MR. BALFOUR ON THE CONSCIENCE AS A NATURAL PRODUCT.
MR. BALFOUR, in the paper on " Naturalism and Ethics," which opens the July number of the Phila- delphia International Journal of Ethics, devotes himself to contrasting the purely naturalistic view of the conscience considered as a mere product of Nature, with the view of it which all practical moralists, of whatever school,—the school of utilitarian expediency, no less than the school of religious mysticism,—insist upon inculcating. Moralists of all schools, he says, no matter whether they explain the rise of conscience as a beautiful provision for bridging the chasm between God and man, or as the ingenious device of a kind of automatic process for persuading men that it matters a vast deal more than it really does whether human society shall flourish for a few thousand years in an obscure corner of the universe, or shall never come into existence at all, are all virtually unani- mous in declaring that the moral law " is worthy of all reverence; that in its main principles it is inscrutable and eternal; that it demands our ungrudging submission, and that we owe it not merely obedience but love." He insists upon it that this view is a perfectly appropriate and consistent view in those who treat man as made in the image of God, and a perfectly inconsistent and incoherent view in those who treat man as the ultimate product of a number of physical forces, which somehow develop consciousness, and succeed in so happily exaggerating the importance of man's race, as to persuade him into subordinating all his own individual wishes to the end of prolonging for a few hundred or thousand years beyond the epoch at which the race would otherwise cease to exist, the insignificant and rather contemptible species which crowns the life of this obscure planet. Why, he asks, should we agree to magnify the conscience as worthy of all homage, if it is really only like "the protective blotches on a beetle's back,"—an ingenious device for saving the race from a number of dangers which might otherwise prove fatal to it earlier than need be, but which must, sooner or later, be fatal to it all the same? If man is really nothing but a product of physical forces, and one which must vanish away as soon as those physical forces so change their aspect that the necessary conditions of his existence here fail, whether from the gradual exhaustion of solar heat or any other physical cause on which he depends absolutely, why in the world should we all conspire to praise the conscience for helping him to survive, a little longer than he otherwise would that destructive clashing of selfish human desires and appetites by which his career here might easily be shortened, though in no case can it be very materially prolonged. Here is Mr. Balfour's statement of the case :— "Now what, according to the naturalistic creed, is the origin of the generally accepted, or indeed of any other possible moral law ? What position does it occupy in the great web of interdependent phenomena by which the knowable Whole' is on this hypothesis constituted ? The answer is plain; as life is but a petty episode in the history of the universe; as feeling is an attribute of only a fraction of things that live; so moral sentiments and the appre- hension of moral rules are found in but an insignificant minority of things that feeL They are not, so to speak, among the neces- sities of nature ; no great spaces are marked out for their accom- modation ; were they to vanish to-morrow, the great machine would move on with no noticeable variation ; the sum of realities would not suffer sensible diminution ; the organic world itself would scarcely mark the change. A few highly-developed mam- mals, and chiefly among these man, would lose instincts and beliefs which have proved of considerable value in the struggle for existence, if not between individuals at least between tribes and species. But put it at the highest, we can say no more than that there would be a great diminution of human happiness, that civilization would become difficult or impossible, and that the higher' races might even succumb and disappear."
If Nature, "indifferent to our happiness, indifferent to our wants, but sedulous of our survival, commends disinterested virtue to our practice by decking it out in all the splendour which the specifically ethical sentiments alone are capable of supplying," why should we conspire with her to promote what, on the naturalistic hypothesis, is a pure illusion, though a pure illusion which may prolong infinitesimally the existence of our race? What difference does it make whether our race lasts on the earth,—say, only thirty thousand years, or as many as fifty thousand,—if it is to be starved out at last, and leave nothing but its bones behind it like the other extinct races of which we ourselves find the re- mains ? Can it be said to be a duty and an exalted privi- lege, to humour the figment that we have a free will (when we have nothing of the sort) and the figment that duty is something mysterious and resplendent, when it is a mere dazzling of the imagination to prevent the premature out- break of anarchy among the most contriving and ingenious of terrestrial animals, if all that is gained by this at last is the postponement for a few centuries of the death of a doomed and dying race P Surely it can hardly be right, much less a lofty virtue, to exalt enormously the praises of the moral law, if the sum total of the results to be thereby accomplished is the dragging out for a little longer of the miserable career of man in a corner of the universe where he has never flourished in any true and elevated sense, and where, in spite of all the protective figments we may invent, he will die out sooner or later, and all his thoughts will perish ?
Such is Mr. Balfour's drift. And it is of course obvious enough that he writes to show that it is the "naturalistic" view of man which is the illusion, and not the spiritual view, that our whole nature protests in every fibre against the notion that we are the mere product of physical causes, and destined only to survive so long as these physical causes favour our survival. Mr. Balfour evidently intends to indicate his own conviction that free-will is not a delusion, that the sense of responsibility is not a mere " species-pre- serving" contrivance in the machinery of nature to persuade us to do what we should otherwise be too indifferent to attempt.
"Man, as far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life cf one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first con- verted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to know that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant.
We survey the past and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude."
The inference more than suggested is that this view is an utterly false one, and that the moral ideal in man,—by no means a natural growth out of the dust of the earth,—is that which both attests his origin and indicates his goal. Which indeed is the more probable,—that an earthly nature should spontaneously generate a crop of delusions, the only apparently good effect of which is to prolong by a few hundred or even thousand years the existence of a race that is at best a temporary product of natural forces, and one of no real significance when measured carefully for what it is worth in the great proces- sion of cosmic phenomena, or that a nature saturated with spiritual elements should have received those elements directly from a being whose spirit is all in all, and for whom earthly passions and pleasures are nothing but the discipline in the midst of which the conscience and the spirit have to strive? Of course, all our life is enveloped in mystery; but the mystery of spiritual growth assimilating and subduing earthly ele- ments, is far less inexplicable than the mystery of earthly elements that generate for themselves a false sun of spiritual life, not for the sake of moulding us to any spiritual end, but only as an expedient for controlling the wilfulness and diluting the dangerous energy of strictly selfish passions in a universe where true spirit has no existence at all. We can easily understand how spiritual life might be ignored amidst the conflict of material passions and earthly wants. But we cannot at all conceive how, in a world developed solely out of physical forces, the idea of moral law, of conscience, of spiritual devotion, could have been elaborated, if all the hopes which these implied had been a pure chimera,. Even such dreams as those of centaurs are compounded out of real elements, put together in an unreal way. But on the naturalistic hypothesis, spirit is nothing in the world but a name for the force exerted by human brains. How, on the naturalistic hypothesis, we ever came to suppose that will and conscience and love are supreme over the bodily organisation of which naturalism regards them as the physical outcome, it is quite impossible to conceive. A pro- vision implanted deep in the human organism for making- believe that the cart drags the horse instead of the horse the cart, in order to increase the speed and insure the stability of the operation, is surely the most astonishing of all the paradoxes of modern philosophy. Mr. Balfour's article will do much to place that intolerable paradox in a light in which its hold on the mind of reasonable beings must wither away.
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