MR. MORLEY'S ESSAYS.* IT is difficult to read Mr. Morley's
fine essay on Condorcet with- out perceiving the strong resemblance between the author and his subject. Like Condorcet, he "abhors all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege ;" like him, he is passionately interested in the reorgani- zation of society; like him, his hope of success in that experiment mainly depends on the elimination of the religious element ; and, like him, he is full of a fierce intellectual impatience which some- times expresses itself in bursts of genuine eloquence. The main difference is in the degree of restraint which the Englishman puts upon his own mind, the acquired habit of fairness in judging opposition, whether from individuals or circum- stances. Condorcet, for example, had the keen hatred of the philosophers of his time for the religious idea, and so has Mr. Morley, who clearly believes and indeed asserts that until theology
and the theologic method have disappeared, progress can be but small ; but Condorcet disbelieved in the priests while he hated them, and Mr. Morley rises far above that vulgarity. In perhaps the most striking passage in the Essays, he exposes the absurdity
of at once decrying the honesty of all religious teachers and accepting the idea of human perfectibility :-
" Take Condorcet's account of purgatory, for instance. The priests, he says, drew up so minute and comprehensive a table of sins that nobody could hope to escape from censure. Here you come upon one of the most lucrative branches of the sacerdotal tracking; people were taught to imagine a hell of limited duration, which the priests only had the power to abridge ; and this grace they sold first to the living, then to the kins- men and friends of the dead. Now it was surely more worthy of a belief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility of the sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a base mercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, as the origin of a doctrine which was obviously susceptible of a kinder explanation, that should refer it to a merciful and affectionate and truly humanizing anxiety to assuage the horrors of what is perhaps the moat frightful idea that has ever corroded human character, the idea of eternal punishment. We could in part have pardoned Condorcet if he had striven to invent ever so fanciful origins for opinions and belief in his solicitude for the credit of humanity. As it is, he distorts the history of religion only to humanity's discredit. How, if the people were always predisposed to virtue, were priests, sprung of the same people and bred in the same traditions, so invariably and incurably devoted to baseness and hypocrisy? Was the nature of a priest absolutely devoid of what physicians call re- cuperative force, restoring them to a sound mind in spite of professional perversion ? In fine, if man had been an grossly enslaved in moral nature from the beginning of the world down to the year 1789, or there- abouts, how was it possible that notwithstanding the admitted slowness of civilizing processes, he should suddenly spring forth the very perfec- tible and nearly perfected being that Condorcet passionately imagined him to be ?"
That answer is absolutely complete, and so is the bitter epigram in which Mr. Morley satirizes religion, while deriding those who feel hatred for that form of intellectual absurdity. Condorcet, he writes, " might without absurdity have gone further than this,
and depicted religion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immature stages, just as there are specific disorders incident in
childhood to the human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with the same calmness which he would have expected
to find in a pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet's pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed. Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had in the struggle contrived to infect them with the contagion of her own • Critical Miscellanies. By John Blorley. London; Chapman and HAIL 1871
traditional spirit." Nevertheless, though Mr. Morley is far more restrained, there is in him the same intellectual impatience, break- ing out now in a burst of eloquent denunciation of England as the chosen home of religious respectability, now in the effort to com- press a criticism into an epigram too small to hold so much, and again in a desperate leap after a "simple" explanation of extremely complex facts. There is much truth in this invective against England, but much more of impatience :—
" In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinona troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever per- missible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in pros- revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since in pm-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where poli- tical forme, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily,—a community, in short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping of the ears, some- how to keep the social pyramid on its apex, and to preserve for England its glorious fame as a paradise for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the poor,—why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a season."
Hell for the poor is certainly not among the objects of the English classes with power, though it may be among the results of their action, and to assume that it is, is to commit the precise mistake which in Condorcet Mr. Morley had so ably exposed. Carlylism, says he, in another place, "is the male of Byronism," at first sight a sound epigram, but one which will not bear a moment's examination, particularly by a reader who has just been reading in these very Essays that Byron was the poet of Revolution, and who knows that Carlylism is nearer lay Calvinism than anything else, that its essential theory is the existence somewhere of a Law— described usually as the Eternal Verities—which human beings must obey under penalty of destruction. There is the same hurry in the striking saying, " Destiny is no artist." There "is a terrible logical finish about some of the dealings of fate, and in life the working of a curse is seldom stayed by any dramatic necessity for a smooth consummation. Destiny is no artist. The facts that confront us are relentless." Surely the smooth consummation is not the desire of the artist, but of the audience, and destiny with its strange ironies is of all artists the most perfect. And to quote the final illustration of our point, what but intellectual impatience can have led a thinker like Mr. Morley to have penned these lines ?- "Morals, it may safely be said, are in the first instance the products of positive institutions, and these positive institutions, in turn, are the pro- ducts of an intellectual discernment, in the chief or lawgiver, of the requirements of the circumstances in which his society is placed, of the consequences of certain kinds of conduct. The lawgiver forbids or enjoins given actions, and then public opinion gradually associates the ideas of praise and blame, virtue and vice, the idea of Duty, in a word, with his injunctions or prohibitions. In rude societies, right and wrong only mean what is permitted and what is forbidden by the strongest, whether the resource of the strongest be the thunders of Sinai or the rope of a Vigilance Committee. It is not necessary that there should be a personal lawgiver or written laws. If certain acts are not tolerated by a portion of the community with sufficient strength to put them down, that is enough, first of all, to generate the idea of Law, and by and by to generate further the idea of Duty. We may see the process actually going on under our eyes on the unsettled western frontier of the United States. In Texas, or Nevada, or Nebraska, you may watch the growth of the ideas of Law and Duty, just as if they were plants."
Apart altogether from the truth of that astonishing theory, which
of course we entirely deny, it does not explain half the facts for which it professes to account. That law strengthens the idea of duty is true enough, but what law is that which inspires in a child , a twelvemonth old a notion of right or wrong ? What law has ever forbidden lying, and what man has ever been unaware that in the abstract truthfulness must be more right than falsehood? The very slightest study of the religions of mankind will demonstrate to anyone that some of the most powerful of the moral beliefs, as, for example, the English horror of torture, have arisen in the very teeth of convenience, have constrained whole communities which once inflicted it to abstain from it lest they should abase their own moral natures. We do not, however, wish just now to argue the great question of the origin of morals, but only to point to the imperfection which a kind of intellectual hurry to settle it and be done with it produces in Mr. Morley's thought. There is in his account of Joseph de Maistre a still more remarkable illustration of his foible. He is discussing the old mystery why, if misery is a discipline, animals should suffer so much, and suggests, " Would it not be simpler and more rational to explain all the pain as well as all the happiness of all creatures with organizations capable of perceiving the difference between the two states by reference to a single principle ? This principle we have in the conditions of existence." Certainly it would be simpler, but of what use is the simplicity if complexity happens to be more accurate? Simple codes are codes which do' not fulfil one-half the objects of law.
Those who would get the best idea of Mr. Morley's power from these Essays must, we think, study the " paper " on Joseph de Maistre, which its author calls a "criticism," but which is also a. charming though slight biography, full of most delicate touches in illustration of character. Mr. Morley stands as far from Catholi- cism as man can, yet he has an unconscious sympathy with the great Ultramontane who used his reason so ably to demon- strate the unreasonable, a sympathy rarely wanting in men who have been greatly influenced by the writings of Comte. Comtism is, after all, Catholicism with the bottom knocked out, and every Comtist must study with appreciation that system: which is his own, though the Church is its final authority, instead of Comte. This very sympathy has led, however, in one striking passage to a kind of unfairness :— " The question with whioh De Maistre concerns himself is the utili- zation of Christianity as a force to shape and organize a system of civilized societies ; a study of the conditions under which this utilization had taken place in the earlier centuries of the era ; and a deduction from them of the conditions under which we might ensure a repetition of the process in changed modern circumstance. In the eighteenth century men were accustomed to ask of Christianity, as Protestants always ask of so much of Catholicism as they have dropped, whether or no it is true. But after the Revolution the question changed, and became an inquiry whether and how Christianity could contribute to the reconstruction of society. People asked less how true it was, than how strong it was ; less how many unquestioned dogmas, than how much social weight it had or could develop; less as to the precise amount and form of belief that would save a soul, than as to the way in whioh it might be expected to assist the European community."
We take it De Maistre rather accepted his creed as abso- lutely true, true whatever its results, but sought to show that it, would have results even in this world which could not be other than beneficial.
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