartily accepts it as divine.

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TWO INAUGURAL LECTURES ON ETHICS.*