BOOKS.
MR. LESLIE STEPHEN'S "SCIENCE OF ETHICS."*
[FIRST NOTICE.]
Tars is an able book, and extremely fair in its endeavour to state those views which Mr. Stephen rejects, but it is hardly necessary to say, to any one who has read this journal with any care during the last twenty years, that Mr. Stephen's view of the " Science of Ethics" ignores altogether, in our opinion, the most distinctive quality of moral obligation. Mr. Leslie Stephen's view is that morality arises out of the indis- putable fact that certain instincts and modes of conduct are essential to social vitality, and that other impulses and modes of conduct are pernicious to social vitality. Those men who instinctively desire to have the social vitality strengthened, and who discriminate truly,—whether consciously or unconsciously,—how it can best be strengthened, and act upon this desire and discrimination, are good men. Those men who either do not desire this, or do not desire it so strongly as they desire other ends inconsistent with this, or even, if we rightly understand Mr. Stephen's drift, who, though they desire the strengthening of the social vitality more than they desire personal ends inconsistent with it, still discriminate wrongly what is and what is not for the ad- vantage of society, and embark on a wrong tack for its reform, are not good men, but bad in proportion to the effi- ciency of their disorganising influence over the society to which they belong. Mr. Stephen rejects entirely the purely selfish theory of human nature. He not only holds indeed, but main- tains, that every human action follows the law of least resistance, that we do at any moment what, under the influence of the com- plex feelings which solicit or deter us, it is easiest, or least diffi- cult for us to d But he affirms resolutely that it is by no means always easiest for us to do that which will most certainly contribute to our own sum-total of happiness; thatit may be much easier for a man to do that which involves the sacrifice of his own happiness to the happiness of his fellow-creatures; and if it is the easier for him so to do, then he is, in Mr. Leslie Stephen's sense, a man of the virtuous type, one of those whom the selective influence of the competition between different races has so far moulded into the right shape, that his feelings impel him to care more for the good of his fellow-men than he can care for his own enjoyment. From this brief statement it will be evident that Mr. Leslie Stephen, though he is a strict "determinist," and though he rejects a conscience or distinctive moral faculty of any kind, is not in the least disposed to adopt the " selfish system " of Hobbes. Perhaps, indeed, one of the greatest advantages of the new insight to which Mr. Darwin's instructive teaching as to the involuntary adaptation of species to the outward conditions of their existence, has led us, is this,—that it has become almost impossible for any wise man to think of any moral agent as always acting from one and the same conscious motive. The number of really unconscious in- fluences by which Mr. Darwin has shown that all living organ- isms are induced to act in this way or that, is so great, that it has become quite impossible to regard " the selfish system," or any other system which reduces all the principles of action to a single conscious motive, as in any degree tenable. An or- ganised being whose life is made what it is by so many instincts of which he neither knows the origin, nor understands the exact significance, is but little likely when he comes to consciousness to find that he has but one and the same conscious motive for action, in which the differences are only differences of degree, and not of kind. In some sense, it may be truly said that the " selfish system " is now not merely gone out of fashion, but that it has become obsolete, through the wealth of discoveries recently made in relation to the organic structure and the various origin of the instincts and impulses which beset us. A nature moulded by so many subtle influences into grooves and habits of its own, inexplicable to its owner, and yet rich in significance, is not the sort of nature to disclose one dead-level of uniformity in relation to all those springs of action of which man is clearly conscious. In recognising the simple disinterestedness, as Bishop Butler termed it, or as Mr. Leslie Stephen prefers to call it,—not we think, very wisely,—the genuine "altruism," of many of the human sympathies and passions, he opens the way for the only portion of the Science of Ethics, in which, so far as we can judge, he is on the right track.
• The Soiencsi of Ethics. By Leslie Ste; hen. London Smith, Elder, and Ca.
This book has one great evidence of candour about it,—that Mr. Stephen never seems to satisfy himself with his own disc.is- sion of any part of the subject, but rather pursues his ethical questions through one phase after another of constantly chang- ing form, till he leaves, as it seems to us, the most important of them not only unanswered, but with something like the impression that they are unanswerable, at the close. Through the whole book we seem to be interrogating a sort of Proteus, who is always changing his shape, but who escapes from us without giving his reply, even at the last. For instance, the questions soon arise—Is there such a thing as human volition, and if so, what is it ? Is there such a thing as moral obligation Is there any power by which a bad man can become good, or any reason which you can expect him to recognise why he should become good ? If all these questions cannot be answered ex- plicitly, and answered in the affirmative, we should have said that there is no proper ethical science, though there may be an explanation of the distinction between good and bad, just as there is an explanation of the distinction between wise and foolish, or between beautiful and ugly. Mr. Leslie Stephen seems to us to reply to the first two questions in a manner which we should describe as a direct negative, though he him- self probably would not acquiesce in that statement. To the third, we understand him to reply that a bad man who is also sensible, and a man of some force of character, might easily find very good selfish reasons for bringing himself up to the average moral standard of his age and class, if he could but find the means for effecting this change in himself, but that it is almost impossible to assign any selfish reason why a man who is not already virtuous should even wish to be better than the average moral standard of his day, for the class to which he belongs, would be apt to require; and that even a highly virtuous man, who, being virtuous, would be, of course, rendered to a certain extent miserable by falling below his own standard, might, nevertheless, succeed in very effectually stilling his own remorse, and in persuading himself that he had chosen rightly, in choosing not to sacrifice life and happiness and every pleasant prospect to an ideal martyrdom. For the rest, Mr. Leslie Stephen holds that there will be martyrs in the good cause all the same ; and that they will only be the better and truer martyrs for having no command of what he evidently deems that moral sleight-of-hand by which religious people first take credit for virtue, as if it were purely disinterested, and then claim all the advantages of the so-called selfish system, by parading the rewards of another life for what they have dis- interestedly done.
In order to review this book with any profit, we must keep very close to one or two main questions which it raises. And in the present article, we can only attempt to touch one of them, which arises as follows :—Mr. Leslie Stephen regards the Moral Law as enjoining those qualities which are found to tend to the health and strength of the society to which those who possess them belong. He admits, and, indeed, maintains, that this is not the uniform or, usually, the explicit reason given for admiring those qualities. On the contrary, as the swifter birds gain an ad- vantage by their swiftness of which they probably never know the magnitude, and as the caterpillars marked like the leaves on which they feed, gain a protection from their markings, of which they are quite unconscious, so he holds that courage and temperance and truthfulness, and justice and pity, add so much to the moral stamina of the race in which those qualities are developed, that numberless individuals in whom these vir- tues are inbred, are quite unaware of the grounds of their own preference for them. Granted ; but it is obvious, and Mr. Leslie Stephen no doubt admits, that any one who accepts this mode of defining the moral virtues, as qualities tending to the health and strength of a society, must not import into the mean- ing of the words " the health and strength of society " the many qualities which he proposes to explain as the means to this health and strength. When you speak of the length of a bird's wing as being an advantage to it, or of the spots on a caterpillar or grub as preserving it from destruc- tion, you mean, of course, that these qualities are physical ad- vantages, that they save it from physical danger. So, too, you must mean by the qualities which minister to the health and strength of society, qualities which save it from danger or death as a society, which give it cohesion, which enable it to bold together when assailed by force, or conquered, or tempted by influences which have disintegrated other societies. The moral qualities are, in Mr. Stephen's view, means to this quasi- physical end,—antiseptics of the social cohesion. These qualities come to be valued in the end so highly as they are,—come, in short, to be esteemed moral qualities,—because they keep up this vitality, this cohesion. If lying, instead of truthfulness, could be essential to this social cohesion and vitality, lying instead of truthfulness would, so we understand Mr. Stephen, become one of the features of the Moral Law. Well, that being so, what we want to ask is this,—how is it that qualities which come into such high repute because they tend to social cohesion, ever lead us to put a much higher value on themselves than on the social vitality and cohesion to which they are subordinate P Supposing the bird came to know the importance of his greater swiftness of flight in preserving his race, would he ever think of patting the means above the end, and preferring to hold fast by his swiftness of flight, even though it should threaten the existence of his race P Supposing a caterpillar could foresee that his markings, instead of preserving his life, would, by some sudden change in the environment, become the chief cause of risk, would not the caterpillar at once sigh for the power of changing his dangerous markings for other safer markings ? If this be so, we want to know why it is that the moral qualities which, according to Mr. Leslie Stephen, have come to be so valuable to us only as protective of the cohesion and vitality of society, should ever be valued very much more than we value the cohesion and vitality of the society which they protect ? And especially we want to know how Mr. Leslie Stephen explains, what he never discusses in this book, how it happens that a change in the conditions of life which obvi- ously leads to the disintegration of society in a given time and place, can seem to be not only right, but morally obligatory on an ordinary human mind—on a mind, that is, which cannot, of course, venture to anticipate, without the teaching of experience, that this disintegration will tend to form a new and stronger society, in another time and another place ? We understand antiseptics for society. But how are we to justify antiseptics the first effect of which is profoundly disintegrating ; and how, es- pecially, are we to justify these on the basis of a pure experience- philosophy, like Mr. Leslie Stephen's P Our first criticism on this book is, then, the following. We hold that, as a matter of fact, men have a great deal more direct insight into moral laws than they have either implicit or explicit apprehension of the principles which tend to the health and vitality of society ;—that we judge of the health and vitality of society by the respect paid to moral laws, instead of judging of the moral laws by the health and vitality of the society; in other words, that Mr. Leslie Stephen has endeavoured to ex- plain the more known by the less known, instead of the less known by the more known, that the very cohesion of society which he makes the true end of the moral laws, is only mea- surable by ns in terms of those very moral laws which are treated by Mr. Stephen as the mere means to that much less intelligible end.
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