PROFESSOR SIDGWICK ON CONDUCT.* WE are accustomed to works on
pure theory from Professor Sidgwick ; in the present volume, however, we make his acquaintance as an exponent of practice. That is not, we think, his forte, for his is perhaps the most purely critical personality in England. Those who powerfully influence life and conduct are usually men who have no doubts, who see clearly and feel intensely within their range, who are inspired by unfaltering faith, and who can rouse the imagination and rally the conscience. Professor Sidgwick's attitude of mind is also that of the Ethical movement as it has developed itself in England. It seems to us to expend its energies in giving to excellent people elaborate reasons for what they are already prepared to do; it is, in short, critical and intellectual rather than inspiring. This task is, of course, a perfectly legitimate, and even praiseworthy, one ; but as the calm discussion of a College lecture-room can never take the place of the eager faith and warm glow of spiritual conviction, so the Ethical Society can never be any substitute for the Church. Pro- fessor Sidgwick himself admits this, and in one of these addresses is careful to say that the Ethical Society will not compete with the Church. What, then, is its field of activity ? Apparently it limits itself to "mundane motives," and declines to deal with the question whether the apparent sacrifices which are demanded in this world from good men are real sacrifices sub specie wternitatis. That is to say, it takes prac- tically the position of ancient Stoicism. By so doing it practically abandons any claim to influence powerfully the
• Practical Ethic,: a Collection of Addresses mut Essays. By Henry Bidgwiek. Landon: Swan Bonnenechein and Co.
life of mankind, and contents itself with careful exposition of mundane ethics. It is on this narrow and lower plane (narroW and lower as compared with the standpoint of religion) that we must consider its methods. Within these circumscribed limits we may find much useful criticism and many profitable hints for conduct.
Professor Sidgwick's positive attitude is frankly utilitarian, the promotion of human happiness being, in his judgment, the one test of morality. But by happiness he means general happiness, not necessarily the happiness of every individual, but the greatest sum of world happiness possible. This being our object, the aim of the Ethical movement is, apparently, calmly to consider, with the aid of philosophy, what kind of acts will best bring about that result. The dominant "note" of the book is, perhaps, social rather than individual, as is inevitable in our time when any speaker addresses a cultivated audience. He assumes their personal moral standard to be high, and so is not disposed to thunder the Ten Command- ments at their head; rather, perhaps, he wishes to see the entire world become what they are, only with more enthusiasm and more active, as contrasted with passive, virtue. Professor Sidgwick, therefore, sets himself, in the two most important papers in this volume, to deal with public and international morality. The first of these, on "Public Morality," is a characteristically cautious but clear condemnation of the doctrine of Machiavelli, concerning which there has been such a widespread discussion since Mr. Morley's Oxford lecture. Professor Sidgwick identifies this doctrine with "national egoism,"--i.e., preferring the claims of the nation to the wider claims of humanity ; as individual egoism pats self first, and the nation and the world afterwards. We think the condemnation would have been more forcible had not the author in the address on the "Aims and Methods of an Ethical Society" implicitly accepted "the modern conception of society as an organism," which seems especially strange in the mouth of a utilitarian. We know that some German thinkers, as also Mr. Spencer, have attempted to construct analogies between a physical and a national organism, but they have not convinced us, and to say truth, we feel the term "organism," as applied to any nation, meaningless, though we fully admit the existence of organic aspects. It is no mere accident that the German writers, to whom Professor Sidgwick refers as defenders of the doctrine of "national egoism," should all have founded this doctrine on the more fundamental one of society "as an organism." The first business of the organism is to perpetuate its existence, and this it does, as Darwin has shown, by a fierce struggle into which, no doubt, moral elements may enter, but which is surely not moral per se. The Machiavellian accepts this "law of the beast" and applies it to the "social organism," and it is not easy to see where the inevitable ethical break with the mere "cosmic process" comes in. We think it would be better to drop the term " organism " as applied to the State, and to frankly admit that the inchoate science of sociology does not yet justify us in using such language, especially as political inferences are deduced from it which Professor Sidgwick has no difficulty in showing are grossly immoral. Thus as regards the dictum, "My country, right or wrong," our author has these pregnant words : "I have never seen, nor can I conceive, any ethical reasoning that will provide even a plausible basis for the compound proposition that a man is bound to sacrifice his private interest to that of the group of human beings constituting his State, but that neither he nor they are under any similar obligation to the rest of mankind." That the "law of the beast," or in other words, "national egoism," works up to despotism is clear to Professor Sidgwick: "The moral emancipation allowed to governments for the promotion of the interests of the nation will be used by governments for the maintenance of their power, even against the interests of the nation; the distinction between what may be done to hold power and what may be done to acquire it will come to be recognised as arbitrary; and so by an easy inclined plane we shall pass from the Machiavellism of the Discourses on Livy to the Machiavellism of the Prince,"—a judgment which may be commended to the notice of the cruder and more extreme apostles of State Socialism.. The "Morality of Strife" is an able, though of course too brief, treatment of one of the most difficult of moral themes. It deals mainly with the morality of the problem presented by war. The mere question of the use of force, which so severely exercises the mind of Count Tolstoy, is not the real problem, for the use of force is neither moral nor anti-moral, but a non-moral act. The question is whether a man or a nation is justified in using force in furtherance of his or its own interests, or whether an impartial and external authority alone should decide. The ethical conscience has no doubt as to the ultimate answer,—that no nation can or should judge its own case. This would mean disarmament and arbitration everywhere. But the world is not ready for this yet, argues Professor Sidgwick, because a particular nation may be the world's real though unrecognised organ of Right (as Greece was against Xerxes, or the Netherlands against Spain), and there- fore, as the guardian of a vital principle, it must not give way. Such instances are rare, but so long as we lack an absolute and universally accepted principle of Right, Professor Sidg- wick holds that in certain cases nations will refuse arbitration, and will rightly refuse. The ethical position, it will be seen, like the political, is a doctrine of accommodation; it does not command the impossible, it does not impose absolute morality, like Christianity, which enjoins perfection sans phrase.
Next to public ethics the most important problem dis- cussed in this volume is one relating both to public and private ethics,—the question of the obligation of the clergy to say exactly what they believe to be true in regard to the Bible and to the creeds and formulas of their Church. It is not with conscious hypocrisy, with the practical atheist at the altar, that our author deals, but with what he terms the "excusable hypocrisy, the well-meant pretence of belief,—the region not of vice, but of error in judgment, if error there be," that he wages a decorous, but yet very earnest warfare. We cannot discuss this difficult problem at length, but it must not be forgotten how disastrous are often the effects, on a too tender conscience, of an absolute prohibition of any utterance other than that which a man can assert he believes absolutely. The man who is per- petually asking, Do I really believe this ?' is apt never to get beyond a see-saw of dubitation. Men of a certain temperament axe prone to confuse uncertainty and disbelief. We are rather surprised that, alongside this demand for veracity in statement, Professor Sidgwick should admit the value of pions frauds for social purposes, as in the Jesuit community in Paraguay. The essay on the "Pursuit of Culture" is mainly a criticism of Matthew Arnold's contradictory ideas of culture as, on the one hand, a knowledge of the best literature of the world, and on the other, the power "of seeing things as they are." Professor Sidgwick accepts the latter ideal, and demands therefore the cultivation of philosophy and the scientific temper. That is well enough ; but did not Wordsworth, e.g., "see things as they are" more truly and vividly than the "fingering slave" who, to add mere facts to his repertory, would "peep and botanise upon his mother's grave " ?
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