BOOKS.
MR. STEPHEN ON LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.* [SECOND NOTICE.] THE nature of our difference from Mr. Stephen's doctrine is closely related, of course, to the nature of our difference from Mr. Stephen's philosophy. Mr. Stephen is not only a necessarian as regards the doctrine of motives, but, characteristically enough, he regards the free-will doctrine as not a doctrine at all, but simply an incon- ceivable confusion of ideas. Mr. Stephen is not only a utilitarian, but, again characteristically enough, regards the doctrine that any disinterested action is possible to men as a mere confusion of ideas, a muddle-headed way of saying that peculiar people have peculiar pleasures, which, viewed from the point of view of the majority of mankind, look like disinterested actions,—just as fox- hunting would look like self-sacrifice to a book-worm, or reading would appear the most heroic kind of voluntary martyrdom to a prize-fighter. Of course with such a philosophy Mr. Stephen sees no magic in the idea or the word 'liberty.' 'Liberty' ' to him only means freedom from constraint, and constraint only means the introduction of threats, or other modifications of the principle of fear, into the motives of our voluntary actions. Here is his statement of the case :—
" All voluntary acts are caused by motives. All motives may be placed in one of two categories—hope and fear, pleasure and pain. Voluntary acts of which hope is the motive are said to be free. Volun- tary acts of which fear is the motive are said to be done under com- pulsion, or omitted under restraint. A woman marries. This in every case is a voluntary action. If she regards the marriage with the ordinary feelings and acts from the ordinary motives, she is said to act freely. If she regards it as a necessity, to which she submits in order to avoid greater evil, she is said to act under compulsion and not freely."
We should have thought that Bishop Butler had exposed the utter unsoundness of saying that any one of the acts which springs from the primary impulses and instincts, is done from either hope or fear. If a man kills another in revenge, or in a fit of jealousy, it is untrue to say that his motive is the desire of any pleasure or dread of any pain. It is conceivable, and no doubt often true, that men who have experienced these and other passions frequently, and reflected on the emotions which succeed their satis- faction or mortification, may act from the desire of the pleasure or the fear of the pain which followed the satisfaction or mortification. This is indeed the precise difference between the man who acts on self-conscious calculation, and the man who acts on impulse, and the difference is so great as to alter the whole mould of the char- acter. But not only does it seem totally false that the only motives of voluntary actions are hope or fear, but we believe it to be also quite false that, even of those actions which are governed by hope and fear, 'voluntary actions of which hope is the motive' are necessarily at all more free than those of which fear is the motive. The identification of liberty with liking is a fallacy as old as Hobbes. An action is free if it proceeds from the deliberate and rational act of the mind itself, and that deliberate and rational act may be prevented as completely by the sudden and violent action of a hope as by the sudden and violent action of a fear. A faint and long-pondered fear interferes far less with moral free-
* Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. By James Fitzjames Stephen, Q.C. London - Smith, Elder, and Co. dom than a violent and sudden hope. A statesman who stifles his conscience to seize a great prize suddenly placed within his grasp, may be far less morally free than one who stifles his sense of public duty and retires from public life under the influence of a faint but long-pondered fear of death as likely to result earlier from his over-exertion. According to our view, moral freedom depends on the controlling power which the mind has over its own motives. According to Mr. Stephen, there is no such power at all, either actual or conceivable. He holds that all the power of the mind is the power of its own motives, either open or in disguise, and that the only difference is between motives which attract and motives which repel. This appears to us so monstrously inconsistent with all the facts of human consciousness and the consequent usages of human language, that studying the writings of a man who holds it is rather like reading a message sent in a cypher, where every word means something quite different from that attached to it in the ordinary tongue, so that you have to translate by substituting at every step for a commonly accepted meaning, one which is wholly foreign to that meaning. Mr. Stephen himself is not consistent with himself. Indeed no writer so forcible as he, could be consistent with such a false and artificial theory as is here given. He tells us (p. 99), "The essence of life is force, and force is the negation of liberty." Now it is hard to say which is the falser of the two propositions, —" voluntary actions of which hope is the motive are said to be free," and "the essence of life is force, and force is the negation of liberty,"-but while both are false, they are also quite inconsistent with each other. There is just as much force, we suppose, in fascination as in repulsion. If "the essence of life is force," the essence of life is, we suppose, strong hope as well as strong fear. But according to Mr. Stephen, strong hope is not the negation of liberty, though strong fear is. Hence you might have the essence of life without the negation of liberty. The truth is, Mr. Stephen's psychology is.not his strong point. There is a sense in which force is the negation of liberty, but it is in the sense in which force means a violent intrusive constraint, acting against the grain of any man's judgment, and reason, and conscience ; and in that sense certainly it is not the essence of life. Again, constraining force may sometimes, as Mr. Stephen truly points out, elicit a very strong force of reaction and resistance from strong minds ; "coercion and restraint," he says (p. 44), " are necessary astringents to most human beings, to give them the maximum of power" they are capable of attaining. But then in this case force is not the negation, but a stimulus to the assertion of liberty. It is worth noting that Mr. Stephen is so little influenced by his own avowed system of thought, that he hardly sticks to it in any of his more powerful passages at all.
Our readers will now understand pretty well how and why we differ from the main doctrine of Mr. Stephen's book about Liberty, which is most tersely stated in the following passage :—
"To me tho question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing? It is both good and bad according to time, place, and circumstance, and a complete answer to the question, In what cases is liberty good and in what cases is it bad ? would involve not merely a universal history of mankind, but a complete solution of the problems which such a history would offer. I do not believe that the state of our knowledge is such as to enable us to enunciate any 'very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control.' We must proceed in a far more cautious way, and confine ourselves to such remarks as experience suggests about the advantages and disadvantages of compulsion and liberty respectively in particular cases. The following way of stating the matter is not and does not pretend to be a solution of the question, In what cases is liberty good ? but it will serve to show how the question ought to be discussed when it arises. I do not see how Mr. Mill could. deny its correctness consistently with the general principles of the ethical theory which is to a certain extent common to us both. Compulsion is bad-1. When the object aimed at is bad. 2. When the object aimed at is good, but the compulsion employed is not calculated to obtain it. 8. When the object aimed at is good, and tho compulsion employed is calculated to obtain it, but at too great an expense. Thus to compel a man to commit murder is bad, because the object is bad. To inflict a punishment sufficient to irritate but not sufficient to deter or to destroy for holding particular religions opinions is bad, because such compulsion is not calculated to effect its purpose, assuming it to be good. To com- pel people not to trespass by shooting them with spring-guns is bad, because the harm done is out of all proportion to the harm avoided. If, however, the object aimed at is good, if the compulsion employed such as to attain it, and if the good obtained overbalances the inconvenience of the compulsion itself, I do not understand how, upon utilitarian principles, the compulsion can be bad."
Now we differ from that, because it entirely denies what seems to us the central fact of human morality,—that man rises in the scale of being in proportion as, instead of being driven about by hopes and fears of which bele the shuttlecock, he shapes his own course by lending the whole force of his will to the pursuit of the nobler aims of life. Free choice of the good is a higher thing than even the fascination of desire for what is good. Liberty of action, therefore, is morally desirable on its own account. It is much higher for men to be free to choose between evil and good,. and some to choose good and some evil, than for men not to be- free to choose, even though the result were that the compulsion, to which they were subjected ended in their all attaining the- seeming equivalent for good. Good chosen, has so much more of good in it than good enforced, that it leaves room for a consider- able margin of evil chosen, before any wise man would think of wishing to interpose constraints. This is where we differ from Mr.. Stephen. It seems to us the end of all legislation, spiritual,. moral, and political, to enlarge the sphere of true moral liberty, —in the existence of which we believe, and Mr. Stephen does. not believe at all. We should, therefore, add to the canons- which he lays down in the above passage that all true liberty is always good, the highest good, but that you may often pro- tect the liberty of the many by interfering with the liberty of the- few. Criminal law, for instance, is certainly adapted and intended to put theft, and murder, and many other acts out of the category of those which ordinary men feel they have a real option of committing. When these acts are punished as they are by the criminal law, the majority of men feel that the threats. it enforces are so strong, that it takes these crimes away out of the region of open questions altogether, and so to some extent narrows the sphere of vulgar men's field of moral trial. .An& this is advisable, because there is a solidarity amongst men living. in society which makes it impossible for the higher fields of morality to be seriously entered upon by the majority, while the lower fields are still open ; and when, therefore, the conscience of any society is virtually unanimous up to a certain point, it is a guarantee for the exercise of moral liberty in a higher field, that the lower field should as far as possible be excluded by common consent from any competition with it. We should add, therefore,. to Mr. Stephen's list of cases in which compulsion is bad, the following, as the most important of all :—Compulsion is bad whenever it really interferes with the free action of the con- science and the will, on subjects on which there is danger of a. conventional as distingished from a real moral conviction. Of course, this might come under Mr. Stephen's third principle, as a case in which the moral cost of applying the compulsion is too. great ; but we see no sign that Mr. Stephen really means to reckon this as one of the greater dangers, nor can he do so, because he does. not recognise moral liberty as one of the characteristics of man at all, still less as one which, even when exercised amiss, points to a far higher nature and far higher possibilities than any moral con- stitution determined only by overwhelming constraints to what is good, could suggest. Of course, this fundamental difference from. Mr. Stephen affects profoundly our estimate of his practical appli- cation of the theory of Liberty. He thinks nothing of liberty except as a means to an end. "To me the question whether liberty is a good or a bad thing appears as irrational as the question whether- fire is a good or a bad thing. It is both good and bad, according to time, place, and circumstance." To us that reply appears. much more irrational than the statement that happiness is neither a good nor a bad thing, but both good and bad, according to time, place, and circumstance. Indeed, to our minds, man lives much more for the sake of learning to be truly free, than for the sake of learning to be truly happy. Liberty is only a bad thing where it is not really liberty, where the mind appears to have a liberty it has not really,—as where you leave to a child to choose what it has not the mental or moral experience adequate to enable it. to choose with discrimination. And of course, therefore, we- do not go with Mr. Stephen in his apparent longing for the re- storation of something very like persecution of those religions which he holds to be false. Even the moral law should not be embodied in legislation based upon a moral standard higher than that of the average conscience of the community, or this legislation will stifle more liberty than it will protect. The object is to get the largest possible amount of free co-operation with the moral law ; and that cannot be attained except where its threats are needed only for the few, where to the many it represents their own inward sense of right and shame. As for religion, it seems to us a strange mis- take to found morality upon it, as Mr. Stephen does. It is much truer to say that morality is the foundation of religion, that reli- gion is the highest point of morality,—and that any coarse inter- ference with it by threats and penalties only corrupts it. Mr. Stephen is compelled by his common-sense to see this as to a great number of religious beliefs, though his theory does not teach it him ; but why he stops short where he does is a mystery :—
"When you persecute a religion as a whole, you must generally persecute truth and goodness as well as falsehood. Coercion as to religion will therefore chiefly occur in the indirect form, in the shape .of treating certain parts—vital parts, it may be—of particular systems as mischievous and possibly even as criminal falsehoods when they .come in the legislator's way. When priests, of whatever creed, claim to hold the keys of heaven and to work invisible miracles, it will prac- tically become necessary for many purposes to decide whether they really are the representatives of God upon earth, or whether they are mere impostors, for there is no way of avoiding the question, and it -admits of no other solution."
And of course Mr. Stephen means that the State should decide them to be "impostors," and so treat them. We maintain, on the -contrary, that no line of action could be sillier or more fatal. The real question is, "as a matter of fact, are priests in general impostors? Do those who know them usually find them interested, insincere, full of trickery and conscious insincerity, or more or less average men, not immaculate, but often possessed of the highest enthusiasm, and generally perhaps of more disinterested- ness, if perhaps less manliness, than other human beings of their -class ?" If the latter is true by the testimony of those who know them, what is the use of setting up a fictitious morality, and saying, "Their religion is false, and therefore they are im- postors"? Is it not a great deal easier to judge whether they are impostors or not, directly, than indirectly as an inference from their religion ? Do we not know hosts of people whose religion must be false,—if more than one religion cannot be true,—and who are yet at the furthest possible extreme from -impostors ?
The whole system of Mr. Stephen's book is artificial. His -utilitarianism is artificial. His notion of liberty is wholly arti- cle]. His idea of morality as a mere derivative from creed is most artificial of all. We maintain that morality lies at the root -of religion, and is its base rather than its superstructure ; that men are much more agreed about the former than they are about the fatter; that in choosing the latter the exercise of the most delicate and the highest kind of liberty is needed, and that to interfere with that exercise by pains and penalties, on an abstract theory that this or that is imposture,' is to mar what we shall never mend. Mr. Stephen's theory tramps over the most delicate 'blossoms of human life and character with a heavy, elephantine tread. There is one view, and but one, which would justify him ; —if religious truth were, as he seems to think, absolutely unattain- able by any exercise of intellectual liberty, he might perhaps justify the manufacture of a sort of coarse substitute for it, to act as stays to the human conscience, which has an indestructible longing for truth. Indeed, Mr. Stephen glances once longingly at this notion ; but is obliged to dismiss it with some reluctance as intrinsically hopeless, —in which we hold him to be right.
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