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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
THE FIELD OF ETHICS
BEING THE
FOR 1899
ALFORD PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
(OTfte nilicrsibc
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY GEORGE HERBERT PALMER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November,
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES
PAGE
I. Plan of the Course 3
II. Relation of Ethics to the Physical Sciences . . 6
III. Relation of Ethics to Philosophy 12
IV. Relation of Ethics to History 14
V.,VL The double meanings of Law and Cause ... 16
VII. The Normative contrasted with the Descriptive
Sciences 24
VIII. Danger of confusing the two 29
IX. Scheme of the Normative Sciences 32
X. Summary 33
References on the Normative character of Ethics 35
LECTURE II
ETHICS AND THE LAW
I. Affinities of the two 39
II. Hobbes and Bentham tend to identify them . . 41
III. But what is immoral is not always illegal ... 44
IV. Nor what is illegal immoral 46
V. Inadequate attempts at distinction ..... 49
VI. (1) The fixed penalties of the law 56
VII. (2) The order of assigning penalties .... 59
VIII. (3) The precision of legal ( obligation .... 66
IX. (4) Moral development not the aim of the law . 74
X. Though welcomed as accessory 78
XI. The objectivity of the law 82
XII. Outer and inner intention 84
References on Law and Ethics 86
IV CONTENTS
LECTURE in
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
I. The beautiful and the good generally felt to be
akin 89
II. Search for common qualities 94
III. Analysis of the Shaw Monument 95
IV. Its beauty proportional to its organic whole
ness 99
V. A similar wholeness found in the holy man . . 102
VI. But moralists have often been suspicious of
beauty 106
VII. (1) Because of the isolation of the beautiful
object 108
VIII. (2) Because its parts may be worthless or even
injurious 113
IX. (3) Because it is insusceptible of growth . . . 118
X. Yet Ethics owes large debts to ^Esthetics . . 121
XI. (1) Borrowing from Esthetics its fundamental
conception 122
XII. (2) Through it becoming reconciled to law . . 124
XIII. (3) And thus enabled to fix its goal .... 128
XIV. The inadequacies of Ethics compel farther ad
vance 130
References on Art and Ethics 132
LECTURE IV
ETHICS AND KELIGION AFFINITIES
I. Question of origins unimportant for our pur
pose 135
II. Early identification of Religion and Morality . 139
III. Many later experts have identified them . . . 142
IV. Social institutions assume their close connec
tion . . 146
CONTENTS V
V. To test the connection, examine a definition of
religion 148
VI. Lucretius s saying that fear begets gods . . . 149
VII. Fear fundamental in morality too 153
VIII. But there are two kinds of fear 155
IX. Illustrated by social timidity 157
X. Noble fear has love in it 161
XI. Religions divide according to their kind of fear 163
XII. Moral fears are also reverential 166
XIII. Conclusion 168
LECTURE V
ETHICS AND RELIGION DIVERGENCIES
I. The dutiful man at the moment of duty is not
always religious 171
II. Nor the religious man always dutiful .... 175
III. Morality emphasizes the finite, Religion the in
finite element 177
IV. From morality to religion is the natural order
of advance 182
V. Three famous definitions of religion .... 187
VI. The debts owed by morality to religion are (1)
horizon 193
VII. (2) Stability 195
VIII. (3) Hope 198
References on Religion and Ethics .... 202
LECTURE VI
CONCLUSION
I. Ethics is unsystematically presented in common
life as morality 205
II. Summary exhibit of the terms descriptive of a
moral being 209
III. Resulting definitions of Ethics 212
THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES
THIS Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation
in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late
WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE of Washington, D. C. (Harvard,
1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be
not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered
annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House,
during the season of Advent. Each lecturer shall have
ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each
course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lecture
ship will be further seen in the following citation from the
deed of gift by which it was established :
" The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue
the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire
it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth,
and the life ; to make known the meaning of the words of
Jesus, I am come that they might have life, and that they
might have it more abundantly. In accordance with the
large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late
Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose
memory the Lectures are established and also the founder
of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that
the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in
terests of humanity. With this end in view, the perfection
of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of
Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and
activity, the Lectures may include philosophy, literature,
art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology,
ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology
and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond
a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus defined,
no restriction is placed upon the lecturer."
I
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE
SCIENCES
THE FIELD OF ETHICS
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES
IN these lectures I propose to offer an in
troduction to ethics of a somewhat novel
kind. An introduction might properly
enough sketch in outline the principal doc
trines of moral science. It might analyze the
working of the will, and its relation to per
ception and the cognitive process. It might
explore the origin of the moral sentiments ;
or might attempt to determine the ultimate
aim by which, however remotely, conduct is
directed. I shall adopt none of these wise
methods, but shall simply try to fix the place
of ethics in a rational scheme of the universe.
I wish to see how it is parted off from neigh
boring provinces of knowledge, and what kind
of being he must be who is the object of its
4 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
study. Why should there be a science of
ethics at all, I ask. Is it an invention of
scholars ? Or, if all treatises on it were blotted
out to-day, would the toiling multitude recon
struct them to-morrow ? This is what I ask,
and the answer is that they certainly would.
The matters with which ethics is concerned
are such as we cannot fail to meet contin
ually. They permeate life. They affect every
occupation in which man engages. They con
sequently enter into many sciences besides
ethics. It is only the way in which they are
surveyed which renders them ethical. I want
to show how necessary this ethical way is, and
how distinct from every other mode of regard.
My plan may, accordingly, be stated as the
demarcation of the field of ethics by means
of a series of graded contrasts. Assuming for
a starting point the generally accredited
notion that ethics is the science of conduct
and character, I proceed to give this formal
definition significance, by first showing how
it separates ethics as one of the philosophi
cal sciences from the great supplemental
group of the physical on the one hand and
the historical on the other. This whole group
of successively eliminated sciences physics,
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 5
non-ethical philosophy, and history is then
seen to possess characteristics in common
which bring these as descriptive sciences into
contrast with certain others, of which ethics is
one, the normative sciences. The most con
spicuous of the normative sciences is the law,
from which ethics can be detached only by
throwing it over in the direction of a3sthetics.
From aesthetics it parts by affinities with reli
gion. But to show how it still remains dis
tinct from religion is a work of such delicacy
that I have thought it necessary, and fortu
nately also harmonious with the aims of this
foundation, to give to religion almost a third
of my entire space. A few words removing
ethics from the opinions of ordinary life close
the discussion.
By this selected series of discriminations,
the point of view of the moral sciences be
comes progressively fixed, the meaning of con
duct and character established, and the field
of ethics significantly limited in relation to
provinces more and more nearly adjacent.
These provinces themselves, however, claim
but a subordinate attention. They are con
sidered, not for their own sakes, but only in
order that by way of contrast they may con-
6 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
tribute something to our knowledge of ethics.
The exposition of them will therefore be inten
tionally meagre and inadequate. I summon
them simply to show wherein they are unlike
ethics. By their repeated exhibits of what eth
ics is not, I hope they may also disclose what it
is, and that thus their account of themselves
may prove to be a negative, limitative, and in
structive account of the nature of ethics itself.
II
To begin, then, the long inquiry. When
we attempt to break up this vast and various
universe and to split it into parts capable of
being described in relatively integral sciences, it
is not at once easy to see what line of cleavage
to adopt. Things, it is true, are but combina
tions of qualities, and of no very great num
ber of qualities either. Any one of these
hot, hard, living, moving may be selected,
set off in contrast with its opposite, and in
stantly the entire multitudinous world falls
into two neatly exclusive classes, in one or the
other of which everything conceivable will be
found. Whatever exists is either hot or not
hot, living or not living, hard or not hard,
and so on, no matter what pair of adjectives
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 7
we may arbitrarily choose. Yet a division by
sucb marks is rather formal than real. The
negative member is but slightly informatory.
We need to find a basis of division more
fundamentally significant, if it is to prove
fruitful for disclosing valuable distinctions.
Such a basis every age has found in the in
conspicuous fact of consciousness. The pri
mary division of the sciences has always been
into physics and philosophy, the physical
sciences being those which deal with the un
conscious world, the philosophical with the
conscious. Small and elusive as this mark of
distinction may at first appear, it is the one
from which all other discriminations are ulti
mately derived.
This fact makes a definition of conscious
ness itself desirable and impossible. If con
sciousness could be analyzed into anything
else, then that something else would become
our ultimate canon of division, and conscious
ness would fall back into a subordinate affair.
But though, being an elementary experience,
it cannot be disintegrated and defined, con
sciousness can be clearly illustrated, we may
easily fix our attention on it, and see how un
like it is to everything else.
8 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
When I hold a pencil before my eye, I am
in a condition different from that in which I
was a moment before. A sensuous impres
sion has been received, a mental modification
experienced. Again, I hold the pencil before
a mirror, and a change is wrought in it also.
Just as the rays of -light fell on the pupil of
my eye, so do they fall on the mirror s sur
face, inducing in it too a slight modification.
Is there any difference in the two effects ?
Not in that which at first seems to discrimi
nate them, their continuance. The mirror
may at least be conceived to have a kind of
memory like the eye, and for a brief instant
after the disappearance of the cause to retain
whatever effects have been induced. But
granting similarity both in the original pic
tures and in their continuance, there is still
an enormously important difference : I, the
possessor of the pupil, am aware of the pen
cil, and apparently the mirror is not. I have
consciousness, awaredness, which the mirror
lacks. Now certain sciences deal with the
facts, the laws, and the implications of such a
consciousness. Others deal with unconscious
objects. The former are the philosophical,
the latter the physical sciences. These two re-
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 9
present the broadest possible cleavage among
things.
Nor would this distinction be set aside if
we should confess that we cannot prove any
objects to be wholly unconscious. We can
not indeed. It may be that the sensitive
plant, when closing its leaf, is aware of what
it is doing. It may be that all nature has as
true a soul as we, and that each smallest phy
sical change is attended by its little mental
modification. But science concerns itself with
what is .accessible to proof, not with what
may possibly be true. Certain phases of the
universe cannot be understood except as mani
festations of consciousness. Other portions
give no sure sign of consciousness. Their
changes are explainable on different grounds.
Admitting, therefore, only what we are com
pelled to admit, we classify these other facts,
laws, and implications as unconscious phe
nomena, and take them for the subjects of
the physical sciences.
Nor again would the distinction be ren
dered unimportant if it could be shown that
the matters considered in the two groups of
sciences are never found in independent isola
tion. Grant that all mental or conscious phe-
10 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
nomena are known to us only in connection
with physical or unconscious changes ; grant
what has sometimes been alleged, that phy
sical facts cannot exist without a substratum
of mind ; even then, though the two orders
of fact were not parted, they might be dis
criminated. We should still, in the physical
sciences, study the unconscious aspects of
facts whose conscious aspects are at the
same time undergoing philosophical inspec
tion. Inseparable and supplemental but still
contrasted, philosophy and physics would
both be needed. In so far as an object is
conscious, we study it philosophically ; in so
far as unconscious, physically. The dualism
of mind and matter cannot cease to occupy
our thoughts even when the two have come
to be regarded as elements having a perpetual
mutual reference.
In which, then, of these great provinces
lies the field of ethics ? In that of philoso
phy, of course. Conduct and character, whose
laws are traced in ethics, differ from matter
and motion, with which the physical sciences
are concerned, precisely in this, that they are
exclusively conscious phenomena. Matter and
motion maybe the objects of consciousness, but
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 11
they do not seem to be constituted by it. The
chemical changes going on in me during any
given hour may be as important to my well-
being as my business plans; but not until,
like those plans, they become expressive of
conscious adjustments do they enter the moral
realm. If it were true that man could not by
taking thought add anything to his stature,
the facts of human growth would lose all
moral significance, and become, like the sup
posedly unconscious motions of the planets,
affairs of physical science. Ethics is con
cerned with the known and the steerable, not
with that which moves on its own blind way.
It is undoubtedly true that the conscious
always reposes on an unconscious basis, that
moral facts presuppose physical facts, that no
exact line can be drawn where unconscious
ness ceases and consciousness begins. It is
true that in a long train of human perform
ance only a few spots are illuminated by con
sciousness, the greater part of the train lying
as truly in the dark and outside the perform
er s cognizance as does his weight or the
associative processes of his memory. But
these important facts merely show not that
ethics is not a science, but that it is not a
12 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
self-sufficient science. It rests upon physics,
yet is not identified with physics. Our world,
as everybody knows, is one. Any single as
pect of it is always incomplete. Its manifold
sciences have a mutual interdependence, each
representing only a special point of view from
which the common material may be surveyed.
The point of view of ethics, as of philosophy
in general, is that of consciousness or internal
cognizability. The point of view of physics
is the acceptance of conditions which are
assumed not to require consciousness as the
ground of their existence.
Ill
Ethics is thus by means of consciousness
separated from the physical sciences and in
cluded in the general field of philosophy.
But this field, too, has many divisions psy
chology, logic, epistemology, metaphysics.
Which of them gives an account of conduct
and character ? None of them. Conceivably
a being might have been created fully en
dowed with consciousness but altogether con
templative and incapable of action. He might
be aware of everything that happens without
and within, yet over these clearly observed
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 13
transactions exercise no control. A psycho
logical being of this sort would not be a;
moral one. He would sit as an idle specta- /
tor at his own drama. Something of this sort
we actually find in day-dreaming, in involun
tary memory, in the multitude of sensuous
experiences which come without our bidding.
If these made up the whole of human life,
ethics would never have been heard of. But
occasionally consciousness reacts upon the
matters of which it is aware. They change
under its influence. It becomes a factor in
producing and guiding them. Hence arises
the need of a science which shall explore the
laws of this factorial reaction.
This is the task of ethics, to analyze con
sciously directed conduct. Each of the many
philosophical sciences examines some special
phase of the common consciousness. Meta
physics studies its nature and the truths which
are involved in its very existence ; psycho
logy, the facts through which from instant to
instant conscious being manifests itself ; epis-
temology, the extent and validity of the know
ledge which consciousness affords ; logic, the
processes by which that knowledge comes.
But the field of ethics is different from all
14 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
these. It does not ask, with metaphysics,
" What am I, and under what conditions can I
be ? " Nor with the other philosophical sci
ences, " What and how do I know ? " It has
its own question, " What and how can I do ? "
All its discussions assume a being who counts
as a causative factor in fashioning conduct.
And this conduct is regarded as unlike other
motions in that it is expressive of human pur
pose.
IV
But if through consciousness we are able
to separate ethics from physics, and through
its active character from all the other philo
sophical sciences, will not ethics become a
branch of history ? History is the record of
conduct and character. It studies how men
have behaved. It investigates their charac
ters, analyzes their motives, and shows under
what circumstances a given course of conduct
^#C is likely to arise. Ethics does the same. His
tory has accordingly profoundly influenced
ethical theory, particularly in our time. The
grounds of obligation, the nature of con
science, the compulsive force of institutions,
the organization of society and its influence
in gradually controlling the selfish impulses
ETHICS AND THE DESCBIPTIVE SCIENCES 15
of the individual, have been traced by the
historical method, as never before, into the
dark backward and abysm of time. To know
the origin of morality has been felt to be the
one sure mode of knowing morality itself, and
to discover the ways in which men have be
haved to be our chief justification for formu
lating laws of how they ought to behave.
With these hopes of an historical recon
struction of ethics I can only partially sym
pathize. For, closely allied with history as
ethics undoubtedly is, its point of view is still
conspicuously different. Primarily ethics tries
to survey a deed in its rise and genesis, be
fore it is committed to existence ; history,
after the deed has become a part of the
world s order. Or if as a secondary matter
the moralist sometimes reflectively looks back
upon deeds already performed, he does so
with thoughts of praise and censure, regard
ing what has happened as an event by no
means inevitable, and feeling called on to de
cide whether some one of many other possible
results might not have been preferable. He
contemplates, in short, a world unfixed and
adjustable. He considers every deed as in
some sense free, and imagines that a chief
16 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
influence in bringing it about was a doer s
choice. To the historian, on the other hand,
looking at events from a point of view after
their occurrence, considerations of choice,
freedom, preference, and alternative possibil
ity, are unsuitable. Schoolboys occasionally
discuss what the condition of England would
now be if William the Conqueror had been
defeated at Hastings. But to a historian such
discussions are idle. Facts are settled things,
those of humanity like those of the physical
world being of interest only because it is
possible to trace their firm connections with
others which preceded and followed. The pos
sibility that something else might have arisen,
a possibility which is at the very heart of eth
ics, history discards. Where this has dropped
out, there is no morality. If man s saddest
words are "it might have been," they an
nounce also his highest glory. Only where
tongue or pen can utter these does a moral
situation arise.
But having now seen how ethics judges a
human being so far as he is conscious, active,
and free, and having thus successively nar-
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 17
rowed our field by the exclusion of physics,
psychology, and history, we bring a new set
of distinctions into view. For the three ex
cluded sciences show a certain similarity of
procedure, and by that similarity are con
trasted with the methods of ethics. This
fresh contrast, generated by the preceding
three, is so widely and deeply significant that
it cannot be stated as briefly as they, but will
require for its explanation the remainder of
this lecture.
By a science, we mean such an organized
body of facts and laws that each of them
has a bearing and influence on all the rest.
Of course, few or no sciences have reached
this completeness. The conception represents
merely the goal toward which all tend. The
ideal is that a group of facts and laws shall
be so exactly determined in their interlocking
relationships that a change in our knowledge
of one would induce a chancre in what we
O
must believe about all. Such an ideal is as
applicable to ethics as to. the other sciences.
No less than they, it studies the linkage of
phenomena and modifies the meaning of any
supposed law in order to bring it into adjust
ment with what in some other part of its field
18 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
is found to be law. Let any moralist change
his opinion ever so slightly about the facts of
human freedom, and there will come a corre
sponding change in his thoughts of obligation,
of conscience, of human society, and of good
ness itself.
But among the sciences, all alike organized
by this common ideal of systematizing law,
special groupings arise according to the mean
ings which they severally attach to law. Most
simply, the word signifies a sequence of events:
e. g., A, B, C, and D appear together and
always in a certain order. Were not laws of
this sort possible, foresight would be cut off.
If we were ignorant of regularity in events,
when one occurred how could we guess what
would happen next ? But we are not so ig
norant. To a good degree life is intelligible,
and is being made more so by each year s
discoveries. The dullest person on seeing the
sun set expects it to rise the next morning,
and the work of the highest science is merely
the increase and verification of similar expec
tancies. The later stages of any sequence are
thought of as effects of the earlier, and we
sometimes even figure a force as passed along
from one to the other. B is represented as
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 19
having not only its own motion, but a motion
which it partly derives from its predecessor
A ; C, a motion partly derived from B ; and
D, a motion partly derived from C. The total
series is so largely due to that which first
occurred that we are able to say it is all a
manifestation of one single original force.
Under the guidance of this conception of
law, philosophy too may be studied. Mental
states no less than physical may be thought
of as coming together in groups or succes
sive trains, each new idea induced by those
which have already appeared. Occurrences
of the mind may be regarded as under the
same sort of law as obtains in the outer
world, and we may apply to the study of them
the same observational methods as give us
our knowledge of the succession of physical
changes. This is precisely what is done in
psychology. In it we have a simple chronicle
of the facts of mind. Regularities observed
among our strange inner happenings are re
corded as psychological laws. Such laws are
mere announcements of the time-order in
which certain facts have repeatedly presented
themselves. They describe the sequences of
our mental modifications without looking for
20 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
farther cause than the existence of the se
quence itself. Laws of this character may be
called descriptive laws, and the sciences built
upon them are the descriptive sciences. Such
are the physical, psychological, and historical
sciences already considered. They all alike
describe fixed trains of fact, and may indiffer
ently be said either not to concern themselves
at all with questions of causation or to treat
the earlier stages of any given sequence as
the sufficient cause out of which all the re
mainder flows.
VI
When, however, we inspect a being capa
ble of conduct and character, new meanings
gather about the conceptions of event, cause,
and law. To make the matter clear, let us
closely examine a case where both kinds of
causation are at work. Here is an engine
with a single car attached. The engine runs
along its track and the car follows. What
makes the car follow? The engine, we say.
The engine, generating within itself a force of
steam, imparts this force through a piston to
its wheels ; these in turn send it on to the link
which binds car and engine together, from
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 21
which it is transmitted by means of car trucks
to the revolving wheels themselves. Once
operating here, the whole car is set in motion.
The causation is sequential. Each new stage
is controlled by that which went before. Out
of the motion which has been, comes the mo
tion which at any instant will be.
But extend the illustration, and suppose a
man running after the car. What makes
him run ? Asking what made the car run,
we said it was the engine. When we now
ask what makes the man run, shall we not
say it is the car ? This is his antecedent, as
the engine was that of the car. But the car
operates causally in a different way from the
engine. Not merely is its influence trans
mitted through sight and mind, instead of
through links and pistons, but there appear
in the man curious imaginative anticipations
which transform the influence received from
the car into an altogether novel kind of cau
sation. The car s motion is induced by a
fact ; the man s by a depicted possibility.
For what made the car run was a state of
things already existing in the engine. The
forces there had to be in actual existence be
fore the car would move. But what moved
22 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
the man was the bare possibility of being on
the car. As a fact he was not on the car.
Had he been, he would not have run.
It may be urged, however, that a fact is
still necessary to start the motion ; for the
imagined picture of himself on the car is itself
a fact of the man s mind. But while this is
true, it is unimportant. That picture gets all
its cogency not from what is actual in it, but
from that in it which is as yet unrealized. It
would therefore be untrue to say that the
moving is caused by an idea, a mental fact. It
is caused by an ideal which, though on one
side of itself a mental fact, draws all its causa
tive power from the mere possibilities depicted
in it. So soon as the picture in the man s
mind is realized and he finds himself actually
seated in the car, he is quiet. Reality brings
personal causation to an end. But it is reality,
and that alone, which generates mechanical
causation. This absence of actuality is the
point on which we need to fix attention if we
would comprehend moral causation. What
ever exists is always insufficient to start per
sonal action. That ideal which alone directs
the whole moral process is always anticipatory
and not realized until the conclusion of the pro-
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 23
cess. With its realization the process ceases.
We may accordingly contrast the two kinds
of causation neatly enough by speaking of
one as causation out of what is, the other out
of what is not ; causation out of the past, and
out of the future; causation out of reality,
and out of possibility.
The difference between these two, and be
tween the laws which express them, is so
momentous that I am inclined to coin for
them two technical terms which may precisely
map out for each its way of working. That
which moves from reality to reality, from
actual A to B, then from actual B to C, then
from actual C to D, I would call sequential
causation. But that which, starting with pos
sible D, summons actual A, B, and C to coor
dinate themselves accordingly, I would call
anti-sequential causation ; and I should not
much care whether anti were spelled with a
final e or i. Spelled with an e, it would de
clare how all personal, moral, purposive, cau
sation comes out of a future. Spelled with an
iy it would show that by doing so it com
pletely reverses the order of physical, me
chanical, inert, causation. In anti-sequential
causation the ideal cause first discloses itself
24 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
at the end of the transaction, and is therefore
often spoken of as the final cause ; whereas
the sequential cause, present at the beginning
and actual throughout, is known as the effi
cient cause.
VII
Parallel with this distinction among causes
runs a similar distinction among sciences.
Those concerned with tracing the operation
of sequential causes sciences like physics,
psychology, history are the descriptive sci
ences; those which are busied with anti-se
quential causation, like ethics, the norma
tive. The reasons for the name of the first
set are now obvious. In these we do nothing
but describe a series of facts. That light
moves in vacua at the rate of 186,300 miles a
second; that, when not interfered with by
consciousness, sensitive experiences transform
themselves into motor manifestations ; that
the baser metal in a nation s coinage tends to
drive out the more costly, these are laws of
a physical, psychological, and historical sort
which merely state the fixed orders of occur
rence observed in their respective fields.
They state no reasons for the occurrence.
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 25
All is description, description of fact. Or if
the matters described in any wise differ from
fact, they do so merely by being not facts of
a single time and place, but facts which are
believed to contain an always.
On the other hand, the moral sciences have
it for their business to trace the working of
anti-sequential causation. They are not sat
isfied with the statement of a situation. Tell
an ethical philosopher that in Barataria par
ents are always honored, and he will still want
to know whether parents there approve of
being honored, whether children approve of
honoring them, and whether the reported facts
result from such double approval. To say of
any action, " Men have always done it," is not
the same as to prove its moral worth. Should
slaves be held ? should alcohol be drunk ?
should competition guide trade ? should white
lies be told ? these are questions not to be
settled by observing what men have done.
We must ask why they have done what they
have, and whether they might not better have
done something else ? Are these acts such as
can morally be approved ? Possibly where
human facts all run one way it may be toler
ably safe to take such approval for granted.
26 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
But it is this clear-sighted approval, and it
alone, which makes the facts morally impor
tant. By themselves, these facts have no
ethical significance. They get it only by ex
hibiting a norm, or standard of desirability,
at work in some mind and bringing about
this particular kind of conduct in preference
to some other, which might also conceivably
have occurred. It is the constitution and
working of these ideal standards which ethics
investigates.
An ethical law, accordingly, unlike a his
torical, psychological, or physical law, is a
mandate or imperative and not a description.
Setting up its standard of what would be best
and comparing actual conditions therewith, it
finds these defective and bids them be brought
into accord with its ideal. Of course they do
not always come into accord. An ideal is
sometimes unworkable and sometimes un-
worked. It may be acknowledged as a law
and yet not be carried out, while a single
clear departure from a descriptive law would
entirely destroy its credit. Indeed this test
of fracture is often convenient for fixing the
character of a law. The law of supply and
demand, for example : is it a natural law, a law
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 27
in the same sense as the transmission of light?
In their ardent moments economists speak as
if it were. But were it so, we should not
need to be warned not to break it. Broken
it could not be. If it is a law and breakable,
it must be a normative law, expressing an
economic desideratum to which it summons
men to conform on pain of belittlement in
case of transgression. A good case illus
trating the easy confusion of the two kinds
of law is found in Mommsen s " History of
Rome " (book v. chapter vii.), when he writes :
" By virtue of the law that a civilized people
absorbs its neighbors who are in intellect
ual nonage a law which is as universally
valid and as much a law of nature as the
law of gravity, the Italian nation was en
titled to reduce to subjection the Greek states
of the East." But we do not say of the law
of gravity that it is entitled to do anything.
As a fact-law, it acts inevitably. The norm
ative law something very different alone
expresses judgments of propriety. The verb
of the normative sciences is consequently not
the verb " to be," or any part of it, but the
verb " ought." And " ought " itself is not
a verb for all times and persons. Strictly
28 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
speaking, it is defective in everything but the
imperative mode, present tense, first person,
and singular number. The subjects explored
in the descriptive sciences existence, fact,
settled reality are announced by "is" and
" are." " Ought " announces a normal stan
dard, ideal, or preference. Normative sciences
scrutinize the validity of these standards and
determine the means and degrees of their ap
plication. Such sciences accordingly declare
estimates of worth and not of fact. They
assess one course of conduct as better than
another. They are sciences of appreciation.
As nothing except a person is so dually
potential as to be capable of a better and a
worse, these sciences all attach to persons and
to persons as capable through action of bene
fiting or deteriorating themselves. Probably
all estimates of worth are ultimately personal.
We often seem to assess the value of phy
sical objects and to feel that one star differs
from another in glory ; but in such cases we
are thinking of the physical world as the hab
itation of conscious man, and are gauging its
worth by its adaptation to his knowledge,
activity, enjoyment, or admiration. To a per
son to Adam ah 1 things properly come
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 29
for assessment. The announcement and criti
cism of that assessment is performed by the
word " ought " in the normative sciences.
It should be observed, too, how fully this
most important of distinctions is recognized
in ordinary speech. I have called the two
groups of sciences the descriptive and the
normative, a pair of terms which because of
their very technicality can be kept exact.
The normative sciences I have also sometimes
called sciences of appreciation. But substan
tially the same line of distinction is had in
mind when the natural, positive, or observa
tional sciences, the sciences of the actual, are
spoken of as unlike the moral, practical, regu
lative, judicial, teleological, the sciences of the
ideal. These are merely different ways of
designating the same thing.
VIII
But though the records of language show
that others beside philosophers are well ac
quainted with this contrast, it is not easy to
hold the distinction steadily in mind, and to
apply it with precision. Commonly enough the
two kinds of causation are confused. Listen to
people trying to track a series of events which
30 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
has brought about a given result. They are
as likely as not to interpolate among them
anti-sequential matters, considerations drawn
from beauty, morality, or design. When the
popular scientists talk about evolution and
progress, we are often left uncertain whether
those processes are to be understood as mere
descriptions of what has happened or whether
some causative influence is supposed to flow
from the end toward which the process tends.
The very word " tends " is itself ambiguous.
Errors like this, where ideals are mistaken
for natural causes, do not corrupt our lives.
More disastrous morally is the substitution
of natural causes for ideals. Something like
this occurs whenever a person excuses con
duct with an explanation drawn from facts.
I ask my carpenter why a drawer he has
made does not run smoothly, and he is per
fectly satisfied when he has told me that it is
because the joints are not altogether true and
the wood has swelled. These are certainly
causes, sequential causes, of the uneven move
ment. But it would be better for the carpen
ter and me if he would turn his attention to
the anti-sequential causes his lack of fore
sight, his haste, and his disposition to do bad
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 31
work for good pay. What a multitude of
such inappropriate explanations deceive our
souls and keep us in permanent degradation.
"I always get vexed when I am hurried."
" My way is to speak out my mind on all oc
casions." But does one do well to be vexed
and inconsiderate ? This all-important ques
tion cannot be shelved by statements of psy
chologic fact. There is nothing more immoral
than moral psychology. Yet many a man
feels himself discharged from responsibility
when once he can describe himself.
And well he may, for he cannot describe
himself. Even to make the attempt is to deny
his personal character. Nothing distinguishes
him from natural objects except his ability
through consciousness to figure future condi
tions and voluntarily to accept or reject them
as corporate parts of himself. This being a
process which must go on as long as the per
son does, is it not absurd at any particular
moment to say what a person is ? How can
we call characteristics finished which, if per
sonal, must be still in the making? A com
pleted person is a contradiction in terms. Our
proper business is to accept an ever-expanding
life. " Ought," the normative verb, is the
32 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
one applicable to so plastic a being as a per
son. " Is " fits objects already constituted and
tolerably fixed. While a picture is under way,
no artist says of it, " This is my picture," for
that is exactly what it is not. But a person is
always under way. Let us not, then, speak
of ourselves as things : " I am lazy," " I am
learned," " This trait came to me from my
grandfather." In reality, morality has nothing
to do with facts ; or, rather, it has this to do
with them, to take them as its point of depar
ture. While the descriptive sciences are busy
discovering the laws of what already is, the
laws of the normative sciences declare what
ought to be.
IX
How many normative sciences are there?
As many as there are distinguishable fields of
human activity. Ultimately, all action centres
in the will and from it goes forth to modify
the world we inhabit. The root, therefore, of
all normative sciences is ethics, the science of
the will par excellence. But this root spreads
and branches. Knowing is an active process,
and has its ethics, summed up in logic and
epistemology. These sciences do not chroni-
ETHICS AND THE DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCES 33
cle the facts of men s reasonings, but attempt
to establish canons by which reasonings may
be proved to be good or bad. So, too, there
is a kind of activity in the feelings, sufficient
at least to make them amenable to standards of
better and worse. ^Esthetics investigates these
standards. In it our admirations of beauty
are scrutinized, classified, organized. Laws
of taste are formulated which subsequently
assume no little magisterial power, and are
occasionally allowed even to employ the sacred
word " ought." Beside these greater norma
tive sciences, there are the subordinate ones
of economics, sociology, pedagogics, grammar,
and rhetoric. Ah 1 these, though containing
much observational material, are by no means
purely descriptive. They have ethical roots,
and show in their several fields how one ought
to act.
X
To sum up. I have sought to find the field
of ethics and so to reach a definition of con
duct and character. Dividing the universe in
the broadest possible way into matters which
exhibit consciousness and those which do not,
into philosophy and physics, ethics ob
viously falls in the former section. But a
34 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
moral being must be not merely cognitive.
He must be active also. He must possess con
sciousness, not as a trait attendant on all
others, but as that which directs and organ
izes all into the unity of an expanding life.
The deeds of a being so organized are re
corded in history, where, however, alternatives
are not considered. But a person is in some
sense free, that is, he has at each instant more
than a single line of conduct before him.
Hence, a physical, psychological, historical
description of him is always incomplete, neg
lecting as it does the unfulfilled possibilities
of his nature. The principles which decide
which of these possibilities he shall fulfill,
ethics establishes. Its laws are accordingly
not descriptions of what a person is and how
he has acted, but are commands declaring
what he should be and do. Laws of this
anticipatory sort express a peculiar kind of
causation and give rise to a special group of
sciences, of which ethics is everywhere the
root.
REFERENCES ON THE NORMATIVE CHARACTER
OF ETHICS.
Sidgwick s Methods of Ethics, ch. i. 1-2.
Bradley s Ethical Studies, p. 174.
Alexander s Moral Order and Progress, p. 62.
Balfour s Philosophic Doubt, Appendix.
Mackenzie s Manual of Ethics, ch. i.
Royce s Spirit of Modern Philosophy, lect. xii.
Dewey s Outlines of Ethics, p. 174.
James s Will to Believe, p. 189.
Wuudt s Facts of the Moral Life, Introduction.
n
ETHICS AND THE LAW
n
ETHICS AND THE LAW
A PERSON, then, a being capable of conduct
and character, is one whose movements are
directed not by past facts but by ideals of a
future, ideals depicting one course of action
as marked by a worth superior to some other.
Such a person, we might say, is directed
rather by the quality of his causes than by
their quantity. The laws that guide him will
be of the nature of assessments, or compara
tive estimates of worth. And these laws will
always presuppose that they may be disre
garded and that he on whom they are laid
may accept a lower worth in place of a higher.
Indeed, he may altogether neglect considera
tion of worth and allow unassessed forces to
control him precisely as they do things. So
conceived, a person would seem to be the very
being contemplated by the law, especially by
40 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
criminal law. May not fresh light be thrown
on conduct and character by studying the
resemblance and contrast between the legal
and ethical conceptions of a person? That
is the problem of the present lecture.
Certainly ethics has closer affinities with
the law than with any of the provinces
hitherto considered. In method, in beings
addressed, and in subject-matter the two sci
ences substantially coincide. Their procedure
is the same, for no more than ethics is the
law a descriptive science. It is not satisfied
with investigating what has happened. Its
statute book erects a standard and calls each
member of the community to conform himself
thereto. Its laws are commands, and in com
mon with ethics it employs the majestic and
unreal verb ought. This you ought to do ;
whether you have done it in the past, or
whether it ever has been done, is unimpor
tant. Henceforth this must be, it declares,
without regard to the actual. Its eye is on
the future. Like ethics, it considers only
the possible, the ideal ; and through specific
laws seeks to give reality to that ideal.
Ethics and the law have thus the same
mode of regard. Both are normative and man-
ETHICS AND THE LAW 41
datory. Both, too, address their commands
to persons, free beings who know a better and
a worse in conduct, and are assumed capable
of giving active expression to their ideals of
what good conduct should be. Statute books
are in reality compendiums of personal ideals.
They classify the possible situations of human
life, assessing the worth of each, and are as
confident as ethical treatises that excellence
so delineated can be reached. Moreover the
subject-matter of the two provinces is largely
indistinguishable. Arson, murder, the keep
ing of contracts, are concerns at once of
ethics and the law. They and matters like
them fall under a double sway. What the
law deals with is dealt with by ethics. What
ethics deals with may also be dealt with by
the law.
II
Accordingly every period of ethical inquiry
has had its writers who have regarded the
two provinces as too closely related to be sun
dered. Their practical identity was asserted,
for example, by Hobbes when ethics first
arose in England. According to Hobbes, all
government, civil and moral alike, is in the
power of the prince. Whatever he reckons
42 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
wrong, that is wrong. Nor is this opinion so
absurd as at first sight it appears. Even if
we do not with Hobbes think a prince the
perfect embodiment of the governmental idea,
we still in another form reach substantially
his conclusion when we give to the enact
ments of a legislature ultimate authority and
hold that these can establish right and wrong.
Hobbes merelv carries this view to its extreme.
tf
His prince, like our legislature, can cause that
to be wrong to-day, which was right yesterday.
Nothing, Hobbes thinks, is right or wrong in
itself and independently of positive law. Out
side law, morality does not eist. I am not
acquainted with any other English writer
who identifies the two fields so completely,
but in our own age a widely influential moral
ist has closely approximated them. Jeremy
Bentham, who at the beginning of the nine
teenth century did more than any other man
of his time to rationalize the laws of England,
entitles his masterly book "A Treatise on
Morals and Legislation." He might almost
as weh 1 have called it morals or legislation ;
for though Bentham sometimes speaks as if
there were a special point of view appropriate
to ethics, and another slightly different for
ETHICS AND THE LAW 43
legislation, the difference is not insisted on.
o
With Bentham the legislative features of
morality are its dominant features.
Evidently, then, when we try to separate
ethics from jurisprudence we undertake a
serious task. The boundaries of the two are
so nearly conterminous that the partition is a
matter of toil and subtlety. I believe, how
ever, that they can be parted. Indeed, I think
it of great consequence for the understanding
of our subject that they should be. Yet I
must acknowledge that it is the same subject-
matter which is looked at by the lawyer in
one way, by the moralist in another. To find
the precise point of view from which the mat
ter is surveyed by the moralist is all I seek.
In searching for it I shall not examine the
nature and niceties of the law itself. That
is unnecessary, and something, too, for which
I am not fitted. I merely inquire what light
the law can shed on my special subject of
ethics. And as the relations of the civil law
to ethics are generally more remote and in
tricate than those of the criminal law, I shall
conduct the discussion chiefly in terms of the
latter. For the sake of brevity, too, I shall
allow myself to speak of all offenses against
44 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
the law as crimes, in the same way as we
speak of those against religion as sins and
those against morals as vices.
Ill
At the very start, it is obvious that as a
fact, whatever the reasons, certain sorts of
conduct fall more naturally under the cogni
zance of the law and others under that of
ethics. The immoral is not always the illegal,
nor the illegal the immoral. Let us assure
ourselves of the first of these propositions.
When we ask what species of immorality is
most widely destructive, what checks personal
life most effectually, some of us would incline
to say it is indolence. Morality is a provision
for the widest possible action. Indolence
hinders action. It might well be held, then,
that the tap-root of vice is laziness. Men are
too sluggish to do what they ought to do. A
multitude of vices are but manifestations of
slackness. A character decays about as rapidly
which allows itself to be lazy as one which
has a positive craving for vice. Accordingly
we might expect, since indolence is so de
structive of moral fibre, that the first page of
the statute book would be given up to for-
ETHICS AND THE LAW 45
biddals of it. But one may hunt that statute
book from cover to cover and never find the
smallest objection to indolence. Of course I
speak merely of indolence itself and not of
certain objectionable consequences which may,
or may not, flow from it. When through
slackness I wrong my neighbor, the law re
sents the wrong. But it is the social dam
age which is punished, not the inner vice.
One may be as lazy as he pleases, provided
he brings no damage to others, and the law
will let him go.
Perhaps some one may think that the vice
of indolence is but a vague one and may im
agine that it is neglected by the law on this
account. Let us consider, then, a highly
specific vice, the vice of lying. What single
act more certainly declares the dastard ? We
scorn a liar ; for society is possible only where
there is mutual confidence. The liar is an
anti-social creature. He breaks down the
bridges between man and man, and by his
own act renders himself an outcast. Auda
cious, too, as is lying, it is ordinarily prompted
by cowardice. Liars fear truth. Not un
wisely did the founders of Harvard College
select " Veritas " as the sacred word which
46 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
a young man should cherish throughout
his training if he would come to clean and
influential manhood ; for in modern commer
cial life, more than in any other period of the
world s history, truthfulness is a central vir
tue. Accordingly we might naturally expect
that modern law would visit its infraction
with the severest penalties. In fact, no pen
alty against lying exists no penalty, I mean,
directed against the real evil, the act of utter
ing falsehood. When a liar breaks a con
tract, the aggrieved party can exact payment
for the loss. But the law overlooks precisely
that element in the lie which strikes us as its
most vicious feature its necessary debase
ment of the character of the liar ; while the
casual effects in possible damage to other
members of the community it relentlessly
forbids and pursues.
IV
These two cases will suffice for half of my
purpose. They show that the immoral is not
always the illegal. But is the illegal always
the immoral ? That is the other half of the
question. To prove my ultimate point, that
the two fields of ethics and the law, while
ETHICS AND THE LAW 47
often overlapping, are not designed to cover
precisely the same ground, I need to name
some matters of the law which are not moral
matters.
There comes to me a vivid remembrance of
my boyhood. Born and bred on Green Street,
Boston, one day when I was but a child I
sauntered down Court Street. Passing Scol-
lay s Buildings, I found a crowd blockading
Court Square and the streets surrounding the
old court-house. Soldiers held the people
back. Curiosity, stimulated by the uniforms
of the soldiers, drew me on. I gained a posi
tion in front of the broad stone steps, and had
hardly reached it when the great doors of the
court-house opened and a black man came
out, guarded on each side by officers. He was
led through the two files of soldiers which
stretched down State Street as far as my eyes
could see. It was Anthony Burns, being taken
to the United States vessel which carried him
back to slavery. My blood boiled, and the
blood of all Boston boiled. We said, this
may be legal, but it is oufrageously immoral.
We acknowledged that the law should be
obeyed. We did not blame the two sheriffs
who conducted the shrinking negro through
48 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
the glittering lines. They were doing their
duty, and we believed them to be as indig
nant as ourselves that such a duty was laid
upon them. What we blamed was the law.
A bad law, we called it. Being law, it must
be obeyed; but its very existence struck at
morality. Morality and the law, never quite
coincident, were here in open conflict.
Seldom is the antagonism so extreme.
What enters into the law cannot usually be
immoral, unless the community which makes
law is itself demoralized. Upright commu
nities repeal immoral laws. Yet this is not
always easy. We all know how the event
which I have described came about. Through
compromises imbedded in our Constitution,
and through peculiar economic conditions in
the Southern States, an immorality almost im
possible to check was spread through the
land. Cases of this sort are at least common
enough to compel us to scrutinize the moral
character of all laws, and thus to bring them
for final judgment before a higher court than
that which originally enacts. But commonly
enough non-moral matters enter into the law,
matters which would not have been morally
commanded had they not first been legally
ETHICS AND THE LAW 49
commanded. Undoubtedly one ought to pay
duties on whatever property of his passes the
custom-house ; but he could never discover
the obligation by inspecting the moral code
as written on the fleshy tablets of his heart.
To find it, he must turn to the statute book.
It is not immoral not to pay these duties
except as they are commanded by the State.
To fail in them then, is to be an immoral
person. And this is true of a large body of
laws. They relate to matters which but for
the specific mandates which bring them to our
notice would lie altogether outside the moral
range.
Considerations like these are, I believe, suf
ficient to establish the fact that the fields of
morality and the law are different. It will be
a longer matter to show why they differ,
wherein they differ, and how much of the one
lies outside the bounds of the other.
V
Before, however, I state my own opinions
on these puzzling points, I want to call atten
tion to some common methods of distinguish
ing the two fields which do not seem to me
altogether sound. It is often said that the
50 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
law differs from morality in this, that its pre
cepts have a negative character. The law
forbids; it does not, like morality, prompt.
The proper dictum of the law is, " Thou shalt
not." Until we transgress, we are not aware
of the law s existence. Policemen watch sin
ners, not saints. Criminals know a good deal
about officers of the law, but the rest of the
community goes its way unconcerned about
them. The law, in short, contains no incen
tive. It is repressive, hindering evil ; while,
in the moral life, we are forever pressed on
into goodness.
But I do not find these assertions true.
The law of the State does not always restrain,
nor moral law always prompt. There is posi
tive prescription in both. By the civil law
the forms to be used in contracts are laid
down with much exactness. The maker of a
contract must always be of sound mind, and
the signature on the deed be unquestionably
his. These are positive precepts. Even in
the subordinate province of city ordinances,
the command is apt enough to take on a posi
tive form. Sidewalks must be kept clear. It
may be said that such an order is in reality
negative, and means that the sidewalk is not
ETHICS AND THE LAW 51
to be incumbered. Undoubtedly ; and the
fact that it can be stated in either the positive
or negative form is significant. In fact, there
is no such thing as a, purely positive or purely
negative statement. In all positive prescrip
tions the law is forbidding something, and in
its forbiddals it also prescribes. I do not see,
therefore, how we can say that the law con
fines itself to negations. That is impossible.
And even if it were not so, this would not dis
criminate the law from ethics. For do we not
find the dicta of the moral life itself predomi
nantly expressed in negative terms ? Lying
and laziness seem more often forbidden than
truth and diligence to be commanded. Ex
periences on this point may differ, but I sus
pect we are more generally conscious of our
selves as moral at moments of temptation,
moments when we need to be restrained, than
in our times of normal and proper activity.
Do we eat our dinners because we feel a
moral prompting ? Is it not rather that when
we incline to improper food we perceive duty
to be connected with eating ? I think so.
Psychologically, I believe it will be found that
our moral constitution reports itself more fre
quently in negative than in positive terms.
52 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
At times when no temptation is in sight we
are not very fully aware of possessing a moral
nature.
It is not necessary here to justify the cre
ative dealings of God with man. We are
made in a certain way. That is sufficient for
my purpose. Yet it may be well to see how
it happens that we suffer no harm from the
fact that nine times out of ten morality comes
in the form, of forbiddal. The truth is, ac
tions are not directed by morality alone. If
they were, our instincts, unconscious impulses,
and past habits would be useless. But these
are in fact the chief moving agencies of our
lives. For the most part, they conduct us
safely, swiftly, and with the least waste of
energy, to the same ends which conscious
reason would select. Only when instinctive
guidance blunders, do we require the interven
tion of a more discerning power. That man
will have the most free and effective life who
gives full play to his instincts so long as these
move on approved paths. But the moment
suspicion arises that he is on the wrong track,
he will be wise to pause, to call on instinct to
explain itself and show whether its goal will
bear inspection. The negative uses of con-
ETHICS AND THE LAW 53
science are accordingly of far greater conse
quence than the positive. The function of
prompting is usually more healthily taken by
the blinder parts of our nature, conscience re
serving itself for a veto power. The man who
eats his dinner as a moral duty will probably
not digest it as well as one whose appetite bids
him eat. No doubt there are cases where in
stinct supplies no initiative ; or even, on ac
count of past habit and novel circumstances,
supplies an erroneous one ; and here we must
act simply on positive moral command. But
such cases of purely positive prompting are
no more usual in morality than in the law.
Another suggestion often made for parting
the two fields seems to me of much greater
interest, though I cannot yield it a full as
sent. The law, it is said, looks on the out
ward appearance, morality on the heart.
Results are the prime concern of the law,
motives of morality. And since morality
judges man s inner nature, I may justly ac
count myself upright, though a long train
of disasters has issued from me. I did not
intend them. My purpose was to bless
my fellows. By some untoward event, that
which was designed as benefit went forth as
54 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
injury. Morally, I am not responsible,
though legally I may be. The law and mo
rality, dealing with the outer and the inner
life, exactly supplement each other. What
one regards, the other disregards.
Once more, I do not see that this mode of
separation, admirably clear as it is, quite fits
the facts. The law, like morals, often con
cerns itself with the interior of a man, with
him from whom the act proceeds. If I kill a
man, the law investigates not merely the fact
of his death at my hands; it asks further,
did I intend to kill him ? Had I hatred in
my heart, and whence came my motive for
putting him to death ? My endeavor will be
to show that I never thought of such a thing
as killing him, that I desired something quite
different, and that by unforeseen accident he
met death through me. When I have shown
this and proved that I had no hostility to
him, but that his death was due to adverse
conditions in which he and I were alike in
volved, I shall expect to be acquitted; that is,
the law in deciding on the crime of murder
does study the criminal, his interior condi
tions, his intentions, and is not concerned
simply with results.
ETHICS AND THE LAW 55
On the other hand, it is an error to say that
in our moral judgments we disregard conse
quences.. I know this is often said, but I
cannot say it. For to my mind only in the
consequences is the full meaning of an act
revealed. When you have injured me, it is a
poor excuse to say that you merely intended
play. No doubt you did. But in that you
were culpable. Your intention was only par
tially formed. You did not fuUy trace the
meaning of such an action as yours. That
meaning, displayed in the consequence, con
demns you. It should have been in your
mind when you acted, shaping the intention.
To hold that conduct and character are ex
clusively concerned with inner conditions and
may disregard consequences is absurd. Ac
tion aims at altering things, and must know
the things it would alter. Moral motives do
not refer to a world of fancy. Accordingly,
I can make no such sharp partition, handing
motives over to the moral court, and conse
quences to the civil, for judgment. Reality
is not so dualistically simple.
It is not, then, by the positive form of its
command or the internal nature of its regard
that ethics detaches itself from the law.
56 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
Both of these distinctions, however signifi
cant, are rough and inadequate. They do
not set ethics in any such instructive contrast
with the law that by it a better understand
ing is to be had of conduct and character.
That is what I wish. To reach it, I shall in
dicate four respects in which the law and
ethics look at wrong acts differently. These
four respects have intimate relations to one
another and are of greater and less complex
ity. The more complex and fundamental I
discuss last.
VI
The first point, then, at which ethics and
the law divide is this : the law works through
fixed penalties. Without a penalty there is
no law. Draw up an enactment against a
crime known to bring the community damage,
describe the crime with the greatest exactness,
and persuade a legislature to make it law.
If no penalty is attached, it is a mere piece
of advice with which courts will not concern
themselves. Accordingly every crime has its
cost marked in plain figures, precisely like
goods in a grocer s catalogue. Indulging
myself in picking a pocket will cost me a
ETHICS AND THE LAW 57
small fine and some days of imprisonment.
If I aspire to bank-breaking, that will entail
an expense of some years in the state prison.
And if I proceed farther and cannot feel the
enjoyment of bank-breaking complete unless
I also knock a watchman down, thi^ too will
be open to me but on rather expensive terms.
In all these cases the undertaking has been
considered beforehand and the suitable charge
assessed. Crimes, like commodities, have their
fixed prices. Or, if the prices are not pre
cisely fixed, it is because crimes like com
modities again differ in quality. A max
imum and minimum are fixed, between which
the higher and lower gradations fall.
Such is the systematic, almost mechanical
assignment of penalties in the criminal code.
But the moral code may be held to possess
its penalties, too, and penalties no less sure or
severe. Who of us has committed hidden
sin without hidden smart? We did some
thing which at the moment seemed a trifle ;
and yet as we walk the streets we are in dis
comfort and wish we might detach ourselves
from the wrong-doer. But escape is not easy ;
we go to our room, sit in our solitary chair,
but find the offensive sinner seated in the
58 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
same chair with ourselves. Who of us would
not be willing to undergo sharp physical suf
fering if by this means we could once for all
be free from our mental distress ? Am I
right, then, in saying that the law is con
trasted with morals through its use of penal
ties ? Certainly not ; but through its use of
fixed penalties. The stress is on the adjec
tive. For the alarming fact about a moral
misdemeanor is that we never know what it is
going to cost. Trivial as it seems at first, it
draws long pangs in its train. One day when
I was a boy at school I committed a sin which
at the moment I hardly knew to be a sin. I
tried to set myself above another person very
dear to me. The impulse came, and I be
littled him whom I loved. It was a base act.
I am glad to confess it here. Though many
years have intervened, I cannot recall the ex
perience without shame. Such things pursue
us indefinitely. We cannot foresee how long
their pains will last. There is no such con
stancy in them as appears in the working of
the law. Between the degree of suffering
and the character of the misdeed little relation
exists. No two persons ever had the same
conscience pang for the same vileness. In
ETHICS AND THE LAW 59
the same life the penalty for some piece of
immorality will be great at one time, and for
a precisely similar one at some other period
will be almost insignificant. From the point
of view of the law these variations of moral
penalty are unjust.
VII
The injustice deepens as we state the sec
ond point of contrast between ethics and the
law, that in the assignment of moral pen
alties the order followed by the law is directly
reversed. When a criminal is convicted, be
fore fixing the penalty a judge is careful to
inquire whether it is a first offense. If so, a
comparatively slight punishment is imposed.
If, however, the criminal is an old offender,
he is punished severely. A high degree of
pain associated with hardened offenses, a low
degree with initial offenses, is the honorable
aim of the law. Nothing of this sort is found
in the moral field. Penalties there are as
signed in exactly the reverse order. Those
who suffer most acutely for sin are those of
the finest moral organization. Astonishing
as this fact is, it is too generally acknow
ledged to require citation of evidence. All
60 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
that is necessary is to mark the contrast be
tween it and what is counted just in legal
procedure.
I know a man who has always prided him
self on veracity, and has brought himself to
such refinement of truthfulness as is not usual
in his social circle. Yesterday, finding him
self in peculiar circumstances, he fell as he
now sees into deception. He is smarting
over the remembrance, ashamed at being
stained with what he has always detested. If
he consults me and asks whether, as an ethical
teacher, I can suggest any way of escape from
his pains, somewhat excessive for so slight
a slip, in common honesty I must answer,
" Yes, I know exactly the way. Go and lie
some more. The more frequently you lie, the
less you will be disturbed. When you have
made yourself a consummate liar, you will go
through your fictions as smoothly as you be
fore told the truth." In all varieties of sin, it
is the first steps which cost. A person long
accustomed to iniquity finds little hardship in
it. -Yet this is exactly what, happening in a
court of law, we should call scandalous. A
man is convicted of drunkenness. " It seems
a bad case," says the judge. " Give him six
ETHICS AND THE LAW 61
months in the house of correction." " Your
honor," says the officer, " it is not his first of
fense." " Ah, call it three months." " But,"
insists the officer, " he has been arrested five
times before for the same thing." " Give him
a month, then." What a travesty of justice
that would be ! Yet, something like it is hap
pening in the moral order every day of our
lives. The penalties laid upon us there are
sharp in proportion as we .are near to right
eousness ; light, as our criminality increases.
It is a common belief that if a man defi
nitely chooses evil in this life, sinking himself
in sin, he will be punished in a world to come ;
and the pains of hell have sometimes been
interpreted by that which we here know as
the conscience pang. A terrible picture it is ;
so terrible, that modern humanitarians have
difficulty in accepting it and believing that a
good God has contrived such chastisement.
But we can imagine a hell more awful still.
Suppose that hereafter there is no pain, sup
pose that those who have given themselves up
to sin here are there able to sin without dis
turbance ; would not that be more terrible,
and more in accord with our experience here ?
Let us be glad of moral suffering. When we
62 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
find that matters which were once bitterly
degrading no longer distress, we may tremble.
I have been told that sexual vice does not
work the same damage in the Frenchman s
character as in the Anglo-Saxon s. Whether
this is the case, I do not know. But if it is,
it marks the low estate of the French. A con
venient test of the height which the character
of any man or nation has attained is found
by noticing how disintegrating vice is. If a
man is not much broken up by vice, but it
comes and goes in him without effecting
much alteration, that man is rudely organized.
Whereas, if even a slight vice creeping into
the character throws its delicate enginery out
of gear and brings the man into painful dis
accord with himself, it is certain that that
man is constructed on a fine moral scale. No
doubt excess of moral delicacy is possible.
Hardihood in goodness is as desirable as in
bodily matters. We need to discriminate in
evil and to foster the habit of distinguishing
great things from small. Men stoutly right
eous seek to fill conduct with excellence rather
than to keep it free from blemish. But, neg
lecting for the moment the protective influ
ence of moral vigor, a noble character is hurt
ETHICS AND THE LAW 63
more by wrong-doing, and receives from it
more distress, than does an ignoble one. It
is foolish to suppose great sinners are great
sufferers, or that he is a fortunate man who
escapes his evil deeds with small pains.
I have already said that it is not my busi
ness to justify the ways of God with man. I
am concerned with anatomizing our moral
structure and making it clearly understood.
Yet, so strange a phenomenon as this arrange
ment of moral penalties, by which the severity
of punishment diminishes as guilt increases,
calls for a few words of justification. If the
law were administered in this way, there would
be an uprising for the defense of society.
But, for moral purposes, I regard the arrange
ment as a fortunate one, and think any other
would be disastrous. All depends on what
is to be accomplished. The aim of morality
is not merely the stoppage of evil acts, but
the production of righteous persons, beings
who freely and of themselves hunger and thirst
after righteousness, and seek to incorporate it
into their structure. For these moral ends,
compulsory methods are inappropriate. A
moral being must develop himself, choose his
own ideals, and take part in shaping his own
64 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
creation. The present arrangement of moral
penalties directly assists such an end.
Suppose having the general desire to be a
worthy man, I come to some dividing of the
ways where a path runs off toward evil. Is
it not fortunate to find a well-marked sign
board set up at that divergence, and when I
begin upon the wrong road to have my atten
tion vigorously called to it ? That is just
what I should desire if I were earnest about
becoming a wise director of myself. I should
be pleased to hear a preventing voice, that
could not pass unheeded, saying, " No, no !
that is the wrong road ; the other, the right.
Do not take that way again." If, however,
I answer, " I know it is the wrong road, but I
propose to take it," would it not be fitting
that my attention should be less strongly
summoned a second time? And if I grad
ually make up my bad mind and say, " Evil,
be thou my good," what advantage could re
sult from further insistence on the evils of
my course. Warnings might well be with
drawn as my evil purposes become clear. All
depends on the aim of the penalty. If pun
ishment is to constrain in the interest of others
beside myself, unquestionably the order of
ETHICS AND THE LAW 65
penal infliction observed in the criminal law
is essential. But if the penalty is designed
as a factor in moral discipline, and is laid in
my own behalf to assist my judgment of what
is right and wrong, then plainly in whatever
degree I have made up my mind and com
mitted my character to a given direction, the
need of punishment passes away. Such at
any rate is the state of things we actually
find ; and the things that holy evolution has
produced, it is generally wise to believe rea
sonable.
Accordingly I can see nothing iniquitous
in the organization of moral penalties. They
take their place in personal discipline and are
as clearly helpful to the moral life as the
mode of imposition of legal penalties is to
the State. Each fits its own field, and we are
liable to mistake when we attempt to carry
notions of justice that grow in the one of
these fields over into the unlike conditions
of the other. But the striking contrast be
tween the two methods of assessment estab
lishes a second line of distinction between
ethics and the law.
66 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
VIII
A third distinction is this : the law treats
only cases which are easily measurable. I
have been insisting that legal penalties should
be precisely defined and indeed should be
proportional to preceding crime. But the
crime too should be defined. The need of
having its nature and extent distinctly for
mulated explains, I think, some of the anoma
lies in the working of the law. We are often
shocked to see that wrong-doing of a pecu
liarly destructive sort is not stopped by the
law, indeed is hardly forbidden. Gambling
is a desolating vice, a vice which more than
most corrodes the character. Its effect is
like that of opium. An opium-eater soon
loses interest in the rest of life. His other
powers become useless or unpracticed. He is
absorbed in his drug, thinks of little else, and
finds it almost impossible to break off the de
tested habit. So it is with the gambler. A
drunkard retains many interests. In his lucid
moments one can talk with him very much as
with any one else. His attention is ready.
But not so the gambler. To his perpetually
fevered mind ordinary things have no inter-
ETHICS AND THE LAW 67
est. More and more he removes himself from
the solid affairs of his fellows, attaches him
self to uncertainties, and shrivels.
Now anything that can so eat up character
we should say ought to be prevented by the
most stringent laws, and the penalties should
grow sterner according to the gravity of the
matters with which the gambler plays. In
reality we find a state of things curiously
unlike that depicted here as desirable. It
is true there are laws against gambling,
laws occasionally enforced. If a poor fellow
shakes dice on Sunday and wins or loses a
few doUars, he is likely to be seized by the
police and to see his name in the court re
ports the next day. But how unimportant
the whole affair is ! Neither the gambler
himself a person probably already depraved
and little likely to suffer further harm from
his silly amusement nor the insignificant
amounts of money involved, deserve much
attention from the law. Yet it is against
cases like this that gambling laws for the
most part operate. In its larger phases
gambling is little interfered with. If instead
of betting on something so small as falling
dice, one bets on the rise and fall of stocks
68 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
or on the price which wheat will reach some
months hence, and if by such betting one
corners the community in an article essential
to its welfare, throwing a continent into con
fusion, the law will pay not the slightest at
tention. A gambling house for these larger
purposes may be built conspicuously in any
city, the sign " Stock Exchange " be set over
its door, influential men be appointed its offi
cers, and the law will protect it and them as
it does the churches. How infamous to for
bid gambling on a small scale and almost to
encourage it on a large !
The reason for this seeming absurdity is
the one which I have just mentioned, the dif
ficulty of so defining gambling as to attack
its pernicious elements. For certain elements
enter into gambling which are of extreme
consequence to the community. They are
not iniquitous. In every society they need to
be fostered. One of them is foresight. To be
a good gambler, one should be able to take a
long look ahead, and a swift look too. One
must calculate chances with exceptional pre
cision and rapidity. Such power of forecast
is socially important. So, far from being
checked, it should be rewarded. And can
ETHICS AND THE LAW 69
gambling be so defined as to honor tbis
element while condemning hectic risk ? That
is difficult. To a slight extent it may be done.
Well-known games, in which the element of
risk is large and that of foresight small, may
be forbidden, and the possession of imple
ments for such games be made illegal. A tol
erable definition of this inferior sort of gam
bling can be framed. But how define the evil
forms of the larger gambling without includ
ing in the definition precious elements of
human energy which should be encouraged?
This is a feat of definition which no man has
yet accomplished. Because of these difficul
ties in marking out the crime, we are prob
ably better off on the whole if we tolerate
speculative risks. The community would prob
ably not reach so high a level if we should
attempt to shut out the evils of what I have
called the higher forms of gambling, but
through bungling definition shut out also
elements vital to the weU-being of commerce
itself.
For several years past men in all parts of
the country have been trying to formulate
what they mean by a trust. A trust is a dan
gerous organization of capital, such an organ-
70 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
ization as will produce disastrous monopoly ;
and what kind of organization is that ? No
body knows. It is something good to de
nounce. But when it must be made definite
enough to be proceeded against by the law,
we pause. Society could not go on, were cap
ital forbidden to combine. It is only mono
polistic combination which requires a check.
But this is a hard matter to define. State
after State has attempted it, but the bad trusts
go on. There is no possibility of a law until
the conditions and nature of crime can be
exactly specified.
How is it, then, in the moral field ? Is it
not equally important there to have vices and
virtues defined ? On the contrary, by being
defined these lose significance. No large
virtue, and no large vice, can be inclosed in a
definition. We ought to forgive those who
do us wrong. Well, just what is meant by
forgiveness, and to what extent should we
forgive ? Nobody can tell. Yet these are
not unimportant matters. They are the essen
tial points. Still, nobody has as yet been
able to determine them. An instructive case
is recorded where the legal defining mind ap
proached the greatest of moral teachers, ask-
ETHICS AND THE LAW 71
ing for an explanation of the difficult matter
of forgiveness. u Master, how often shall my
brother sin against me and I forgive him ?
Until seven times ?" How sensible the ques
tion ! A maximum must be fixed, beyond
which forgivable offenses cannot go ; and
would not seven be a generous point at
which to fix it ? Our Lord s answer is almost
scornful. " I say not until seven times, but
until seventy times seven." It is as if he
had said, " There is no limit. Let the law
concern itself with such things. They do not
belong to me. My work is to show how con
duct and character may be constructed ; not
how enactments should be drawn. From the
moral point of view, forgiveness is immeasur
able."
Ethical writers sometimes talk about duties
of perfect and imperfect obligation. The
terms are not altogether fortunate. But the
distinction is an ancient one, and so well illus
trates my present point that I pause to explain
it. Yesterday I borrowed a dollar of John.
When to-day I go to pay him, I do not dis
cuss how much he would like to receive. That
is fixed. I have a direct obligation of pre
cisely one hundred cents. If I give him a
72 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
hundred and ten, I am showing kindness or
treating him as an object of charity ; I am
not fulfilling a duty. If I offer but ninety-
nine cents, something still remains due. For
it is exactly one hundred cents, and nothing
else, which I owe. My duty is one of perfect,
i. e., of precise, obligation. There are many
such duties. To both individuals and the state,
we are bound to perform a multitude of spe
cific acts. But such duties are, after all,
generally of an inferior sort. Those most
distinctively moral are of imperfect, i. e., of
undefined, obligation. Morality deals, with
infinite beings and makes infinite claims. For
example, I ought to be truthful. How truth
ful? When asked a question which may be
answered by yes or no, I must say yes, if the
facts are as stated ; no, if they are otherwise. .
Does the obligation of truthfulness end here ?
Certainly not. Falsehood is carried by sugges
tion as well as byword, and the duty of veracity
extends to this also. And beyond this ? Yes.
I must be as truthful with myself as with
others. I must have truth in the inward
parts. Indeed, each time I am truthful, a
vista of possible new forms of truthfulness is
opened before me, so that it would seem that
ETHICS AND THE LAW 73
I might go on becoming forever more deli
cately truthful. The duty is infinite; and
what genuinely moral duty is not ? Is there
ever a possible limit to righteousness? Be
benevolent. How benevolent ? To the extent
of words, or money, or coat, or cloak ? To
the extent of his needs and your powers,
both infinite.
Accordingly whenever our attention is
called to something as a duty which we per
ceive can be precisely stated and defined, we
ordinarily experience for it a slight sense of
contempt. " Well enough to be done," we
think, "but it can hardly be called a moral
obligation." Brush your hair. Dust your
room. When you shove a drawer in, do not
push it as far as it inclines to go ; shove
it clear in. Complete your purpose. Un
doubtedly all these matters pertain to good
morals, involving as they do principles of
wide range in life. But it is allegiance to
the principles, not performance of the specific
acts which deserves the name of righteous
ness. Though moral claims must often be
specific, particular, definite, they are so only
as manifestations of principles which cannot
be measured, particularized, and defined. In
74 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
short, in all its higher forms morality deals
with precepts of imperfect obligation ; while
the law deals exclusively with duties of perfect
obligation, where the nature of the thing com
manded is exactly defined. The phrases I do
not altogether like. To talk of duties of per
fect and imperfect obligation puts the mind
on a wrong track, the word imperfect usually
conveying a suggestion of inferiority rather
than eminence. Duties defined and unde
fined I should prefer to call them, duties of
infinite and of limited obligation. But all
these names serve to bring out well the dis
tinction on which I am insisting. The law
treats only cases which are easily measurable,
while every truly moral command will be
found to contain infinite implications.
IX
The fourth point of contrast between ethics
and the law sums up and explains the pre
ceding three. It is this : the aim of the law
is the defense of an already established order.
Development is the aim of morality. No per
son is at any time all he is capable of being.
From an ethical point of view he can never
be described, like a finished thing. The case
ETHICS AND THE LAW 75
in which he at any time finds himself can
never be honored except as a step leading to
something else. On the powers in him which
are only possible and which wait to be realized,
ethics fixes attention. But the law views men
in an entirely different way. It takes them as it
finds them, ready-made, without much inquiry
about the processes of their growth. Finding
organized beings with already established ties
obtaining among them, the law seeks to guard
this constituted society from interference.
Each man must be protected in the exercise of
such rights as under an order so constituted he
might expect. Of course, then, the law must
treat all men alike. Not that they are alike ;
there are endless differences among them.
Some are much more highly developed than
others. But the law is not concerned with spe
cific differences. How men are made, it does
not ask. Here they are. Having somehow
reached an average pattern, Thomas is as good
as John, Mary as Susan, all claim equality
of treatment. The law, therefore, knows no
persons. It knows only blank forms, human
beings in outline, men and women of a con
ventional pattern from which most that lends
individuality to character is omitted. Profes-
76 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
sedly, poor and rich are treated alike, learned
and ignorant, strong and weak. The gener
ous, the poetic, the courageous, the aspiring
must receive no favors which are not also
open to the niggardly, the unimaginative, the
timid, and the man of limited horizon. Of
course in practice something very different
results. The world over, great talents grasp
great rewards. Moral opportunity does not
cease because the law holds sway. But it is
independent of it. Legislation which prima
rily sought to foster opportunity would rightly
be reckoned unjust. The law seeks to secure
a fair field and no favor for a multitude of
struggling human units, all of whom should
for its purposes be regarded as of a tolerably
similar constitution.
To protect men as they stand is, therefore,
the object of the law, to guard those defined
rights which turn a man into a person. We
might almost call " damage " the sacred word
of the law, for it is always busy preventing
each person from being diminished by some
other. A while ago, in speaking of the moral
vices, I said that perhaps the greatest of them
were laziness and untruthfulness, and that of
these the law took no cognizance. But I was
ETHICS AND THE LAW 11
obliged to qualify immediately by adding that
the law would take cognizance so soon as
these vices interfered with anybody. This is
the same as to say that the law studies the
worth of any man not with reference to him
self, but with reference to some other person.
It does not ask, " Is this a good man and how
can he be made better ? " but, " Is this man
fashioned however he may be doing any
harm to his neighbor ? " Legally, goodness
and badness are terms of external relationship,
and their degree is measured by the mainte
nance or damage induced by them in the
status quo of society. It is no wonder, then,
that in every age lawyers have been charged
with being conservatives, uninterested in pro
gress. That is a danger incident to the trade.
Lawyers of course remain human beings
often, I do not doubt, moral ones. In his
human character a lawyer may be warmly in
terested in the development of society and
even in that of the moral beings who compose
it. But as a lawyer he must hold by the
status quo, and the unquestioning defense of
that status quo is his daily business. Any
thing else would be calamitous to the com
munity.
78 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
It is interesting, however, to observe how
inadequate this abstract conception of man
and this fixed organization of society is found,
and how we continually try to stretch the law
in an ethical direction. Such attempts have
never been more frequent or earnest than in
our time. Indeed, they have been so largely
successful that the very line of distinction
which I have laid down has begun to be
questioned. I might well be challenged if I
should say that the law cares nothing about
personal filth, but only about social ; that it
regards filth only in its likelihood to damage
others beside its producer. To-day we freely
pass laws requiring tenement houses to pro
vide bathrooms, sanitary appliances, and clean
entries. It is true we profess to do this for
fear typhoid fever might break out in some
filthy spot and become a general danger.
We talk of protection to the community ; but
the enthusiasm which carries the law is more
than half a moral one, the passion to furnish
those who live in crowded tenements condi
tions more favorable to noble living than they
would otherwise obtain. Perhaps we should
ETHICS AND THE LAW 79
hesitate to legislate directly for such noble
living- were we not also legislating for the
common defense. But we are glad to believe
that the two aims coincide.
Factory laws for fixing the hours of labor
for women and children and even the
hours for men in some employments furnish
another striking example of ethical legisla
tion. But perhaps our laws have gone far
thest in the moral direction in the matter of
education. By what right do we send every
child to school ? Do not such laws ideal
and expansive, rather than protective aim
at the development of imperfect individual
souls ? And is it true that in this case we
estimate the worth of the person in terms of
his relation to his neighbor ? Is it not rather
that we think each man has a right to an
education for his own sake ? This is often
denied. An ignorant man is a danger to the
community, it is said. Ignorant men vote.
For the safety of the existing order, voters
should be able at least to read, write, and per
form simple sums in arithmetic. But who
defends education laws in this way without
secretly congratulating himself that he is,
after all, developing human beings? Press-
80 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
ing a little beyond the point here described,
the subterfuge becomes patent. High schools
are established. Every boy and girl in New
England has a chance at some sort of high
school training. Why ? Is a voter who is
not a high school graduate a dangerous crea
ture ? No ; but we must not draw the lines
too sharply. Give all a chance. The move
ment is in the general direction of protecting
the community, and it may as well be liber
ally interpreted. Who does not see that the
school laws have a moral as well as a legal
intent? Yet legal justification is still re
quired ; for when we ask whether public high
schools shall teach Greek and Latin, there is
hesitation. A non-Greek or non-Latin voter
is obviously not a public danger. And ac
cordingly in providing these languages we
appear to be somewhat straining a point. A
good many towns do not feel justified in
maintaining these languages by general tax.
The line must be drawn somewhere and may
as well be drawn at their exclusion. But on
the other hand, all our Western States main
tain university education through general tax
ation, unquestionably aiming at developing
moral individuals and not simply protecting
ETHICS AND THE LAW 81
the community. Yet here, too, there is color
able legal excuse. The established order of
society will be more intelligent and workable
if it contains a percentage of highly trained
men.
These examples serve to show how far from
firm the line separating the law from ethics
has in our time become. I bring them forward
to break down the rigid distinction which I
myself set up. If that distinction is held as
anything more than a general tendency of
contrast, it misrepresents the facts. The so
cialistic demands of the last twenty years
have carried morality far over into the legal
field. The socially protective aim and the
individually enlarging aim have been approxi
mated. For the law is no field apart from
other human interests. Subtly and fully, if
slowly, it feels the influence of the ideals
which sway a community and adopts them
into its structure. And though we grant
that the law in our time is not exclusively
occupied with guarding completed men against
damage, it has not abandoned this its special
office. It holds the results of civilization
secure. By moral experience, reflection, and
criticism, man reaches a certain stage of devel-
82 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
opment. The rights and duties appropriate
to such a stage are then codified into the law,
while the moral life goes on expanding itself
to finer and wider issues. Yet in thus accept
ing into its charge the approved moral ideals
of a community, the law is still hampered by
the three conditions already named : it must
define its crime, define its penalty, and impose
that penalty in direct proportion to criminal
ity. And all these conditions somewhat re
strict the socialistic endeavor to push the law
over into the field of morality.
XI
To sum up, then, the long discussion : I
have attempted to determine the field of
ethics by asking how far it coincides with
that of the law. Similar as in many respects
the two fields are, they show a fundamental
difference in the way their common material
of conduct and character is presented. In
view of the careful explanations already given,
this difference may now be compacted into a
single word. The law is inadequate to the
moral demand because it is too objective. By
it the moral agent is not regarded primarily
in himself, subjectively, i. e., with reference to
ETHICS AND THE LAW 83
the effects which his conduct may produce on
his own growth and welfare. He is regarded
objectively, i. e., in relation to others, and is
accounted good or bad according as he dam
ages or protects other members of his com
munity. And this objectivity of the law will
oblige us to look elsewhere for a full exhibit
of the moral life. We must supplement the
ethical deficiency of the law. We must dis
cover how the moral agent may be good in
himself. To be good in himself, he will need
also to be good objectively and not to inter
fere with the good of others. But we cannot
make this good in relation to others the sole
test of goodness. It is plain that for com
plete goodness we must pass beyond the
bounds of the law into some other field where
the verb ought is still applicable, some field,
therefore, whose laws, unlike those of the
descriptive sciences, embody ideals, but one,
nevertheless, in which a subjective estimate
obtains so that the object of judgment is re
garded as having a worth within itself and
not merely outside itself. In short, we must
turn to the field of aesthetics, the region of
beauty. For as I understand it, each beau
tiful object is regarded as essentially a thing
84 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
of worth. Its relations to other thing s are
O
not alone considered, as they seem to be by
the law, but the important matters are its re
lations to itself. The field of beauty, accord
ingly, excellently supplements that of the law
and holds out good hopes of showing us what
we are seeking the character of the moral
being and the nature of that which we call
his conduct.
XII
In closing, perhaps a word more is needed
in regard to one of the two objections already
considered. As a means of discriminating
the field of law from that of ethics, I men
tioned that it was often held that the law
looked on outer consequences, while ethics
looked for the inner motive. I said that I
could not fully accept this statement, although
it called attention to an important point.
What that point is we can now see. The
law certainly does regard intention. No crime
was ever brought into court to which ques
tions of intention would be altogether foreign.
The statement is not, then, strictly true. Yet
what is central in this line of discrimination
is both true and important. While intention
ETHICS AND THE LAW 85
is taken into account, it is studied only in its
bearing on somebody else. Everything in
the case, the intention itself included, is
treated objectively. The law does not study
how far the intention is injurious to the man
himself.
REFERENCES ON THE RELATIONS OF LAW
AND ETHICS
Hobbes Leviathan, pt. ii.
Bentham s Morals and Legislation, ch. xix.
Austin s Jurisprudence, lect. v.
Holland s Jurisprudence, pt. i. ch. iii.
Hegel s Philosophy of Right, 36.
Holmes The Common Law, lect. iv.
Stephen s Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, p. 159.
Sidgwick s Politics, ch. xiii.
Sidgwick s Methods of Ethics, bk. i. ch. ii. and bk. ii. ch. v.
Fowler s Principles of Morals, vol. ii. p. 146.
Mezes Ethics, ch. xiii.
Paulsen s System of Ethics, ch. ix.
Hibben s Ethics and Jurisprudence, Journal of Ethics, Jan.,
1894.
in
ETHICS AND .ESTHETICS
m
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
ESTHETICS, like ethics, is a science of worth
estimates. The connoisseur does not de
scribe his objects. No more than the moralist
does he view them as ultimate and uncriti-
cisable facts. He judges whether they are
what they ought to be, and assesses them as
excellent according as they more or less com
pletely embody ideals. With nothing else is
he concerned than with the formation and
embodiment of ideals of beauty ; just as the
moralist s whole work is to decide what ideals
of goodness should shape a given piece of
conduct and whether these have or have not
shaped it. The methods of the two sciences
are so similar that one naturally looks for
similarity of result. The good and the beau
tiful may be regarded as but different names
for a single thing. More commonly, per-
90 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
haps, it is to outward objects that we attri
bute beauty; or if to persons also, to per
sons in their physical or visible aspects. But
the limitation is arbitrary and unnecessary.
Beauty may easily be carried over to affairs
of conduct and character ; and when so car
ried, will it not precisely coincide with what
we mean by goodness? That it will is an
opinion which has repeatedly been held by
students of ethics.
It was the ancient opinion, the one com
mon when ethics first appeared among that
marvelous people, the Greeks. The Greek
way of describing a person as all he ought to
be was to call him /caXos KOL dya^os, beauti
ful and good. But even this marked too great
a separation. Beauty and goodness must be
no distinct elements, tied together by a con
junction. " And " must be conceived as a
conjunction of apposition, and the whole com
pound phrase represent but a single idea. Its
different parts were accordingly melted to
gether. The word /caXo/caya^o? was coined
to indicate the man in whom goodness reaches
its suitable embodiment. This opinion, instinc
tive in every Greek, was adopted by Plato,
of all Greek philosophers the one of profound-
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 91
est moral insight. Nobody has intertwined
the beautiful and the good more exquisitely
than he. He cannot imagine the one divorced
from the other. Wherever beauty appears
in the world, goodness is indicated ; wherever
goodness enters, it announces itself as beauty.
But this view, though properly enough con
nected with the name of Plato, its conscious
advocate, was one which had always shaped
profoundly the whole structure of Greek life.
These judgments about the substantial iden
tity of the beautiful and the good were by no
means confined to the Greeks. Soon after
ethics arose in England, the doctrine appears.
Shaftesbury, in attacking Hobbes, thinks
Hobbes would have been saved from his
errors if he had perceived this alliance of
the good and the beautiful. He believes we
shall more easily make men comprehend what
we mean by goodness if, instead of speaking
of the moral man, we speak of the connois
seur or virtuoso. That is what each of us
should seek to be. The artistic connoisseur
is one who has acquired such sensitiveness to
beauty that long before he verifies the reasons
for preferring one picture to another he has
instinctively made his preference. No man is
92 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
a good man who has not acquired a similar
connoisseurship in morals and has the in
stinctive passion for righteousness which the
virtuoso feels for beautiful objects.
Once again, this time in Germany, the
union of goodness and beauty found its cham
pion. Just after Kant had imparted his
mighty impulse to intellectual and moral sci
ence, Schiller pointed out, in his " ^sthetische
Briefe," or, Letters on the Nature of the Beau
tiful, that without discipline in the perception
of beauty, an important part of scientific and
moral education cannot be had.
But to make out a connection between
goodness and beauty it is hardly necessary to
resort to the teachings of philosophers. Our
ordinary words descriptive of righteousness are
largely borrowed from aesthetics. We speak of
what is good as fair, fit, fine, clean, square,
SBsthetic terms all. What is bad is ugly, hide
ous, repulsive, coarse, unsuitable. Every one
would understand these bad words as moral
words; yet primarily they indicate only absence
of beauty. The testimony of all languages
is the same. Describing in any of them the
beautiful and the good, the same word will
be found indiscriminately to fit either.
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 93
And this testimony is confirmed in our own
experience. Every one of us finds moral en
noblement in the presence of beauty. Who
of us can come from a symphony by Beetho
ven, from a portrait by Watts, from Shelley s
"Skylark" or Keats s "Nightingale," and
think mean thoughts, be envious of our neigh
bor, or give ourselves up to gross imaginings ?
Badness has become difficult. A power ex
pulsive of evil resides in the beauty we have
been contemplating, and sweeps us away from
that preoccupation with self which is the root
of vileness. The beautiful object lends us its
dignity. If I were a father and were send
ing my boy from home, I should tremble at
his departure if I knew that he had no re
gard for beauty. A coarse, dull boy, to whom
beauty makes no appeal, lacks protection at
critical moments. Many times have I been
saved from wrong-doing through the thought
of its unseemliness. I have reflected how in
congruous it would be, what an ugly and re
pulsive person I must afterwards appear, and
not to others only but to myself. Considera
tion of the ugliness which vice possesses has
often, I dare say, held me back when the
moral call had lost its power.
94 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
II
Up to this point all I have sought has been
to make the bare fact of kinship plain. This
fact must now be acknowledged. Testimony
of every sort, gather it where we may, shows
that the human mind has always identified
or tended to identify the field of beauty
and the field of goodness. But to settle the
fact is not enough. As ethical students we
must ask for reasons. I pass on, therefore,
to inquire why it is that the beautiful and the
good have such close affinity. What is there
in the nature of beauty which can so fortify
the spirit of goodness ?
For any adequate answer it would be ne
cessary to analyze the entire significance of
beauty. We should need to determine ex
haustively what makes an object beautiful;
and that would carry us into intricate aesthetic
discussions for which I have little competence.
The region is an uncertain one. ^Esthetic
explorers are by no means agreed in their
accounts of beauty. Almost everybody who
has tried to track the shy thing has been
obliged to acknowledge that it finally takes
covert in mystery. Beauty probably contains
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 95
elements not altogether capable of verifica
tion. Mystery seems an essential part of it.
It is easy to find common qualities possessed
by all beautiful things, but hard to be sure
that we have enumerated them all. I shall
not attempt anything so ambitious. Here, as
in the case of the law, my interest is centred
in ethics. I pay attention to other subjects
only so far as I can hope that from them
light may be reflected on my own matters.
My method, therefore, will be to select some
well-known object of beauty, to observe its
more notable features, to mark how far these
are found in other beautiful objects, and also
how far they are discoverable in things called
good. This will give no complete exhibit of
beauty. But it will make us familiar with
certain constant traits of both beauty and
goodness.
Ill
In seeking for a beautiful object which I
may fairly assume to be widely known, what
can I select better than the wonderful bronze
memorial which stands on Boston Common
opposite the State House? All of us are
familiar with it, the Shaw Monument and
we all feel the sublimity of its motive. It
96 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
represents a subject race moving toward free
dom, seeking that freedom by its own exer
tions, yet under the guidance of a people
more developed than itself. This complicated
and exalted motive is made by the artist to
address the eye. As a work of art his picture
appeals to us not merely through its senti
ment, but by the entanglement of this with
certain experiences of vision. Visual pleasures
of a peculiar sort are made to fortify patriotic
emotion. What, then, are these visual plea
sures and how are they adjusted to stir our
sense of sublimity?
First there is rhythm. This multitude a
dozen or more in the foreground, suggestions
of an indefinite troop behind is no mere
multitude. It is bound together by harmony
of answering lines and gives to the eye such
concord as measured verses give the ear.
Then there is its typical character. These men
are negroes. The strange and half -formed
faces, the large and awkward feet belong only
to one race. There is no feature which is
not distinctive of a specific people, and all the
kinds of man which could enter into a racial
army are here represented. Here is the drum
mer boy, young, eager for the fray, delighting
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 97
in adventure. Here the man of vigorous
years, performing his duty with cheerful
stoutness, not thinking too much about it or
himself. And here the aged man, whose
great opportunity has come after a life of
waiting.
Inclusive, therefore, as the piece is, we feel
it to be one, one however minutely its details
are inspected. How united, for example, are
its lines of motion. The end which this race
seeks is not yet attained. But half-men yet,
their goal is ampler manhood. It lies ahead,
and toward it every line converges. To these
resistless marchers those words of Shakespeare
apply by which he described the minutes of
our life : " In ceaseless toil all forward do
contend." Everything here contends for
ward. The very slope of the muskets, though
never allowed to become mechanical through
parallelism, beats out the same reiterated im
pression the impression of onward move
ment. There is no portion of the figures too
unimportant for the artist to have studied
with this in view. He has related his sol
diers legs, has harmonized their feet ; and as
these rise on the toes, all their ungainly curves
combine to emphasize the forward swing.
98 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
Spontaneous as all appears, not an ill-adjusted
heel can be discovered, no part which is not
in some way called to make concord with its
fellow part.
And if there are features of the composition
which might at a first glance seem to jar its
chief lines, these will be found on closer study
to confirm the ocular argument. Thrown
out a little from the rest they a troop of
trudging negroes, he the most refined of
white men sits an officer on his horse. The
horse is tightly reined, and the harsh curve
of his neck and body breaks the lines of the
piece and throws this part of the composi
tion out of full concord with the surround
ings. But is not the detachment needed ?
Does it not reinforce both thought and visual
pleasure ? Contrast is involved in the subject,
and perhaps this jarring of the dominant lines
heightens their effectiveness. And then how
beautifully the multitude is once more united
and its community of aim displayed in the
floating Victory above ! Hardly noticed by
the moving figures, she sweeps over them in
her trailing robe, welding all together and
assuring their common end.
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 99
IV
When we try to sum up our general impres
sion of the beauty of this monument, I think
it will be found in its exceeding harmony.
In it there is nothing superfluous and no
thing lacking. That is its striking character
istic. If any doubts visit our minds about its
perfect beauty, they take the form of pointing
to something in it which does not quite go
with the rest. Is the figure of Victory rather
long ? That is to ask whether it is truly pro
portioned to its surroundings. Does it attract
attention to itself, or fix attention on the
whole composition ? We may think the horse
of Colonel Shaw a little too natural, and con
demn him for backing too much as a real
horse would. If so, we judge that the lines
of the creature detach themselves too palpa
bly from the rest of the composition and do
not assist, as they should, to confirm human
action. That is, in criticising the piece and
deciding whether it is singularly beautiful or
a worthy work with blemishes, we scrutinize
its concord and ask how fully it is organic,
whether each part in it is demanded by every
other part. If nothing capricious appears, if
100 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
the single portions, however minute, have
been dictated by the law of the whole, then
of course we count it beautiful. If we think
we can detect any portion which sticks out,
hangs off from the rest, and claims attention
for itself, then we say that in this respect it
fails.
But is it true that no one can enjoy the
Shaw Monument without going through some
such analysis of its beauty as I have given
here ? Far from it ; such analysis is quite as
likely to hinder the enjoyment as to help.
We have approached the matter as students
of beauty, trying to bring its elements dis
tinctly into consciousness. But that which
makes a beautiful work of art most beautiful
is that it calls for no distinguishing conscious
ness. The separate parts are not specifically
observed. The total makes a single impres
sion. The work of art appeals not to intel
lectual verification. It reaches the unity
which should characterize it only when it can
be grasped at once by momentary feeling.
So long as it is necessary to go over it piece
meal and say, " This single part accords with
that single part and with the other single part,"
we may be sure the result is flabby. If the
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 101
work were really coherent, it would say so at
a glance. The crowds who pass before that
august bronze and feel the sting of its beauty
do not know that they are impressed by con
gruent features, rhythmic figures, almost par
allel muskets, lines of uplifted heels, and con
verging curves. With no such things are they
concerned. To notice these is to disparage the
total beauty. By the artist these things are
studied before the beauty is born ; by the
spectator, when the thrill of it is a little passed
fey-
We may probably conclude, then, without
search for supplemental elements, that this
principle of organic wholeness is a central
characteristic of the beautiful object we have
been examining. And is it not also of beauty
everywhere ? In a beautiful piece of music
.there are no accidents. Everything falls there
by appointment, nothing by mere happening.
The whole demands every note that sounds,
and no phrase could have differed from what
it is. The case is the same with beautiful
writing. When our essay or story turns out
badly, it is because we have put in matters
which were unnecessary or have omitted what
the reader would really need to know. The
102 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
parts straggle or do not go entirely well to
gether, and in consequence the piece is not
integral, solid, firm in texture. It is true my
examples have thus far been drawn from the
field of the fine arts, that is, from beauty
humanly constructed. But where beauty is
an affair of nature and not of conscious con
struction, its principle is the same. In a
beautiful human body " head with foot hath
private amity." In calling a landscape beau
tiful, I mean that it possesses such harmony
of lines and colors as would have been placed
there by a conscious artist. Its easy whole
ness is just what an artist labors to produce.
Let it be agreed that wholeness in the
sense in which it is here defined, organic
wholeness, is essential to beauty. But this is
no less true of a good deed. At the very
heart of moral excellence is the aim at organic
wholeness. Goodness at its height we call
holiness. The root of the moral and aesthetic
words is the same. The holy man is the
whole man ; the sinner the fragmentary one.
The sinner is not in accord with himself. He
does this instant what he is ashamed of the
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 103
next ; or if not the next instant, then the next
year. His endeavors of to-day dislocate those
of the coming week. The holy man is he who
does to-day what he will approve to-morrow,
next week, next year, to all eternity. He is
at one with himself, a total being. Rightly we
call him a man of integrity, a harmonious
nature, a balanced soul. Such phrases we
have seen have their origin in the aesthetic
field.
This a3sthetie mode of judgment helpfully
clarifies much in ethics which otherwise
would remain obscure. We speak of the
sinner as a dissolute or dissipated person a
man breaking up, going to pieces, one whose
personal character will gradually disappear.
" He rots to nothing at the next great thaw."
Shaftesbury thought this the universal and
distinctive mark of vice, which he accordingly
proposed to define as solutio continui, the
breaking up of wholeness. If we take any
cheap and ordinary vice, I think we shall find
much confirmation of his view. When I went
to dinner to-day, I had a voracious appetite,
and there was something on the table I was
particularly fond of. It had never agreed
with me ; that I knew. But I did not care.
104 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
I wanted it, and I let my desire loose. That
was the vice of gluttony ; and in precisely
what did it consist ? Is eating wrong ? Not
at all. A man must eat if he would live.
And is it wrong to enjoy food? Only the
ascetic will say so. Healthy men and women
frankly count the pleasures of the table
among the minor blessings of life. Where,
then, runs the line which parts the vice of
gluttony from the pleasure of eating ? It lies
in taking the desire as an independent matter,
as if desire for food had no relation to any
thing else. The holy man eats as the sinner
eats, enjoying his food no less than does the
glutton. But the holy man, while he enjoys
his food, enjoys too his business, his walking,
his benefiting his fellow men ; and enjoys
all these as parts of one another and as they
help to constitute a worthy life. He will not
allow one factor to break that wholeness. No
disproportionate attention shall be given to
this or that. Each element of his life shall
be tested by its ability to assist the other ele
ments. He gets his victory over the momen
tary impulse by surveying it in relation to
the whole. Of everything that can enter into
that whole without causing impediment he is
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 105
unashamed. But he lets no moment stand
by itself, no passion stand by itself, no intel
lectual interest even ; nothing is abstract, sep
arate. All are filled with mutual relation
ships. The good man has
His words and works, and fashion too,
All of a piece.
And this expression in each petty part of the
spirit of wholeness begets the good man s
dignity.
Why then should we not call the good man
the beautiful man ? We should, and should
find the vicious man repulsive. How ridicu
lous to exult over the harmonies of our pic
tures, our clothing, our furniture, to praise
our jugs and tables because their several parts
accord, and not perceive the ugliness of our
own characters, where traits do not go to
gether, but hang apart or clash. We really
ought to reckon the good man the most beau
tiful object on earth. No artist accomplishes
a result so subtle, complex, and freshly ad
justed as he. He seems to show us that the
beautiful and the good are but two names
for a single thing; and to make plain the
wisdom of Plato, Shaftesbury, and Schiller
when they tell us that the shortest way to
106 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
comprehend goodness and the surest way to
incorporate it in our lives is to discipline our
selves in the appreciation of beauty.
VI
Much as there is which points in this direc
tion, I cannot shut my eyes to facts of an
opposite nature. Artists are not usually the
sternest moralists. But something like this
ought to be true if the conclusions to which
we have gradually come are altogether cor
rect. Devotees of beauty should be devotees
of goodness. Yet our common expectation is
the reverse. A person of high artistic tem
perament is excused for many small vices.
We do not make the same moral demands of
him as of others. One constituted so, we
think, will be exposed to double temptation.
In every period of the world s history moral
leaders have looked askance on beauty. Even
among the Greeks, the Stoics showed distrust.
The Epicureans were frank admirers of beauty
but the Stoics set little store by it. Plato
himself excludes the poets from his state. In
Christian times devout opposition to beauty
has been commoner and more pronounced.
It was involved in monasticism. It set Puri-
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 107
tans to destroying images, pictures, and many
of the adornments of life. It brought the
Quakers to insist on plainness and to banish
from their homes and churches every species
of fine art. And how can we say that the
beautiful and the good are in reality one
and the same thing when those most impas
sioned for goodness become ipso facto foes
of the beautiful? Indeed, I might again
appeal to personal experience. I pointed out
a while ago how often at crises of our lives
the sense of beauty comes to us bearing a
kind of protection. And this is undeniable.
But there comes also, sometimes, an envy of
the stolid and the rude. We are exposed to
a hundred temptations from which a less sen
sitive nature is exempt. Wisely does Tenny
son say that " the passionate heart of the
poet is whirled into folly and vice." And
though few of us are fully poets, most of us
can verify in ourselves what are the special
dangers to which a poetic temperament is
exposed.
Evidently, then, the fields are not quite
conterminous the fields of the beautiful
and the good. Nearly allied as they are, each
depending largely on the other, the bounds of
108 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
the one do not lie precisely where lie those of
the other. Beauty and duty may sound alike,
but from the beginning they are spelled dif
ferently. In parting off ethics from the law,
we had to deal with distinctions of a subtle
sort, subtler than were necessary for separat
ing ethics from the descriptive sciences. But
it is far harder to sunder ethics from aesthet
ics than from the law. I find it impossible to
trace a single clear line of demarcation. But
if I cannot altogether separate the two fields,
I can at least show how a different point of
view controls the mind of him who speaks of
the beautiful and him who speaks of the good.
The two may be surveying the same matter,
but each perceives it under a special aspect.
What these contrasted points of view are, I
must now endeavor step by step to make
plain.
VII
An object becomes beautiful only through
becoming single, complete, isolated. In look
ing at a picture of a landscape, we must often
have doubted whether a result so slender is
deserving of so much pains. Instead of try
ing to construct or adapt a scene, we wonder
why the painter did not snatch a piece straight
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 109
from nature. Any window might serve him.
Let him take the window frame for his picture
frame, and put into his picture whatever that
frame contains. If he simply copies what he
finds there, will he not have the best of land
scapes ? Nothing like it. Of course, what is
there could not be fully copied. The resources
of paint and the dexterity of fingers are not
sufficient. But could it be truly reported,
point by point, the result would be monstrous,
a fragment, something torn out of nature,
with ragged edges and with little relation
among its represented objects. It would not
come together. What the artist tries to do in
composing a landscape is to put into it what
ever will be necessary for its best understand
ing. It should imply nothing beyond itself,
and within itself all portions should be mutu
ally helpful. Undoubtedly we sometimes find
in nature groupings which allow us to take
them substantially unaltered, because in them
there have occurred such coordination of part
with part as we are ordinarily obliged to estab
lish for ourselves. But seldom, indeed, does
nature furnish all the adjustments required
for unity.
In the same way, if I should take any half
110 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
hour out of the life of my friend and report
its events, I should obtain an interesting series
of observations on a fellow being, but these
would not constitute a story, a work of art.
The events of that half hour are essentially
connected with what went before and what is
still to come. Anybody contemplating this
fragment would find no unity. Whenever we
tell a story, the difficulty recurs. We are apt
to assume certain facts as familiar to the
reader which we have no right to assume.
Not until our story demands nothing for its
comprehension which is not contained within
itself, is it excellent ; and nothing unde-
manded must appear, or the reader s interest
will be split and disappointed. A French
critic of the drama forbids any character to
come on the stage with a gun unless somebody
is going to do something with a gun after
wards.
In short, in order to be beautiful an object
must be all contained within its own compass.
Accordingly we often find it well to emphasize
the bounding lines. The painter feels his
picture hardly complete until it is detached
from the surrounding wall by a frame. The
frame is a warning that interest in the picture
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 111
is a separate thing from interest in the wall ;
that anybody looking at the picture should
think of nothing beyond it, its bounds being
supposed to hold a sufficiency for the under
standing. So desirable is detachment. And
the more sudden our sense of this isolation
of the object, the keener is our delight in its
beauty. Whether the included matters are
important or unimportant, whether of large
or small size, it is of little consequence. But
completeness of inner relationship is of every
consequence. Here is a sketch of the sea;
on the left a projecting rock ; on the right a
tree ; over the water floats a single cloud, a
bird, a sail insignificant matters. But the
colors are ah 1 interrelated and the lines flow
together, welding the small facts into a swiftly
apprehensible unit. It is a veritable picture,
incomparably more beautiful than the most
accurately drawn section cut arbitrarily from
chaotic nature and left without inner concord.
The beautiful is that which contains its own
explanation.
When we turn to a good deed we find a
very different state of affairs. I have been
pointing out how essentially abstract a beau
tiful object is, how sundered from all else.
112 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
To a good deed, on the contrary, it is funda
mental that it link itself with much beyond.
In its origin involving all the character of
him from whom it comes, it connects itself in
its effects with the entire universe, and is not
fully explained without knowledge of that
universe. Its relations run in every direction.
We can never look to the end of them. Per
haps an evil deed we might call, like the beau
tiful object, abstract ; or rather we might say
that the evil-doer stupidly tries to make it so.
He attempts to limit its operation, to take his
act detachedly, as if it stood aloof, under its
own law, exceptional, and without relation to
the rest of things. Of course he does not suc
ceed. All moral matters, good and bad, are
infinite. But the good deed is peculiarly con
crete. It goes forth in intimate alliance, with
O
the other forces of its doer s life, with the other
forces of society, with the stars in their courses.
At its best it announces what the constructive
powers of the universe would bring about at
just that juncture. Here, accordingly, is a
strongly marked contrast between the good
deed and the beautiful thing. The good
deed can never be entire. That is impossible,
for it is endlessly relational. The beautiful
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 113
thing cannot be beautiful unless complete,
unless it expresses a rounded unity. It is
essentially single, particular, isolated. But
this fundamental contrast carries important
consequences in its train.
VIII
In a beautiful object the worth of the parts
is judged by the contribution they make to
the whole, and not by their possible effect
elsewhere. When we admire a beautiful thing
we do not necessarily admire the elements of
which it is composed. Our admiration simply
means that those were precisely the elements
needed to bring about compact wholeness.
Some visitor, seeing my little sketch of the
sea, might say, " This is a picture of a boat.
I was not aware that you are fond of boat
ing." And I should answer, " I never enter a
boat unless I am obliged to, and I get out of
it as quickly as possible." " Then it must be
you are fond of rocks. I see a large rock on
the left." " On the contrary, I hate rocks.
My farm is full of them ; and I can never see
one anywhere without thinking what an ob
stacle it is to crops." " Well, is it clouds
you care for?" "No, I am a devotee of
114 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
sunshine. Indeed, these several objects do
not interest me in their severalness, I mean.
It is only in their togetherness, in their rela
tion to one another, that I take delight. In
the beautiful object I study its parts inter se,
not extra se."
I might go still farther. If the parts of
a beautiful object were positively pernicious,
this would not affect our judgment of its
beauty. If two of us are looking at a splen
did tree, and I, commending its beauty, declare
it to have every virtue that a tree can possess,
exuberant growth, abundant top, strong
trunk, sufficient balance to show no distor
tion, while yet not so symmetrical as to seem
mechanical, and my friend declares he finds
no beauty in it, because it has the baleful
power of spreading malaria far and wide and
allowing nobody to keep sound health in its
neighborhood ; should I not answer, " You
are confusing two very different things. I
did not call it a useful tree nor hint that it
has helpful relations to other beings than it
self. I merely said it was beautiful; that is,
that its internal relations were all they should
be. Whether it produces good or evil does
not affect its beauty." Indeed, to suggest
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 115
that a beautiful thing has useful parts rather
detracts from our feeling its beauty. Sup
pose somebody should propose to make some
thing more out of the Shaw Monument than
a mere work of art. Hinges might be at
tached to the big square of bronze. It might
be turned into a gate and keep stragglers
from entering the Common at inappropriate
hours. I believe we should all feel that this
usefulness debased it. No doubt it would re
main beautiful while swinging to and fro.
But would not a kind of indignity be done
it ? So great is its worth in itself that to at
tempt to add another worth would belittle.
The indignity would be unmistakable if in
order to give external worth we disregard its
internal. It is shocking to say that the mar
ble of the Venus of Milo would make excel
lent lime. Its present uses are all we wish to
think of.
Perhaps these principles become plainer still
in literary beauty. Which character of " Par
adise Lost " attracts us most ? Not Adam, by
whom we are easily bored. Nor Eve, who is
rather too subservient and borrows her light
too obviously from Adam. But, rather, Satan.
He at least is my favorite. I would alter no-
116 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
thing in him ; and if I am asked how I can
admire a character so evil, I answer that the
words " evil," and " admiration," are both
ambiguous. For if it is meant to inquire
whether I wish the crop of Satans to multi
ply in actual life, I certainly do not. They
are altogether disturbing, and should be ex
tirpated wherever found. But if admiration
be used aesthetically and not morally, then I
say that nothing in the whole range of Eng
lish poetry more properly stirs admiration.
Here traits are moulded together into strong
individuality which ordinarily tend only to
weakness. That delight in evil which regu
larly breaks up the nature in which it appears,
here becomes a directive power. What mar
velous skill is shown by the artist who can
induce matters incompatible, like the envious
traits of Satan, to become compatible, assistive
of one another ! Everything that Satan says
is just what he ought to say not what
others ought to say, but what he ought. It is
just so in the play of " Othello." The heavy,
ox-like man, pushed on to destruction, slow
to move but incapable of stopping himself
when once in motion, dull of apprehension,
u perplexed in the extreme " by what has been
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 117
uncritically apprehended, is certainly a huge
character. But more generally admired is the
lithe lago, exhaustless of life, delighting in
intellectual play for its own sake, without hate,
without love, without responsibility. lago, it
is true, being a man of no passions, is one of
the most foul-mouthed of Shakespeare s char
acters. But so he should be. He is exquisitely
consistent. It is not necessary to mark his
speeches with his name. They are marked
with the characteristics of the man, and all he
says throws an ever fresh light on the work
ings of his sinuous mind. He is a creature
of beauty, therefore, proved so not by ser
vice to others but by consistency with himself.
And can we estimate goodness in this way ?
Can we test a good deed by the coherence of
its parts ? A good deed should be coherent,
should be beautiful. But we do not rest con
tent with this. We ask what will be the effect,
the normal effect, of that deed ; what is its
tendency ? A particular effect may fail in a
given case, but we ask whether in the long
run it will produce such or such results. We
study our deed in its entire setting, tracing
how it may promote other good deeds and
stimulate goodness throughout the entire tract
118 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
into which it enters. Thus, here again, the
points of view from which we survey beauty
and goodness are widely unlike. The ele
ments which enter into a good deed are
broadly effective and bring themselves into
adjustment with more than themselves. When
we call a good thing beautiful, we speak of
only a single aspect of it and have not yet
taken up the distinctively moral point of view.
IX
According as an object is beautiful it be
comes insusceptible of growth, is finished,
fixed, finite, however rich in suggestions of
infinity. The hardships of life are rooted in its
limitations. We engage, for example, in some
enjoyable action. That action is destined to
come to an end ; its end is prefigured in
its beginning. While in its career, it must
be conducted under the strictest rules. Only
by proceeding exactly so, precisely thus, can
the intended result be reached. We are finite
beings. Our knowledge, our desires, our ac
tivities are hemmed in on every side, while
our wishes run far beyond restriction and
seek to loose themselves from every bond.
Now I take it that at the times when we most
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 119
keenly feel the bitterness of such limitations,
we feel also most fully the solace of the fine
arts. In them we take refuge as in a realm
of infinitude. Here we rid ourselves of that
sense of restriction which besets our ordinary
concerns.
Curiously enough, the fact is the very op
posite of that which our feelings report. The
beautiful object, more than anything else in
life, is limited, finite. The considerations we
have brought forward have made this abun
dantly clear. In the presence of a beautiful
object we say, " It is enough, I wish nothing
more. Here is all that any one could ask."
But is not this the same as to say that we are
here dealing with an entirely finite affair ?
It is through smallness, limitation, detach
ment, that the thing of beauty gets its per
fection. That is why we personal beings are
never altogether beautiful. We never can be
complete, such ties with the infinite are in
us. If, to be so, we allow ourselves to pause
at some assumed perfection, we destroy our
goodness and render ourselves incomplete
anew. It is impossible, then, that a person
shall ever be really beautiful, for he is always
in the making. Growth is involved in his
120 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
structure. It is excluded from the beautiful
object. In making that object complete, we
have cut off the possibility of further develop
ment. No doubt we often speak of a grow
ing object as beautiful, but only in an accom
modated sense. Arresting growth at some
single point, contemplating what has already
been attained, and for the moment with
drawing attention from the developmental
agencies still at work, we admire its beauty.
More strikingly still, we sometimes speak of
an entire line of development as beautiful.
But in this case we contemplate the line not
merely in what has actually been accomplished
but in that toward which its tendencies move.
In calling a growing object beautiful, we fore
cast what is not really present in that which
we behold. Strictly speaking, in the beau
tiful thing the work of evolution is ended.
As much has been done as will ever be done.
Accordingly there is always something petty
about a beautiful object, even the most beau
tiful. It has stopped and, unlike the moral
being, rests in its finitude.
I have said, however, that the beautiful
object through its very finitude suggests in
finity. Strange that it should do so ! Per-
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 121
haps it is due to the fact that the goal of our
endeavors being attained so dimly and imper
fectly elsewhere, beauty, with its goal already
reached, comes to us as a prophecy of what
might be, so that only in connection with the
beautiful does the infinite seem possible and
clear. I cannot fully explain the matter. We
certainly should not expect to meet the infinite
most strikingly in that portion of life from
which it is most nearly banished. But this
I believe to be the fact. As I understand
it, in order to be beautiful an object must
have accepted limits, have reached its growth,
have completed its development; yet in its
presence alone do thoughts of limitation pass
away, and we enter a region where restriction
ceases and we seem to have attained that
very infinitude for which elsewhere we vainly
yearn.
X
Such appear to be the three lines of dis
tinction between ethics and aesthetics. Per
haps I should rather say the single distinc
tion, one fundamental contrast being here
presented in a threefold aspect. Nor does
this contrast altogether prevent an object
from being both good and beautiful. While
122 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
it moves toward completion and enters con
tinually into wider relationship, we think of
it as good. In its attainment and satisfied
repose we feel it beautiful. These are differ
ent points of view. Yet to have belittled sa
cred beauty, even to this extent, seems an act
of profanity. Before closing I will make a
kind of atonement by turning back and point
ing out the enormous debts which ethics owes
to aesthetics, the large dependence which the
good must always have upon the beautiful.
XI
In the first place, as we have already seen,
from aesthetics goodness borrows its concep
tion of organic wholeness ; and no other con
ception is of equal importance for moral
guidance. The time when a man first comes
upon it constitutes an epoch in his life. It
is the foundation of science. As children
we look out on the world seeing one thing
and another thing and another thing. Each
object is an independent affair. Gradually
we begin to perceive that the various objects
which we see belong together, that the one is
in some sense dependent on the other. But
it is a long time before we come to the great
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 123
discovery that every object in the world is
dependent on every other. The moment we
have mastered this thought and know that
we cannot understand one thing until we
have understood all, incipiently at least we
are scientific men.
Nor can we be moral men until this
thought is ours. The child is impelled in
one direction by one powerful impulse and
in another by another. He strongly desires
this now and something else by and by. A
multitude of whirling desires sweep him
away. We might say that the forces at work
upon him are centrifugal, tearing to pieces
the central self. Each moves on its own pe
culiar track, while he, the person, is as yet
unformed. Some time or other the great
thought comes to him that these varied pas
sions cannot be valued independently. He
cannot call one of them good or bad. He
must ask, " How far does each impulse of my
nature help me to fashion a whole my
self ? " Through an understanding of that
self, thus constituted, their worth becomes
tested. When that young mind has grasped
this conception of an organism, he is a new
being. The whole moral world lies open to
124 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
him. Soon he will be led on to contemplate
a larger self still, that selfhood in which he
individually becomes adjusted to all other
individuals in helpful unity. And this con
ception of organic wholeness is precisely that
which is summed up in rounded perfection and
instantaneously presented to our feelings in
each beautiful object we behold. It is beauty
which is the chief teacher of the importance
of organization. " Study the whole," it is
perpetually saying. " Do not let life become
disintegrated. See things in their relations
to one another, and observe what peace at
tends the wholeness."
XII
Then a practical gain comes to the moral
life from aesthetics, for again and again we
need beauty to reconcile us to law. Who is
there who does not sometimes fret under
obligation ? A duty calls, we accomplish it,
and think we are about to be free. But right
before us stands another duty, obliging us,
instead of following our own sweet will, to
attend to it. Following that out, we still
have not obtained our discharge. Duty after
duty lies in wait wherever we turn. Life
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS 125
seems reduced to slavery. The crack of the
moral whip never ceases. When we would
rest and amuse ourselves, and really obtain
some pleasure from life, we are compelled to
hear the intrusive voice of duty, bidding us
do what it commands and not what we would
like. Willing as we may be to give up por
tions of life to duty, clearly as we may per
ceive that lives not so given are poor, we do
not want to feel our necks under the yoke
forever. We want a little pleasure before
life is ended and not to have spent all in
responding to harsh exaction.
Now I know nothing that can reconcile us
to the life of duty except the revelation which
beauty brings. For I suppose we all feel the
field of beauty to be the field of delight. In
beauty s presence we find our keenest enjoy
ments, and we instinctively oppose these al
lurements of beautiful things to the behests
of duty. But is this instinctive opposition
correct? Exploring beauty, we find that in
it law reigns more entirely than anywhere
else. We have already seen how art ban
ishes caprice, how only that which is de
manded by the law of the whole can enter a
beautiful object. Yet the result is delight.
126 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
We have figured to ourselves when going
through the long train of duty that pleasure
lay outside law ; and that if we could be rid
of its commands, pleasure would be ours.
Beauty teaches that the opposite is true. In
beauty we are under the government of law
to a higher degree than we possibly can be
elsewhere. And still it is here that we feel
our keenest pleasures.
Accordingly every beautiful object fur
nishes a luminous revelation in regard to the
character of the moral life. Law and delight
are not enemies, but very closely akin. When
we have supposed that by following law we
were bringing ourselves into bondage and
keeping pleasure at a distance, we were de
ceived. More frequently pleasure has been
missed through not allowing law sufficient en
trance. I do not know how this lesson can
be taught elsewhere with the same impressive-
ness. State it, and there will always be un
belief. But when beauty announces it, we
know it is true. And how widely it applies !
What a burden, for example, it is to be al
ways thinking about order. When I come
into my room, instead of throwing down my
hat in one place and my coat in another and
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 127
kicking off my boots wherever they may fall, I
cannot really be at peace with duty until I take
up each article and put it in a designated spot.
If I could get rid of this passion for order, as
many around me do, then I might lead a lif e of
independence and be free from pursuing care.
So it looks. But once initiated into beauty,
we do not think so. Then we wish each func
tion of life to be clear and distinct. When
we are occupied with our sitting life we do
not wish it intruded upon by our walking life.
If our comfortable chair is really to be en
joyed, we like to have it separated from boots
and coat. The writing table, littered with
matters which do not concern writing, will not
appear pleasing. The discord there will be as
offensive as a jarring note in music. Let the
aesthetic sense of order be trained as the OBS-
thetic sense of hearing usually is, and order
will be perceived to be an expression of the
beauty of vigorous and discriminated living.
Where order is not present, functions are hin
dered and pleasures in the long run diminished.
He is wise who has learned to take moral mat
ters aBsthetically, and through the truer in
sight which the sense of beauty gives has
come to smile at the stern exactions of duty.
128 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
XIII
One further debt should be recorded as
owed by ethics to aesthetics, and that is, that
the aim sought in ethics is set by aesthetics.
When we seek after goodness and try in any
given way to moralize our lives, we can do so
only by having in mind a goal to be ultimately
reached. If, for example, we set out to study,
we must have in mind the goal of a finished
totality of wisdom ; we must seek to become
entirely learned persons. Do we expect, then,
to become entirely learned persons ? By no
means. Every degree of wisdom that we at
tain simply opens a fresh possibility of further
learning. We shall not reach it, but we could
not study without figuring to ourselves the
goal of wisdom. Now completed wisdom is
an aesthetic aim alluring us by its beauty. I
seek to be a good man ; that is, to have a per
fect character. Such an ideal of a perfect
character is a thought of myself as beautiful,
rounded, ended. In reality I know there is
no such thing possible as a rounded and ended
character. But I have it in mind as an object
of endeavor. And this object, so necessary
to the moral life, is an affair of beauty.
.ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 129
There are two opposite errors into which one
may fall at this point. We have already seen
that devotees of beauty are not the most stren
uous moralists. The causes of this are often
alleged to be the great vivacity of the artist s
physical senses and the fact that he inhabits
a somewhat unreal world. I do not doubt
there are perils in both of these directions.
But another reason now appears. The adorer
of beauty is a lover of a finished result. But
finished results are not to be had in the moral
life. This always remains unfinished. If
completeness is prized, it must be sought in
what is small, superficial, and easily detached,
rather than in matters fundamental. And
here is a danger of the artistic temperament.
On the other hand, there are persons in whom
the aesthetic sense is feeble. They are well
aware that duty is never finished, character
never complete, service to the community
never at an end. Such persons go through
life as slaves; forever under alien compulsion.
Beauty should rest them. He who has a ready
apprehension of it will detect its little whole
nesses everywhere, and in each one of them
will catch a refreshing prophecy of that which
he continually seeks. Nothing relieves the
130 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
hardness of life like the facile seizure of
beauty.
XIV
We may now sum up what has been said
in regard to beauty and compare it with the
results of our examination of the law. The
law conceived a person in too objective a way,
studying him only in relation to his fellows,
and chiefly with the purpose of preventing
his injuring them. His worth was estimated,
not in terms of himself, but in terms of his
neighbor. Necessary for certain purposes of
life as was this mode of treating persons, we
found it inadequate as an account of the
moral man. Too objective I called it ; and
we turned to the subjective fine arts, hoping
to find in them the ethical point of view more
nearly attained. But our trouble with the fine
arts is just the reverse of that with the law.
Artistically we estimate a person purely in
terms of himself, disregarding all that lies
beyond. The point of view of aesthetics is
therefore far too subjective to yield a full sur
vey of the moral field. For though a moral
being must be a person, who, like an object
of fine art, has worth in himself, he must also
fulfill relations to his fellow men, as the law
requires.
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 131
What we need, then, is some province dif
ferent from either the law or aesthetics, dif
ferent, though including the point of view of
each. Morality judges persons as both subjec
tive and objective, as both beautiful and legal.
Is there, then, any aspect of life in which a
man s worth is reckoned in terms of himself
at the same moment when that worth is esti
mated in terms of his fellow men ? Perhaps
we should add one further demand. We
saw that beauty was always finite, while good
ness could not be stated in finite terms. Our
new province must present us a being, not
merely of worth in himself and of worth in
reference to others, but of a worth unlimited,
admitting of endless growth, and opening out
upon infinity.
When these conditions are distinctly un
derstood, it is evident that they are fulfilled
in only one field, in that of religion.
REFERENCES ON THE RELATIONS OF ART
AND ETHICS
Shaftesbury s Inquiry Concerning Virtue.
Schiller s Letters on the ^Esthetic Education of the Human
Race.
Sharp s ./Esthetic Element in Morality.
Merriman s Religio Pictoris.
Palmer s Glory of the Imperfect.
Santayana s Sense of Beauty, pt. i.
Miinsterberg s Psychology and Life, ch. iv.
Dickinson s Greek View of Life, ch. iv.
Mackenzie s Ethics, ch. xvi.
Plato s Republic, bk. iii.
Aristotle s Poetics, ch. vii.
Marshall s Pleasure, Pain, and Esthetics.
IV
ETHICS AND RELIGION
AFFINITIES
IV
ETHICS AND RELIGION
AFFINITIES
I
THE Christian believer, or rather the reli
gious man of every faith, thinks of himself as
a being whose conduct and character possess
worth, worth respected of God and furthering
or hindering the worth of his fellow men. He
is a person, in short, of both subjective and
objective importance. He knows, too, that
he is essentially connected with the infinite
ground of all worth, which is indeed his own
source of supply. This inherent connection
forbids any estimate of himself in finite terms.
The field of religion, accordingly, approaches
that of ethics more nearly than can possibly
the field of the law or aBsthetics. It has not
the onesidedness of either of these. What
is the degree of this nearness, and does it
amount to identity?
For an answer, I shall not enter into the
vexed and interesting question of origins.
136 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
That belongs to a different order of inquiry.
In what way morality and religion first mani
fested themselves, certainly forms an instruc
tive chapter of history, a descriptive science,
but has only an indirect bearing on norma
tive investigations. Questions of origin and
questions of validity spring from different
quarters of the human mind. They cannot be
given a single answer without misleading him
who asks, and distorting two important lines of
inquiry. To find out the power and signifi
cance of any factor of personal life, we do not
wisely study it where it is feeblest, in its be
ginnings. Its value is best tested when most
operative, in its developed form. That in
early times religion was something pretty gro
tesque is well known. That it has undergone
development is generally agreed, and that in
doing so it has passed through a tolerably fixed
order of stages, from repulsive early externali
ties to the spiritual ennoblements of to-day,
seems highly probable. But this is no more
true of religion than of any other of man s
affairs. Medicine, architecture, trade, love,
have similarly all experienced immense trans
formations, and appear among us in forms
very unlike those which characterized their
ETHICS AND RELIGION 137
primitive start. When we try to fix the place
in man s life of any of these, we do not get
much help from inspection of half-understood
beginnings. An historical account of the tem
poral sequence of social forms furnishes an
impressive lesson as regards the slowness of
man in comprehending his needs and powers.
It is also full of encouragement for his ulti
mate growth. But if we would know the
meaning and capacity of architecture, it would
be folly to seek it in the initial stages of the
art. The savage s hut cannot possibly ex
plain Amiens Cathedral, though the cathe
dral throws much light on the hut. The last
stages, not the first, disclose the significance
of a developmental process.
We may, it is true, set aside all questions
of significance. We may chronicle a series
of social changes with as much disinterested
ness as we do a series of physical ones, never
asking whether as they occurred men found
broader room for ampler powers. And there
is much value in such an account from which
all thoughts of advance are excluded. But
whenever we talk of development, we are
thinking of conditions which involve a lower
and a higher, of a movement toward a mark,
138 THE FIELD OF ETHICS .
of a conclusion more expressive of man s in
terests than was its beginning.
Now I think it is sure that both religion
and morality have developed ; that is, that in
their present forms they are better adjusted
to human nature than ever they were before.
When then I try to make out their relations
to each other, I do not turn back to the
pathetic gropings and misapprehensions of
primeval man. Nor shall I trace minutely
the degree or frequency with which religion
has found itself associated with morality.
This has often been brought about or pre
vented by external conditions. Religion has
at times been overpoweringly ceremonial, and
has then seemed meagre enough in morality.
Morality, too, when most ardent, has again
and again attacked religion and has often
attempted to crush the infamous thing. But
was it not on these glorious occasions reestab
lishing religion on more solid foundations?
Substantially, though with an occasional
clash, the two are acknowledged to have de
veloped pari passu. What we want to know
is, why their connection has been so close ?
Now that both are at their completest point,
can we say that religion embraces within itself
ETHICS AND RELIGION 139
the whole moral life, or are some elements of
that life still relatively independent ? When
most fully engrossed in thoughts of God, are
we most completely removed from moral dan
ger ? Or, to put our question in its most
arguable form, does the love of God naturally
include the love of our neighbor ? Is duty
apprehensible only through recognition of our
relation to an infinite being?
II
This question would commonly enough be
answered affirmatively. There is a general
belief that the religious man is, as a matter of
course, moral, and the moral man fundamen
tally religious. The moral man need not,
indeed, be religious according to a specified
type. We ought not to identify religion with
this or that particular religion. But religion
in general, religion manifested in its highest
forms, is commonly supposed to be undivorci-
ble from morality. No doubt it is easy so to
misconceive both religion and morality that
they may be set far asunder. But will this
separation endure careful scrutiny ? Ordinary
life contains a multitude of moral maxims. It
is said a person cannot be a good man unless
140 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
he does so and so. But on consideration no
one would hold that exact conformity to spe
cific precepts is religiously commanded. The
question is whether one who pierced through
conventional maxims to discover duties under
neath, one who ever sought to grasp the
principles on which specific precepts rest,
whether such a man would find his obedience
to the laws of morals obedience also to the
law of God. There is a large consensus of
opinion affirming that he would. I will classify
the testimony.
Early times know no duties which are not
religious. The patterns of bows, rugs, and
domestic implements, the times and methods
of planting, food, hygienic arrangements,
medicine, dress, social courtesies, birth, mar
riage, burial, not one of them is adjusted
without reference to religious prescription.
Religion permeates the whole of lif e, knowing
little distinction of sacred and secular. To
become acquainted with the gods of a people
is to learn the national conduct and character ;
and, conversely, to observe the people s be
havior is to read a chapter in the biography
of their gods. Whatever traces later ages
may show of a separation of morality from
ETHICS AND RELIGION 141
religion, the separation is one of which early
times know absolutely nothing.
And to a large extent later ages are of the
same mind. The priesthood, the ministry,
have always been the recognized guardians
of the modes of living approved in their
communities. And while there has certainly
been a tendency on the part of religious
functionaries to dull the moral interests com
mitted to their charge, and to check their
priority, freshness, and growth, it may truly
be said, on the other hand, that moral leaders
have almost invariably been religious leaders,
insistent on the unity of divine and human
law. Preeminently is this true of Jesus. We
cannot call him an awakening moral teacher,
nor the revealer of a new faith, without mis
interpreting his work. He was both, and each
by means of the other. He sought to bring
men to a knowledge of themselves through
God, and to God through a knowledge of
human relationships. In him the love of God
and man were not two things, but one. And
all his attacks on the constituted authorities
of his day were directed against their attempt
to take the humanity out of divine things.
142 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
III
In every age since that of Jesus, certain
experts have advocated his view ; I mean by
experts persons devoting themselves specifi
cally to investigations of ethics and religion.
These men, though persons widely unlike in
temperament and training, have agreed in the
substantial identity of the two departments.
For early Christianity, Augustine laid down
the moral rule, " Love God, and do as you
please." " Dilige, et quod vis fac." Nothing
else is needed. The inclinations will be so
transformed by love of God that they will al
ways point to righteousness. The Ten Com
mandments are no doubt a convenience for
persons incapable of perceiving the unity of
virtue. The precepts which society has grad
ually elaborated and embodied in its forms
and usages may well repay study. But all
rest on an elementary principle. If we love
God, morality is ours.
A precisely similar criticism on the Ten
Commandments Jesus himself had offered.
He pointed out that there are not ten duties,
but one. Love God, including your neighbor,
he said and seemed to think the two much
ETHICS AND RELIGION 143
the same thing. " For all the law is fulfilled
in this one word : thou shalt love God with
all the soul and with ah 1 the heart." That is
the one and only commandment. Allegiance
to God and allegiance to righteousness are
identified. Augustine s sublime statement
merely repeats the thought.
It may, however, be felt that these judg
ments are biased. Jesus was founding a
church, of which Augustine was a defender.
The two naturally give truth a religious color.
But let us take the testimony of one who stood
outside all religious communions, one who
was a singularly original and unpurchasable
explorer in ethical fields. No one will charge
Spinoza with ecclesiastical prejudice. Yet the
conclusion of his great treatise is that in
the love of God all duties are fulfilled ; apart
from that love duty has no existence. He
who has not attained the love of God is in
capable of goodness. He may be unaware of
possessing that love and still in reality do so.
That is conceivable. But whatever goodness
he has must, in Spinoza s judgment, spring
from his love of God. There is no other
possible source. The outcast Jew, Spinoza,
and the Church Father, Augustine, accord
144 THE FIELD OF ETB,ICS
in maintaining the unity of ethics and reli
gion.
But these are ancient authorities. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century no mor
alist had a wider currency among English
speakers than Paley. With him, the religious
sanction is the only sanction. If the belief
in God should perish, he declares that all mo
rality would perish with it. It is easy to dis
parage Paley. People nowadays say that he
had no large acquaintance with either God or
morals. But only a little earlier, one of the
greatest ethical forces America ever produced,
Jonathan Edwards, said the same thing. His
doctrine is a repetition of that of Spinoza and
Augustine. He holds that the love of God
is the whole duty of man, and that conduct
lacking that excellence lacks all. Paley and
Jonathan Edwards are about as unlike as
Augustine and Spinoza. But in this belief
they are agreed.
With them agree some of the leading ex
perts of to-day. Henry Sidgwick has had
immense influence in English ethics, largely
because he is so persistently unable to make
up his mind. He considers every side of every
subject, and rejects little except dogmatic con-
ETHICS AND EELIGION 145
elusions. Yet the last pages of the " Methods
of Ethics " declare ethics to be an imperfect
science, incapable of completion without reli
gion. Parted from that, ethics has little mean
ing. The ultimate sanction of every right
deed must, when considered carefully, be the
religious sanction. This is Paley s doctrine,
and a remarkable one to appear in a mind so
secular as Sidgwick s. But it appears again
in another writer about as untrammeled as he,
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the historian of
the criminal law of England. His book, " Lib
erty, Equality, and Fraternity," attempts to
prove that if the religious beliefs of mankind
perish, morality will go too. Stephen is no
theologian, and does not attempt to inquire
which faiths are true or false. But religious
conviction and right conduct are, in his view,
so identified that the one must ever be modi
fied by the other.
Here is a sufficiently varied collection of
authorities. I have cited Christian teachers
simply because Christianity is the religion
under which we live. Under other religious,
the identification of the two fields would have
been commoner still.
146 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
IV
But the beliefs of experts do not, I think,
announce so fully what is in the mind of a
race as do its institutions. A second class of
testimony shall accordingly show how large
is the stake set by civic institutions on the
close relationship of religion and morals. The
amount of money spent by most modern na
tions on church establishments is one of the
largest charges incurred for any single ob
ject. Military expenditure, that on means of
communication, railroads, telegraphs, post
offices, and that on education, may occa
sionally rival it. It is, in any case, an enor
mous sum, in this country, about two
hundred million dollars of annual outlay.
Here, it is true, it is spent by groups of
individuals, and not by the state. Yet these
voluntary churches are counted by the state
of such importance to the morals of the com
munity that all taxes on them are remitted.
The remission constitutes a large subsidy, the
more remarkable because under this mode of
giving the state does not direct expenditure.
State aid is thus granted to churches of every
sect, and .simply because they are churches.
ETHICS AND RELIGION 147
Here is strong testimony to the general con
viction of a close connection between morality
and religion. It means that if religion flour
ishes in a community, expensive vice is dimin
ished, upright and social conduct increased.
And probably most of us are instinctively
of this mind whether we profess ourselves
believers in God or not. Traveling in the
remote West and desirous of settling in some
eligible spot, if we came where pioneers were
already attractively established, but found that
in the little settlement there was no sign of
worship, we should probably move on. We
should say, " Though not myself a religious
man, I am safest under the church spire.
Property is more secure where that rises.
Then there is my family ; when my children
are grown, it will be time to warn them against
superstition. But I could hardly train them
properly without religious institutions." Such
feelings are common enough among the irre
ligious. Devout minds carry them a step far
ther and find that religion is only the com
pleted expression of morality. The prophet
asks, " What doth the Lord require of thee
but to do justly and to love mercy and to
walk humbly with thy God ? " And the apos-
148 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
tie declares that " Pure religion and undefiled
before God and the Father is this, To visit
the fatherless and widows in their affliction
and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
In this lecture I have adopted the same
method as in the preceding. I have tried to
show that the two fields are as a fact identi
fied. The reasons for the fact I have thus far
not discussed, nor even whether it may not
rest on error. My own opinion has not been
expressed. I have merely wished to exhibit
the widespread belief that goodness and de-
voutness are inseparable. But the deeper
question remains, Why are the two identi
fied ? What is there in the nature of the one
which is also found in the other ? A simi
lar question arose in the analysis of beauty.
Noticing its alliance with goodness, we were
obliged to take a beautiful object and ask
what it contained which belonged also to the
moral field. Something analogous must be
attempted now. As I cannot take a religious
object, I take a religious definition. Among
the many expositions of religion we will, some
what arbitrarily, select one and ask whether in
ETHICS AND RELIGION 149
that definition is included and essentially
included what would also need to be in
cluded in any definition we might fashion of
the moral life. I say we shall need to choose
our definition of religion somewhat arbitrarily,
for otherwise this lecture would become a trea
tise on the philosophy of religion. Ethics, not
religion, is the theme of our study. I look
into religion only to find how far it can illu
minate ethics. Our inquiry will be most
easily kept within bounds if dogmatically I
assume a certain notable definition as on the
whole that which suits me best, and proceed
directly to inquire how far it covers also the
case of the moral life. I will, however, before
closing the subject, take up one or two other
famous definitions and see if they corroborate
the one which I have arbitrarily chosen.
VI
Lucretius defined religion in words which
have deeply influenced twenty centuries:
" Primus in orbe timor fecit deos." What
brought gods before us first was fear. Be
cause we are born to trouble, the idea of God
has visited us. At first the statement may
shock, and make us disposed to deny it. But
150 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
my impression is that the more we reflect, the
more we shall find ourselves compelled to ac
cept it and to own that at the heart of reli
gion lies fear. It is difficult to judge a
matter so personal without bias. But if we
try to do so, we shall find, I believe, that as
a fact our thoughts of religion have hitherto
been closely associated with a sense of our
own weakness.
To test the case, let us ask under what
circumstances feelings of devoutness come
easiest ? Is it when we are strong in body,
masterful, possessed of abundant wealth, with
all the events of life turning out for us fortu
nately, and we thinking of ourselves as crea
tures of natural good luck on whom evils do
not easily fall is it then that God seems
nearest ? Few would say so ; rather, " It is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of heaven." When sickness threat
ens and we feel our helplessness, then it is
that even if not our practice before we
incline to pray. We say, " I am weak ; Thou
art strong." In the call for help we reach
the clearest consciousness of God. An old
English poet has said that we turn to God
ETHICS AND EELIGION 151
"when griefs make us tame." How excellent
the expression ! When strong and boisterous,
we seem to do very well without God. But
when we are tamed by grief, he seems close
at hand or we wish he were.
And this, which is true in our own case, is
doubly true in reference to others for whom
we fear. I love my father, and see him suf
fering ; he has suddenly lost his property, has
forfeited his repute among men. Witnessing
his distress and knowing how helpless I am
to aid, the very sense of that helplessness ex
torts a call for higher aid. I can hardly im
agine any one standing by the bedside of a
sick friend without longing for God. Piti
able scenes cry out for him.
And something similar appears when we
are brought face to face with the huge forces
of nature, so much more powerful than we.
As we stand on the shore of the outstretching
sea, the sense of its immensity brings home
to us our littleness, and in the perception of
that littleness God is near. Who can look
into the starry sky, thinking either of the
multitude of worlds there or of the enormous
tracts of space required by that multitude,
and keep thoughts of God banished from his
152 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
mind? Indeed, whenever we become small,
God becomes large. In some striking verses
Arthur Hugh Clough considers who are the
believers and who the disbelievers in God.
After describing those who have little sense
of divine things, he inquires who still in every
community maintain belief in God? These
he finds to be
" Country folks who live beneath
The shadow of the steeple ;
The parson and the parson s wife,
And mostly married people ;
"Youths green and happy in first love,
So thankful for illusion ;
And men caught out in what the world
Calls guilt, in first confusion ;
" And almost every one when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him."
These have a keen sense of God, because
they have a keen sense of their own limita
tions : the parson, hemmed in by an ecclesias
tical system ; married people, checked by one
another ; the young man falling in love, know
ing how poor he is and how rich he wishes to
be ; and whoever is oppressed by sin, disease,
sorrow, or age. All these persons, unlike as
ETHICS AND RELIGION 153
they are in other respects, are alike in this,
that they find themselves behind bars. They
are small. And in that apprehension of re
striction comes the thought of God s greatness.
Now I agree in fact, I said so at the be
ginning of this section that views of this
sort have in them much that is repulsive. But
we are not trying to discover what we like
and what we do not like. We want the truth.
And it does seem to me clear that this sense
of our weakness in connection with God s
power just the conjunction which is the
essential element of fear is fundamental to
religion everywhere.
VII
But this is only half of our question. Per
ceiving that as a fact morality and religion
are widely believed to be but different names
for the same thing, we sought something
closely connected with the essence of religion
and were then to ask whether anything like
it is involved in the essence of morality. The
first part of that question has been answered.
Fear is wrought into the foundations of reli
gion. But how fundamental is it in ethics?
I must appeal here, also, to experience. When
154 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
we do a right deed in obedience to duty, does
it not appear as in some sense a setting of our
selves aside as if we were beings too small to
be considered ? I am not to be counted im
portant ; the duty is to be counted important ;
and whether I like or do not like to do it is
of no consequence: Every duty announces
something as due from us to beings of some
sort or other whose claims are superior to our
own. I will not pause to inquire to whom
that debt runs. Perhaps it is the social or
ganism, perhaps the greatest happiness *of the
greatest number, perhaps the perfection of the
individual or the race, perhaps the command
of God himself, which makes the claim. In
any case, we are called on to know ourselves
little, and something else large. Accordingly,
all of us are restive under duty, feel a certain
irksomeness in it, and are disposed to assert
our own importance. But duty is unyielding,
and regardlessly says, " No. Set yourself en
tirely aside. Do not ask what you want, or
whether you are likely to get it. . Necessity
is laid upon you. Obey." That is the un
sympathetic voice of duty everywhere ; and it
awakens in us that very feeling of shrinking,
that very sense of being small in the presence
ETHICS AND RELIGION 155
of something large, which appeared in religion
as fear. Fear is at the heart of both religion
and morality, fear as I have defined it the
sense of ourselves when dominated by what is
more powerful. So much for the connection
of the two fields through the principle of fear.
VIII
Yet I should be sorry if this conclusion
were heartily accepted. Even if my presenta
tion has been convincing, and fear is now con
fessed to be deeply imbedded in religion, I
hope it will be felt that the account is in
complete, and that religion contains elements
much more important and ennobling than fear.
The Psalmist says that " Fear is the begin
ning of wisdom," evidently meaning by wis
dom, divine wisdom, reverence for God. His
thought might seem the same as that of Lu
cretius. But in the Psalmist s mind, fear is
only the beginning of wisdom. To argue that
it is the end a substantial portion of com
pleted religion, as I appear to have done
is to produce a sense of bewilderment. The
hearer may feel that he ought to be convinced,
but the proved conclusion will hardly fail to
be revolting. In such cases of a divided mind,
156 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
where the results of reasoning clash with high
instincts, it is usually well to turn back and
examine whether there may not have been
ambiguity in some of the fundamental terms
employed.
I believe the word fear to be ambiguous.
There are two kinds of fear. When we be
come convinced that fear is essential to reli
gion, we are thinking of one sort of fear;
and when again we draw back and find the
doctrine of fear abhorrent, we are chiefly
influenced by the thought of a different sort
of fear. On the clear understanding of these
two sorts of fear depends in large measure
our comprehension of the nature of religion
and our just discernment of the contrast be
tween religion and morality. To bring the
matter most transparently before us, suppose
we look at it in a field where prejudice can
not disturb. Questions which, like those of
religion, affect our deepest interests, are dif
ficult to look at without distortion. I will,
therefore, leave these higher regions, and tak
ing up an altogether trivial case, remote from
everything about which we might have strong
feeling, through it attempt to work out defini
tions of the two sorts of fear. Afterwards
ETHICS AND RELIGION 157
we can adapt these definitions to the weightier
matters of ethics and religion.
IX
The other night I received an invitation to
a party, and was not much pleased to read
it. It is not my habit to frequent such fes
tivities. I am a quiet student, preferring
my library and armchair to everything else
and only there feeling really at ease ; still, it
seemed not quite possible to avoid presenting
myself on this disturbing occasion. Sadly
I got into that unwonted article, my dress-
suit, and moved off forebodingly to the car-
riage-becrowded door. I was not reassured
on entering, for the place was brilliant, and
everybody, except myself, appeared altogether
at his best. I felt awkward, did not know
what to do with my arms and legs, and began
to wish I had not come. Forcing a smile,
however, I shook hands with my hostess, and
then slunk into a corner hoping to be un
observed. Gay couples swept past me, airily
enjoying themselves and sharpening my pangs.
It made me wretched to see how thoroughly
at their ease these people could be. Their
talk was as distressing as their bearing.
158 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
Each had something neat to say, something
that struck me as enormously clever yet quite
unforced. Their casual remarks, thrown out
as they approached and drifted away from
one another, were fitted to stir gayety but not
to demand reflection. Repeatedly I said to
myself that I could not have contrived any
thing so suitable if I had had half an hour to
think it over. And the more I vexed myself
with wondering what remarks I had better
make, the less I could discover what would do.
I never before judged myself quite so fool
ish. As the bewildering brilliancy increased,
I sidled nearer the door. When it opened I
managed to creep out, unseen, I hoped,
and on the street found myself for the first
time at ease.
It had been a tremulous evening. I could
not imagine how I had ever permitted myself
to appear in such company. Plainly I had
no business there, being quite too small and
rigid a person for so complex an occasion.
My little lif e is marked out for definite duties.
I go through them very well. But the mo
ment I try to swell myself to the proportions
of a man of the world, able to join in the
give and take of society, with something ever
ETHICS AND RELIGION 159
on the tongue apt to the minute, at ease with
myself no matter who appears, then I dis
cover how small I really am. And this was
the source of my terror, that I, essentially
small, mingling with large persons, found
that the contrast between them and me re
vealed my true size. I was thus brought face
to face with my smallness and was shown how
narrowly limited my life is. Through the
easy ability of others I discovered my incom
petence. And that was fear the apprehen
sion of greatness from which I was shut out.
In their own kind, in naturalness of social
approach, these people were great. But I was
little and aloof, though I had not observed
my exclusion until I sought to identify myself
with them.
Suppose some gentle soul had noticed my
timidity and, audacious himself in the service
of weakness, had approached me and tried
to relieve my discomfort. By what means
might he have restored my composure and
abolished my fears ? He might have said,
"I know what makes. you fear. Up to this
time you have met few ladies and gentle
men in society, and naturally you are a little
abashed at their swift ways. Their graceful
160 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
alertness in giving each other pleasure at
momentary meetings makes you feel small.
But has it occurred to you that that easy gen
tleman, receiving with so much assurance the
admiration of all, is but an enlarged picture
of yourself? There is nothing in him that
you may not be. You are in error in ima
gining that between him and you there is a
great gulf fixed. It is merely that hitherto
you have turned but little in his direction.
You have thought of yourself as a recluse,
imagining that his refinement and ease is the
peculiar heritage of a special class. Having
allowed yourself seclusion, you are now ex
periencing the sense of estrangement which
privacy naturally brings. But see what
powers this man has brought out in himself.
He shows you how to do it. Think what
you might become if you were willing to
emerge from your library. If instead of re
garding him as your foe, you had looked
upon him as your pattern, your exemplar, you
might have enjoyed yourself. He is your
best friend. You say you feel yourself small?
What of it, if you are on the way to large
ness? Do not fear. There is nothing alien
or hostile to you in his excellence. It is
ETHICS AND RELIGION 161
yours, if you will take it. Think of him as
a revelation of yourself and fear will cease.
He who terrifies you will make you bold."
Such thoughts transform fear into love.
For when we talk of loving we mean .that we
have found some one greater than we in
whose life we can so merge our own that his
will become ours, and we, through union with
him, shall be able to escape our own pettiness.
That is the essence of love, identification of
one s self with another deemed our better.
Pityingly we sometimes love those beneath
us. But love s fullness is not come till we
love one to whom we look up, identifying
ourselves with him however large he seems,
and however small we. That largeness of
his, first causing us fear, love adopts for its
own. Accordingly fear fear of the old
debasing sort is set aside. Yet fear of an
other kind is not altogether absent. The poet
Spenser calls his lady, " My dear dread," an
exquisitely truthful contradiction ! Knowing
how pure and exalted she is, and how ignoble
he, he finds her awe-inspiring. And such a
contradiction is always involved in love. We
162 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
abhor ourselves when we love, but we respect
ourselves too, as we were never respected be
fore. In the new light that has dawned we
look with scorn on our old separate and actual
self, while the presence of the one we love
opens a vista into regions which we had never
expected to enter and brings us incredible
honor. Both elements are present, dignity
and abasement. Love is not love which has
not holy fear at the heart of it.
But evidently this fear at the heart of love
is of a different sort from the fear I expe
rienced at my party. Unfortunately in Eng
lish we have no two sharply contrasted terms
for naming these unlike fears. The Ger
mans are luckier than we. They have the
two words Furcht and Ehrfurcht, cowardly
fear and the fear of honor. One is the fear
of him who knows he is fixedly a little per
son and who accordingly hates the excellence
from which he feels himself debarred. The
other is the noble fear of one who delights in
all that is superior to what he now possesses,
because he sees in it his own large possibili
ties. How unlike they are the fear that
springs from exclusion, the fear that springs
from identifying admiration. That is a splen-
ETHICS AND RELIGION 163
did saying, I believe it is Goethe s, there
is no protection against excellence except
love. Excellence is an august and terrible
affair to him who believes it alien to himself.
It arouses an envious terror, as for something
we cannot possess. Hopelessly outside us,
such excellence belittles us at every turn.
The only way to escape its debasing terrors
is to break down the wall of separation, to
enter in and claim excellence for our own.
And such identification with what is admired
as superior is love. Love is community, an
upward-looking community. So the apostle
writes, and much in Goethe s spirit, " Love
envieth not." Everything except love does
envy. But the lover cannot. In him there
is no place for belittlement through separat
ing fears. He finds the qualities of his loved
one beneficently helpful, and would rather
have them where they are than in his own
possession. Even in feeling his weakness, he
exults.
XI
Such are the two contrasted kinds of fear.
I believe they both appear in religion. In
fact, I suspect we might divide the religions
164 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
of the world on this basis. Some of them
we call pagan, others universal or ethical;
and the distinction marks the different sorts of
fear which they contain. The pagan s God
is alien to himself. He never knows what
that God of his is going to do. God is a
powerful being, but irrational and arbitrary.
His worshiper can only humble himself and
conciliate, studying how to avoid offense.
Between God and himself there is no inti
macy or friendly trust. What he would like
best would be to get away from God, to hide
himself, and be allowed to go his own way.
This being impossible, his religion is largely
an affair of self-abasement. He will sacrifice
what he prizes most, in order to show of how
little consequence he is. Then perhaps God
will not harm him. That is his conception of
religion, a religion of cowardly fear.
The noble religions, on the other hand,-
and there are many of them, recognize the
inherent likeness of God and man. Their
worshipers look upon God as their father,
a being essentially akin to themselves. In
his image they are made, though they are
far from filling out that image. He is high
and lifted up, the object of awful admiration.
ETHICS AND RELIGION 165
Yet in their little degrees they identify them
selves with Him, and in Him alone can behold
themselves complete. The goal of their am
bition is union with Him, and they cannot be
at rest except in his presence. Between God
and man there is no other separation than
that of degree, and to become more completely
a man is forever to approximate godhood.
Such an attitude of mind does not exclude
fear, which we have seen is always the sense
of smallness in the presence of greatness.
But the fear is of the noble sort which ador
ingly contemplates the revealer of its small-
ness, finding in him a refuge and the means
of its own enlargement. Fear is thus trans
muted into love which in all its higher
forms retains fear of the reverential sort.
Fear we called the beginning of wisdom.
Love is its conclusion. Love is the fulfill
ment of law.
Here, then, we see the deeper meaning of
the statement that fear begets gods ; the
deeper meaning, and also the reason why the
saying instinctively offends us. The statement
is a profound one, though ambiguous; for
each of its two meanings accurately describes
one side of the religious life. Ignoble fear
166 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
begins the process. Greatness when first
seen is overpowering and must impress us as
beyond our capacity. He who sees no farther
is belittled and cannot escape a panic-stricken
life. We must come to recognize the great
ness which terrifies as after all a presentation
of our possible greatness, and therefore the
object of reverential love.
XII
But our original question is not yet quite
answered. To determine whether morality and
religion are the same thing, as there seemed
much reason to suppose, we sought to find the
nature of religion. We have now seen that
fear is at its heart, fear in its twofold form.
But what is the nature of morality ? In the
obligations of duty do we find anything which
identifies the moral with the religious life ?
Once more I find difficulty in keeping the
discussion within bounds. Fully to show why
we do right and what we mean by ought
would require a volume. But, without over
running our limits, I think it can be seen how
the double principle of fear is involved in
obligation. Every child, I suppose, feels the
command of duty obnoxious when, about to
ETHICS AND EELIGION 167
carry out his own strong desire, he is checked
by his parent. An important matter it is in the
training of a child to teach him that he is not
of much consequence. The child is naturally
bumptious, imagines that the whole world be
longs to him and is there for little else than
to wait on his wishes. Advance in moral ma
turity discloses a world very large, very much
occupied, and in it himself a comparatively
unimportant person. It has its own laws, not
made by him yet by him to be obeyed. There
arises in the child a sense of limitation, a feel
ing of oppression, by which his early buoyancy
is checked. Becoming acquainted with duty
is a sobering process, and obedience contains
a large element of ignoble fear.
Nor is this quickly outgrown. Most of us
are still visited by a feeling of the alien and
repressive character of our duties. From time
to time, at least, they strike us as a nuisance
from which we should well be rid. But he
who is not naturally servile does not rest in
forced performances, even if he does not defi
antly cast off all bonds. He makes intimate
acquaintance with duty, and learns how in all
genuine cases of it he is fulfilling himself and
not becoming restricted. Our obligations, in
168 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
fact, mark our straight path toward large
ness. In some degree and under certain as
pects, most persons of maturity know this.
We have learned the possibility of loving
righteousness, and have begun to perceive
that it is not exterior and alien to us. But,
even so, we retain reverence for the right,
have respect for it and awe in its presence.
For it is not we who create our duties. They
exist, and call us up to their august compan
ionship. Noble fear is as essentially con
nected with the moral life as it is with the
religious. There is perfect parallelism. Fear
directs them both, a fear which may undoubt
edly be exalted into love, but which in that
ennobled form remains awesome and com
manding.
XIII
Such seems to be our conclusion ; and this
analysis may explain the reasons why in every
age there has been a large consensus of opin
ion that religion and morality are one and the
same thing. But I am not altogether satisfied.
Recognizing, as fully as I have expressed here,
the close affinities of the two fields, I cannot
fail to see certain divergencies also. To these
I devote the following lecture.
V
ETHICS AND RELIGION
DIVERGENCIES
ETHICS AND RELIGION
DIVERGENCIES
I
IN tracing the divergencies of ethics and
religion it will be well to pursue the course
we have followed before ; that is, we will first
demonstrate as a fact that the two fields are
not precisely identical, and afterwards look
into the meaning of this fact and seek the
reasons for it.
If, then, I ask myself whether as a fact a
man when most moral is also particularly reli
gious, and the farther question, whether, when
particularly religious, he becomes by that cir
cumstance peculiarly moral, I must say there is
a great deal which points the other way. We
will take up the two inquiries separately : that
is, our first question shall be whether when a
man is peculiarly faithful in the performance
172 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
of his special work, God is naturally in all his
thoughts? It seems to me that, strangely
enough, this is not the case. Why it is
not, we must consider hereafter. But taking
actual occurrences and asking ourselves with
out prejudice this single question, I believe
we are shut up to a negative answer.
Here is a surgeon engaged in his perilous
art. The slightest divergence of the knife to
right or left will have serious consequences.
While performing this his special task, steer
ing that knife exactly true, does he fill his
mind with thoughts of God and seek to lose
his own small life in that of the infinite One ?
I do not think so. It would be disastrous if
he did. I suspect his thoughts can hardly
travel so far from that knife as to consider
even the poor sufferer before him. I doubt
if he greatly pities the patient on whom he is
engaged, or takes much satisfaction in restor
ing him to health. Before he began his work
he may have had compassionate thoughts,
and may have regarded himself as the ser
vant of God in conflict with hated distress.
And possibly afterwards, looking back upon
his work, he may give it approval, and feel
that God s finger directed every curve of the
ETHICS AND EELIGION 173
knife. Both of the two, the sense of special
duty and the sense of dependence on God,
may well exist in the same person. But do
they present exactly the same point of view ?
Does he who is thinking of the one necessa
rily think of the other? I hold that as he cuts
he may wisely exclude all thought of both
God and his neighbor, being simply a surgeon
and nothing more. He requires a certain
narrowing of his vision, a certain exclusion
of the infinite aspects of his task, in order to
perform that task well.
Somewhat similar conditions will be found
in almost every exigency of life. The painter
eliciting beauty, the musician eliciting music,
must be impassioned for beauty and music,
and for nothing else. If the artist should
care less about producing beauty and more
about companionship with God, he might
have a more exalted aim than the seeker after
colors. But that aim will not make him a good
artist. When he is painting, colors and lines
must claim him. He, too, has need of narrow
ness, and must let infinite things alone. Or
take the humbler departments of life. When
the carpenter drives his nail, is he not think
ing simply of the straight course of that nail
174 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
and nothing else? He cannot at such mo
ments meditate on divine commands. I grant
he will be a poor carpenter if sometime in his
life he has not asked himself what is his place
in God s kingdom ; and has not seen that to
drive nails straight, to do thorough carpentry,
is the best service he can offer. These are
wise thoughts for seasons of leisure. But
they interfere with work. When driving nails,
I should advise him to withdraw his attention
from the Most High. The case is the same
in all life s operations. The particular thing
before us demands a narrowed attention.
I think, too, we must have been struck with
the fact that many persons whose characters
are excellent and for whom we have great
reverence, seem to get along pretty well with
out much consciousness of God. Few persons
in my own world have seemed more worthy of
honor than my old nurse. She brought me
up, and to her I owe almost as much as I do
to my mother. She always impressed me as
about the greatest saint I knew, so devoid of
selfishness, so intent on cheerful and intelli
gent service. But she had little time for com
munion with God and did not, so far as I
could see, suffer from the lack. She was too
ETHICS AND RELIGION 175
much occupied with seeing whether I had
proper stockings on, with contriving how to
quiet my petulance and get my dinner ready
at the right minute, to be much concerned
with her soul or its relations to God. She
simply went about her work. Most of us have
had similar experiences, and some of us have
been a good deal puzzled by them.
II
On the other hand, many of us have known
persons who struck us as extremely religious,
but whom we should not have been quite will
ing to trust. Their religious emotions were a
good deal divorced from moral responsibility.
The newspapers are fond of reporting such
cases and telling how the defaulting cashier
was superintendent of a Sunday-school. The
negro on his way home from prayer-meeting
stops to steal a chicken from the roost. Sup
posing the newspapers do not exaggerate, and
that our own experience supplies corrobora
tive cases, a simple explanation is ready. Since
everybody assumes the close connection of
morality and religion, immoral men shrewdly
put on a religious cloak. This does not show
that the devout and the moral are independ-
176 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
ent matters, for the defaulter was not really
devout. He was only pretending to be. Had
he been so, he would have felt the incongru
ity of his evil act.
This explanation is undoubtedly sufficient,
and it is difficult to show that it is untrue,
but it seems to me improbably easy. I do
not find hypocrites so common. It requires
a high degree of abstinence and self-denial to
make a first-class hypocrite, that is, a man
who will steadily consent not to lead his own
life. To most of us our own life is precious.
We want to utter the thing that is in our
minds, and not go through the world playing
a part for which we do not care. In the long
run, this demands too much constraint and
too much skill. Momentary pretenses we all
slip into ; but these are very unlike the cohe
rent hypocrisies which the present explanation
requires. These are surely of rarer occurrence
than are the wrong-doings of the devout.
I cannot fail to see that a good many
persons are, so far as I can judge, sincerely
religious when not quite responsive to the
demands of the moral code. I am sorry to
say I find this true of myself. At my times
of greatest religious exaltation small duties
ETHICS AND RELIGION 177
do not appeal to me most urgently. There
seems to be a kind of separation, as if there
were something in the nature of the religious
emotion which removed me from earthly du
ties. When the religious impulse is strongest,
I am obliged to be especially careful if I would
not be blind to the plain duties of the day. I
am much mistaken if the experience of other
people does not confirm mine.
These considerations seem to show that
however close the two fields are, religion and
morality, they are still distinct. But I feel
that here, far more than in any preceding
case, it is difficult to mark the separation. As
a fact, we have seen they differ. Why, and
in what respects, we must now try to discover.
Ill
The points of difference come out most
obviously when we set a great religious cry
side by side with a great moral one ; and by a
cry I mean the utterance of a distressed and
aspiring soul yearning for moral or religious
power. Take, for example, the cry of the
Psalmist, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I
sinned ! " and the cry of Wordsworth in the
Ode to Duty, " Oh, let my weakness have an
178 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
end ! " The two refer to the same matter.
Each person feels his imperfection. Each
mourns a departure from righteousness. In
each a finite person is recognized as connected
with what is infinite, a connection felt to be not
accidental but essential. As we have already
seen, neither in religion nor morality can the
finite detach itself from the infinite. In both
cases the finite person, perceiving his imper
fection, seeks refuge in the perfect one.
But if the substance of the two cries is the
same, if they refer to similar spiritual condi
tions, wherein do they differ ? The point of
view is different, that is all. While each ex
presses the essential union of the finite or im
perfect being with the infinite or perfect one,
yet in the religious case the stand is taken at
the point of view of the perfect one ; while the
moral man looks at it from the opposite end,
the point of view of the imperfect one. To
the mind of the Psalmist the horror of his
sin consists in this, that he the little imper
fect creature has attempted a blow against
the all-perfect One. He cannot think of his
sin as damaging his brother man, nor even as
damaging himself. He himself, his fellow
men, all imperfect existences, are beings of
ETHICS AND RELIGION 179
no account. The only being of worth whom
he contemplates is the Most High. And the
sin is wrought against Him. He, the one be
ing of worth, has been by the Psalmist s deed
declared unworthy. That is the shocking
thing, that he has raised his imperfect hand
against perfection.
Plainly there is nothing of this in the cry
of Wordsworth. On the contrary, he is con
ceiving of himself as so important as to re
quire additional strength. " Oh, let my weak
ness have an end ! " The being in whom he
is specially interested is himself, the imper
fect one, the finite. He longs to have a full
connection established between himself and
the perfect one not for the sake of the per
fect, but of himself, the imperfect. No less
than the Psalmist he recognizes the need of
being interlocked with the eternal. But he
starts from his own side. His view is man-
ward ; the religious view is Godward. There
is, accordingly, a sharp contrast while each
still acknowledges the same two elements
essentially conjoined. Neither finds one of
these elements of any account parted from
the other. But the conjunction is reckoned
of consequence by the religious mind because
180 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
of the Most High ; by the moral mind, because
of us struggling, needy, imperfect, finite crea
tures. And this contrast is fundamental.
Everywhere the religious soul seeks after
God as all in all. We are of no consequence.
" What is man, that Thou art mindful of
him ? " To lose ourselves in Him, to abolish
separation, this has been the aspiration of
religion in every age and under every type of
religious belief. It is that o/xoiwcrt? rw 6ea>,
or absorption into God, for which Plato and
the mystics long.
Ethics has always looked at the matter in
an entirely different way. While accepting
the eternal as that which alone possesses in
finite worth, the moral mind has asserted that
it too possesses a worth. The statement is
presumptuous, but life could not go on with
out it. I may acknowledge the majestic uni
tary principle which guides the world and
utters itself in the word " ought." " Thou
dost preserve the stars from wrong. And
the most ancient heavens through thee are
fresh and strong." Sublime, indeed! But I
also have my little world to guide. My bread
must be earned, my clothes kept clean, my
hungry neighbor fed. These are small acts,
ETHICS AND RELIGION 181
but they are worth while. They are not
ignoble, they deserve attention, indeed they
call for my best thought. The moral man is
always thinking of matters limited in time
and space, limited in scope of consequence,
limited in the individuals concerned. But
these things he still considers as of such worth
that eternal realities are regarded only as
they furnish strength and order to these.
Here, then, ethics diverges from religion
and takes its independent path. It studies
infinite principles so far as they receive a finite
expression. That finite expression is the one
important matter. And this divergence will
explain some of the strange suggestions just
made. I said that I thought I had observed
that the attitudes of the moral and religious
man are not merely unlike, but that there is a
certain conflict between the two. The reason
of this will be apparent now. When atten
tion is turned in one of these directions, it is
in some degree withdrawn from the other. I
cannot at the same moment be conceiving of
God as the only being of worth, and yet of
my life this fragmentary life as itself a
matter of worth. I alternate. Now as a reli
gious man, I lay chief stress on the one; now
182 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
as a moral man on the other. Most certainly
the two are inextricably involved. They can
not be sundered, but only distinguished by
the degree of our attention. I cannot resolve
to be an exclusively moral man, paying entire
attention to finite and imperfect matters ; that
is nonsense. The relationship to the perfect
is everywhere presupposed, is expressed in the
ideals of duty, and is all that gives dignity to
my several undertakings. The two fields are
supplementary, though attention is predomi
nantly given to one or the other.
IV
It might well be asked which is the proper
order of acceptance ? When we awake to a
consciousness of the conjunction of our lives
with the life of the whole, and see that it is
incumbent on us to serve that whole while
still serving ourselves and our imperfect fel
low men, to which side of the complex demand
shall we primarily address ourselves ? Shall we
say we cannot be moral men until we have be
come religious, or that we cannot be religious
until we have become moral ? Shall I throw
myself into the petty temporal tasks, and
only after these are accomplished take time
ETHICS AND EELIGION 183
to sit down and contemplate the infinite One ?
Or shall I rather say that the infinite includes
the finite ; and that if I am filled with zeal
for the larger, the smaller will take care of
itself? Are not the religious teachers right
who declare that ethics hardly deserves spe
cific study, the earthly life needing little care
so long as we are sincerely devoted to the
eternal? Love God, and do as you please.
For my pleasure will then be included in the
pleasure of God ; and when his will has be
come my delight, all my acts will be naturally
expressive of him. Is not this the proper
order : first the large, with progression through
that large to the small ?
I cannot think so. To my mind, the re
verse is more nearly the normal order. We
move best from small moral matters up to the
larger religious ones. I acknowledge that in
making the antithesis, I falsify. The two con
ceptions are auxiliary, not antagonistic. The
one cannot get along without the other. I
have no confidence in the secularist who says,
" Intending to be an upright man, I have no
need of God." He speaks in a contradiction
of terms, and is overlooking elements implied
in his endeavor. Nevertheless, though mu-
184 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
tual adjustment of the two is necessary, with
greater or less consciousness, it does appear
to me that the chief stress of attention is
primarily demanded by the moral side. We
devote one day in seven to specific worship of
God, and it is about the right proportion.
The fact is that the road down the path
from the universal to the particular, from a
general principle to its applications, from an
including law to the special facts included
under it is always peculiarly treacherous and
confusing. The road up is man s natural path,
the road which runs from particular objects
and events to their including law. He who
imagines he can take the former road, having
no other guidance than that furnished by the
universal principle itself, assumes that he has
the ability to forecast the precise forms into
which that principle divides, and that he needs
no suggestive guidance from positive and
casually presented facts. Nothing short of a
divine mind can be so deductively creative.
No man who has comprehended the law of
gravitation can discover in it a particular fall
ing apple. Love of humanity does not of it
self breed consideration for Thomas or Susan.
Nor will allegiance to God at once disclose
ETHICS AND RELIGION 185
what particular act any given instant demands.
To hit this requires a kind of independent
and supplementary interest in the instant
itself. The special situation must be studied,
and attention be for the moment heartily and
somewhat exclusively addressed to it. For
purposes of clearness I overstate the contrast.
A fact without a law is as nonsensical as a
law without a fact. God and his world are
not separable. But while in the order of
nature universals and particulars are always
conjoined, in our comprehension they often
temporarily fall apart, and minds peculiarly
fitted to grasp the one miss the other. It is
an important question, therefore, by which
approach the mind most naturally seizes the
conjunction, whether by advancing from the
transient and special, with only covert and
occasional reference to the eternal, or by
moving in the opposite direction. My own
impression is that the primary emphasis is
most safely laid on the given facts of time
and space. " First that which is natural, then
.that which is spiritual."
But, without regard to philosophic analysis,
I suppose all will agree that large considera
tions are apt to be vague. When we lose our-
186 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
selves in the thought of God, we often find
that we have indeed lost ourselves, that we
have become insensitive to the world we in
habit and are in danger of becoming obliv
ious to its duties. When full of the thought
of God, it is not impossible to allow a room
to go dusty, a neighbor to be hungry, a bill
to remain unpaid. Not impossible? It is dan
gerously natural. We shall be wise to warn
ourselves, when thoughts of God are so dear
and uplifting, that we must watch the little
world which lies around us and not, because
of devoutness, neglect to hear its needy calls.
These are cautions which the religious man
of every age has found it sadly necessary to
give himself. When he has failed to hear
them, he has run into mysticism and many
forms of similarly useless rapture, God has
been divorced from reality ; whereas, when we
begin with the vivid and pressing little duties
close at hand, though here too is danger of
absorption, there is a steady solicitation to
view their broader connections, and thus to
pass on to him who is the basis of all. " He
who hath not loved his brother whom he hath
seen, how can he love God whom he hath
not seen ? " That was the thought of the
ETHICS AND RELIGION 187
beloved disciple in regard to this puzzling
matter. Obviously he was stating just what
I am trying to state, that we must make our
start with the given world around us that
morality, in short, precedes religion. But
even in this initial morality I do not under
stand that we are discharged from religion.
The religious sense is still the light of all our
seeing. We may recognize the smallest acts
that we perform as those which infinite intel
ligence would call for at this particular time.
When seeking to embody righteousness in
petty acts, we justly regard ourselves as
representing God under finite conditions.
Morality fulfills itself in religion, even though
its gaze is directed manward rather than God-
ward.
V
Now that we have reached the conclusion
of our long argument and shown with what
peculiar intimacy religion and morality are
allied, an intimacy far closer than has ex
isted in any other field, it may be well to
pause and compare our results with those ob
tained by other inquirers. There are three
striking definitions of religion which have
deeply influenced men at different times dur-
188 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
ing the last hundred years. I can best jus
tify my own statement by showing that it is
really involved in all these.
Kant defined religion as morality viewed
as divine command. He thus distinguishes
the two fields, but regards their substance as
the same. Righteousness is their common
matter. Only, the moment we conceive of
our duties as ordered by God, and ourselves
as his agents set to an appointed task, duty
takes on a new color, and one so distinct that
the new type of life deserves a new name.
When an upright act is done not for our own
benefit or because we incline to do it, not be
cause it is usual or is dictated by our fellow
men, but because we have heard in it the
command of God, then we are religious men.
This is what I too have said that the same
act might be regarded in a finite or in an in
finite way, as concerned with events of time
and space, or with these as merely representa
tive of an eternal order. Kant s statement
would accordingly be altogether satisfactory
to me.
Shortly after the time of Kant, Schleier-
macher proposed another notable definition.
It is one which has traveled far, and widely
ETHICS AND RELIGION 189
affected theological speculation. It is that
religion is rooted in the sense of dependence,
it is the Abhangigkeitsgefuhl. I had this
in mind in saying that we should never have
known God if we had not found ourselves
weak. The recognition of ourselves as in
sufficient for our needs, the longing to have
our imperfections rounded out by conjunction
with that which is adequate, gives the occa
sion for God. We may call this adequacy
the world, nature, society, infinite personality,
God phrase it how we will, we are always
compelled to recognize a universal being as
the supplementation of ourselves. When we
have perceived how helpless and meaningless
we are apart from such support, we have
come into the presence of some kind of God.
Morality is transformed into religion.
Yet these two definitions, framed by men
who were philosophers by profession, are per
haps a little scholastic. One has been offered
more recently which has found larger popular
favor. Matthew Arnold says that " religion
is morality touched with emotion." Arnold
is a master of ambiguity, and this definition
does not lack that mark of all his great
utterances. No word in it is clear. Which
190 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
emotion is intended? The emotion of fear,
of rage, of self-sacrifice ? We are not told.
What is meant by " touched " ? It is un
certain. And of course morality goes unex
plained. That is, there is no word in the
whole phrase which is shut up to one precise
meaning.
I do not call attention to this peculiarity of
Arnold s style, whether in this or in other of his
famous phrases, for purposes of disparagement
or to suggest that his definition is of any less
worth on account of its ambiguous nature.
On the contrary, I believe it will be found
that the phrases which have deeply stirred
mankind have usually had a noble ambiguity
about them. They are not neat packages of
exact meaning, but words thrown out in some
direction which men s minds were already in
clined to explore. For something like five
hundred years the Stoic maxim helpfully
summoned men to " live according to nature."
But no man was ever able to say what was
meant by nature, or what living according to
it was. That was what made the saying a
glorious cry. A similar cry at the close of the
eighteenth century set the world on fire,
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." But whac
ETHICS AND RELIGION 191
do the words mean ? How compatible, in
deed, are they with one another ? Is it possi
ble to have brotherhood where men are exactly
equal to one another and each is altogether
free? Such questions never interfered with
the currency of the cry. To be a world-
mover, a phrase must pass beyond clear con
sciousness and appeal in part to the uncon
scious sides of us. It must venture into the
unknown, and while stimulating thought
through suggestion must fix no bounds to
its significance. Something of this sort char
acterizes Arnold s definition. It is framed
for practical, not scientific purposes ; and I
have no right to render its meaning rigid.
But admitting its proper vagueness, I cannot
think it out of accord with the conclusions
here reached. Probably the emotion which
Arnold had in mind is chiefly the emotion
of love. Now I have pointed out how, when
religion reaches its height, the sense of alien
relation which is the basis of fear passes
away, and we see in the being whom we wor
ship the fulfillment of ourselves. When mo
rality, the search after uprightness of life, is
affected by love, or allegiance to another who
is still identified with ourselves, there comes
192 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
a new character into it. Instead of a life of
drudgery, we lead a life of exaltation. Some
such thought seems expressed in Arnold s
shining phrase. And if so, it is only a con
densed and picturesque expression of that
which I have endeavored to explain. Into
Arnold s definition, too, as into my own, have
entered by no means all of the elements of
religion. We have both sought to point out
only those factors which contrast religion with
morality.
But I will not conclude this investigation
with negative statements. It has been neces
sary to show how unlike is the point of view
of ethics to that of religion. I have said
that as students of ethics we must bring our
selves though confessedly with difficulty
to withdraw our attention temporarily from
religion. But though, as I have rightly urged,
we must fix our moral mind on the manward
rather than on the godward side of a life
which unites finite and infinite, I ought not
to leave the subject without pointing out with
some precision the debts which ethics owes to
religion. These debts are too considerable for
me to mark out in detail. I will confine what
I have to say -to three forms of them.
ETHICS AND RELIGION 193
VI
In the first place, morality gains through
religion a wider horizon. Among the many
forbidding aspects of the moral life is its pet
tiness. A while ago I spoke of the little duty
of keeping my room and myself clean. But
when these are set in order, they remain so
but an hour or more, and then must be at
tended to again. To these small and insistent
demands there is no end. How dismal must
be the life of the dutiful housewife who gets
three meals a day only to see them succes
sively disappear, and to hear a call for three
more to-morrow. Now these are fair exam
ples of duty everywhere. In trivialities like
these we see the endless succession of duties
better, perhaps, than in matters which we
count of larger consequence. And yet, of
how small consequence the greatest are ! Af
ter struggling and denying ourselves in order
to do just the right thing, there comes the
depressing query whether if we had done
otherwise, it would not have been pretty much
the same a hundred years hence ? What is it
all worth ? It is a little matter. I do not
count; this duty does not count; nothing
194 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
counts. Everything in the world is shut up
to some single time, or place, or person, and
all alike are clamorous for care. Such things
render the moral life dreary. Its petty round
of duties eats us up.
From this depression there is only one es
cape. We may see in the little the large,
may look through the finite limited duty into
the friendly face of the eternal. We may
perceive ourselves to be God s agents, and
know that the small task we are undertaking
he has trustfully committed to us, bringing
under our special guardianship that particular
portion of his work. So we gain horizon.
It is the narrow look, with our gaze confined
to the single task, which tires. Sending our
eye through that task and viewing each par
ticular duty as but a single feature of the
great kingdom of God, we acquire the dignity
of citizens in that kingdom. Dreariness is at
an end.
" Who sweeps a room as to Thy laws
Makes that and the action fine."
So it does. Sweeping a room is drudgery.
But sweeping it in order that God s way of
living may be manifested, is quite another
thing. That was an admirable retort which
ETHICS AND RELIGION 195
Theodore Parker, I believe, made, when some
one in his presence spoke of " mere morality."
" Mere morality ? " said he. " We might as
well talk of mere God." Yes, so we might,
if we are speaking with full insight. Yet,
after all, morality, because it deals with the
finite side of affairs, is liable to become
sundered from the infinite, and then it is
degraded. The disparaging mere accurately
describes this condition of things. What we
must do is to cast off the mere. And the
moment we do this, we see the moral life to
be the life of God on earth.
VII
To religion ethics owes its wide horizon.
But a second great debt is the debt of sta
bility. Again and again the thought must
come that what we have considered righteous
ness may, after all, be nothing but conform
ity to arbitrary social custom. Society has
agreed on a thousand practices. As well
might it have agreed on others. Practices
to-day sanctioned, to-morrow may be changed.
And may it not be that every seeming moral
duty is but a piece of conventionality, with
no root, fixed only in the varying fancies of
196 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
men ? And if this is the case, how disheart
ening ! Why sacrifice our brief lives to main
tain conventionalities ? Desires are real, pas
sions unconventional. Why not cast off arti
ficial restraints and be rid of the strictness
of duty ? There is only one thing that can
give steadiness at such times, and that is to
recognize a distinction between the variable
conventionalities of life and eternal morality.
What Cudworth called " true and immutable
morality," grounded in the being of God and
believed to be a manifestation of his nature,
can make conduct cheerfully firm, even when
it is at issue with personal advantage.
The supporting authority which morality
gains, when thus set in contrast with man s
wayward desires, has been given majestic ex
pression by Sophocles, in his " Antigone."
King Creon has issued an edict that under
penalty of death no one shall bury the traitor
Polynices, who has fallen in an attack on his
native city, Thebes. But are there not fixed
duties to the dead, especially to dead kins
men, duties which no royal edict can alter ?
Antigone believes there are, and buries the
body of her brother. She is seized and
brought before the king, and the following
conversation occurs :
ETHICS AND EELIGION 197
Creon. You there, now turning to the
ground your face, do you acknowledge or
deny you did this thing?
Antigone. I say I did it. I deny not that
I did.
Creon. Tell me, not at full length but
briefly, did you know my edict against doing
this?
Antigone. I did. How could I help it?
It was plain.
Creon. Yet you presumed to transgress
laws?
Antigone. Yes, for it was not Zeus who
gave this edict ; nor yet did Justice, dwelling
with the gods below, make for men laws like
these. I did not think such force was in your
edicts that the unwritten and unchanging
laws of God you, a mere man, could traverse.
These are not matters of to-day or yesterday,
but are from everlasting. No man can tell
at what time they arose. In view of them
I would not, through fear of human will,
meet judgment from the gods. That I shall
die, I know, how fail to know it ?
though you had never made an edict. And
if before my time I die, I count it gain. For
he who lives like me in many woes, how can
198 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
he fail to find in death a gain? So then for
me to meet this doom is not a grief at all.
But when my mother s child had died, if I
had left his corpse unburied, then I should
have grieved. For this I do not grieve.
And if I seem to you to have been working
folly, it may be he who charges folly is the
fool.
Neither can understand the other. To
Creon, duty is a matter of human enactment,
voluntarily imposed and accepted. To An
tigone, it is a divine law, imparting steadiness
to earthly vicissitudes. But beliefs like hers
have such large social consequence that many
legislators, whose interest has lain simply in
maintaining human institutions, have declared
that if the religious sanctions should become
generally distrusted, customary conventional
morality would be found an unstable affair.
VIII
A third great advantage possessed by the
religious man is hope. The world presents
serious discouragements to right doing. The
wicked flourish, the righteous are oppressed.
Every age has recorded its cry of disappoint-
ETHICS AND RELIGION 199
ment over the ineffectiveness of goodness.
We seem continually to be striving against
the structure of things, trying to force good
ness upon a world organized adversely or in
differently. A sense of helplessness falls
on us when we see how subtle and strong are
the obstacles besetting the good man s way.
From such discouragements whether rightly
or wrongly I do not say the religious man
is free. In his view God is at the heart of
things. The world is not chaotic. It has
aim, an aim akin to what we mean by pro
gress, growth, the triumph of righteousness.
We may not always be able to discern this.
The goodness I toilsomely perform may seem
to be lost. But the make of the world and
its maker are in every case of moral aspira
tion on my side. What, then, can man do
to me? The religious man is accordingly
fundamentally an optimist, with exceptional
assurance and ease in upright conduct. He
has great allies.
Kant insists that nobody can act morally
without assuming that the constitution of
the world furnishes a field adapted to moral
action, and he holds that this necessary as
sumption is practical belief in an adapting
200 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
God. The religious man differs from others
in the clarity with which he makes this as
sumption. A higher degree of steadfast ex
actitude in righteousness is therefore rightly
expected from him than from those who lack
his exalted hope. The religious man often
sins. But the fact that when he does so the
public mockingly laughs, treats his misdeeds
as doubly base, and counts him more at issue
with himself in wrong-doing than others are,
shows the general belief that in the hopes of
religion motives for righteousness are to be
found which cannot be expected elsewhere.
I have nothing to do with demonstrating
religion. I take it for granted, as I do aes
thetics, the law, or the descriptive sciences.
Even more than they it is an indestructible
factor of human life. To it I turn, as to other
accredited fields, merely to ascertain what are
its relations to ethics, and thus to learn how
far ethics is a dependent science. Plainly it is
dependent in a high degree. By itself ethics
is imperfect, and needs, in order to become an
effective engine in life, large supplementation
from religion. In religion, morality cannot
without danger be merged. A sort of inde
pendent interest in the things of time and
ETHICS AND RELIGION 201
space is an essential preparation for any true
vision of the things of eternity. Ethics,
studying the means by which the kingdom of
heaven may come upon earth, is necessarily
occupied with earthly conditions. The finite
is its field ; but a finite which never lacks
dignity, because, under the guidance of the
majestic word " ought," the moral man is
ever seeking to manifest the connection of
the finite with the infinite.
REFERENCES ON THE RELATIONS OF RELI
GION AND ETHICS
Kant, Practical Reason, bk. ii. ch. ii. 6.
Caird s Evolution of Religion, ch. Lx.
Martineau s Study of Religion, Introd.
Stephen s Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, pp. xxvi and
310.
Royce s Religious Aspect of Philosophy, ch. xii.
Bradley s Appearance and Reality, p. 438.
Watson s Christianity and Idealism, chs. i. and viii.
Baldwin s Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. viii. 5.
Santayana s Poetry and Religion, ch. i.
Wundt s Facts of the Moral Life, ch. ii.
Fiske s Through Nature to God.
VI
CONCLUSION
VI
CONCLUSION *
I
SUCH seem to me to be the intimate alli
ances and the subtle divergencies of ethics
and religion. Conduct and character every
where exhibit finite and. infinite conditions.
Devotion to the infinite conditions is ex
pressed in religion ; devotion to the finite, in
ethics. But when this has been shown, have
we not identified ethics with common life ?
Life is engagement with the finite, the re
action of that mysterious and familiar being,
a person, upon the events of time and space.
How can we form a special science of that
which enters into everything? And what
right has any man to call himself an ethical
philosopher when that with which he is con
cerned is as familiar to all other men as to
1 For the convenience of the reader, the chapters of this
book are not divided precisely as were the original six lec
tures.
206 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
himself ? The answer to these questions and
the consequent distinction of ethics from
common life can best be given by defining
two terms.
Again and again in the course of these
lectures I have employed the words ethics and
morals in a way which I dare say has made
them appear interchangeable. But they can
not be interchanged. Though both referring
to conduct, and to conduct which should con
form to a standard, each has its distinctive
meaning. If I object to a man s morals, I
assert that he is in the habit of performing
acts which the majority of his fellow men
disapprove. I decline to associate with him
on account of deeds done and states of feel
ing permitted which I believe corrupt. But
if I object to his ethics, I do not suggest that
he has ever wrought iniquity. I may con
sider his conduct more righteous than my
own. What I object to is his explanation of
conduct. My understanding of righteousness
is different from his. I believe it to spring
from other principles than those to which he
traces it. Ethics, in short, is a science ; mo
rality, an art. The one is concerned with
systematic comprehension and formulation,
CONCLUSION 207
the other with individual performance. To
morality, ethics is related as geometry to car
pentry. The carpenter embodies the princi
ples of geometry, but he may do so blindly,
knowing nothing about them. The geometer,
who takes his principles from objects of the
outer world, may have no skill in fashioning
such objects. Each of the two has his honor
able work. The one creates, the other reveals.
A like difference obtains between the ethical
philosopher and the moral man. Both are
concerned with the same facts, but they treat
them in different ways. When .we perform
moral actions in common life., we do not
thereby become ethical philosophers. For
purposes of action, it is not necessary to com
prehend the principles involved in the deeds
we do. Of such principles, we may merely
catch glimpses, as our fragmentary acts fall
from us. Instincts repeatedly guide us, cus
toms, imitation of those around, or even the
pressure of circumstance. Our conduct does
not usually express the results of broad sur
vey, full consciousness, deliberate approval.
This full and coherent consciousness of what
conduct and character signify it is the office
of ethics to bring about. The ethical student
208 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
tries to formulate systematically those shap
ing ideals which may give consistent unity to
wealthy lives. Persons, however finite, are
regarded by him as capable of becoming con
scious wholes, and he seeks to learn the laws
which may permeate them in their entirety.
The ethical man accordingly analyzes what
the moral man half blindly lives.
When in these lectures I have wished to
direct attention to good deeds, I have used the
word " moral." But our general discussion
has had reference to ethics ; i. e., we have been
engaged in examining how far the intelligible
principles involved in good conduct might be
discriminated from those found in the neigh
boring fields. It is true that in dealing with
religion predominantly an affair of practice
I have often found myself obliged to con
trast with it morality rather than ethics. But
I believe it will be found that the distinc
tive meaning of the two terms has been pre
served, and that, on the whole, these lectures
have been ethical, not moral. I have not set
before myself the colossal task of making my
hearers better. I have had the humbler aim
of the teacher, to lead those who hear to a
clearer conception of what being a good man
CONCLUSION 209
is. Even this conception I have traced only
so far as its outlines could be seen detaching
themselves from other nearly allied sciences.
Content with discovering what sort of being
is capable of conduct, I have not attempted to
formulate or codify its laws. Problems of this
sort form the matter of a treatise on ethics to
which these lectures are but an introduction.
II
We are now in a position to deepen our
preliminary definition of ethics and to answer
compactly the question with which we set out.
What sort of being is capable of conduct and
character ; what being, therefore, requires the
peculiar science of ethics to explain him ? I
present the answer in tabular form. Ethics
deals with a human being who is conceived as
unlike the being of
1. Physics, through being conscious
2. Philosophy, through being active
3. History, through being free - -
4. Law, through possessing subjective worth
5. ^Esthetics, through possessing objective
worth
6. Religion, through being finite 1
7. Common Life, through being coherent j
210 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
A little explanation will make the table
clear, and define a few of the fundamental
terms of ethics. The word " spirit," even in
its lowest uses, signifies something that acts ;
and when acting, is moved of itself and from
within. Its opposite is matter, something pas
sive and inert. When we inspirit a man, we
give him life and power of action. When
we say an animal is spirited or spiritless, we
mean that he either has or has not vital ac
tivity. The same thought is in our minds
when we call a liquor which comes from fer
mentation " spirits," or when we talk of " the
spirit of the age," and thus indicate what
dominant ideals have shaped its activity. Eth
ics investigates spiritual laws, the laws which
guide beings conscious, active, and free. But
ethics deals with embodied spirits not with
pure spirits, or activities altogether parted
from matter.
Accordingly a moral being is something
more than a spirit ; and when this word is ap
plied to him, it suggests a kind of unreality.
He is a spirit circumstanced thus and so ;
that is, he is a person. Persona, a mask,
indicates that he who wears it has activities
clearly defined, which differentiate him from
CONCLUSION 211
other spirits and give him a worth and stand
ing of his own. To impersonate is to put on
definite spiritual characteristics. The oppo
site of person is thing ; a specially constituted
passive object is contrasted with the specially
constituted active being. Person is accord
ingly the great law term ; for the law can
deal with spirits only when they are thus lim
ited, when they live on a particular street at a
particular number, and have their particular
nature defined by relation to others. But
though the law undertakes to estimate their
worth only so far as they help or harm others,
it assumes that aBsthetically and morally per
sons have worth in themstlves.
A person thus fully particularized is single,
individual. He is a being cut off, contrasted
with society. There may be individual things
or brutes, as well as individual persons. But
a person is so conceived in ethics in order to
emphasize the fact that a moral being must
be a coherent organic whole, who, though con
nected with the infinite, is busied with finite
affairs. Such an individual spiritual person
can really be known only internally as a self.
This unique knowledge of selfhood we carry
over, however, by analogy and attribute it in
212 THE FIELD OF ETHICS
varying degrees to all who show some simi
larity to ourselves. Primarily ethics is- a
study of the self. Society and the world are
considered in it only so far as they too are
implied in selfhood and are the appropriate
field for its activity.
Ill
The proper place for definition is at the
end of one s inquiries. Having offered defini
tions of some of the important terms employed
in ethics, I am tempted to set down some of the
more notable definitions of the science itself.
We might call it a criticism of the formation,
maintenance, and comparative worth of human
customs. We might say, with Sidgwick, that
it is the study of what ought to be, as far as
this depends upon the voluntary action of in
dividuals. Or, with Alexander, that it is the
answer to the problem of reconciling the mani
fold likes and dislikes of many persons. Or,
with Paley, that it is the science which teaches
men their duty and the reasons of it. Or,
with Spencer, that it describes the form
which universal conduct assumes during the
last steps of its evolution. Or, with Guyau,
that it is busied with the means of preserving
CONCLUSION 213
and enlarging life, life material or intellectual.
Or, with Lord Bacon, that its aim is so to com
pose the passions that they may fight on the
side of reason and not invade it. And all these
definitions, with their wide verbal differences,
will be found to intend pretty much the same
thing. Ethics is certainly the study of how
life may be full and rich, and not, as is often
imagined, how it may be restrained and
meagre. Those words of Jesus, of which
Phillips Brooks was so fond, announcing
that he had come in order that men might
have life and have it abundantly, are the
clearest statement of the purposes of both
morality and religion, of righteousness on
earth and in heaven.
Slectrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton <5r Cc,
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A.
-, ff
PALMER, a. H.
Field of Ethics.
37<
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BORROWER S NAME
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37
The Field of Ethics.
