Is Life Worth Living? by William Hurrell Mallock (best ereader for textbooks TXT) 📕
Such is the outline of the question I propose to deal with.
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Will trammel up the consequence, and catch
With its success surcease.
All the vice of the world, and all its virtue, all its pleasures and all its pains, will have effected nothing. They will all have faded like an unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind.
Here, then, the importance of morality at once changes both its dimensions and its kind. It is confined within narrow limitations of space and time. It is no longer a thing we can talk vaguely about, or to which any sounding but indefinite phrases will be applicable. We can no longer say either to the individual or the race,
Brief, but yet endless.14
We can only say that it is brief, and that bye and bye what it was will be no matter to anyone.
Still within these limits it may be said, certainly, that it is a great thing for us that we should be happy; and if it be true that the moral end brings the greatest happiness, then it is man's greatest achievement to attain to the moral end. But when we say that the greatest happiness resides in the moral end, we must be careful to see what it is we mean. We may mean that as a matter of fact men generally give a full assent to this, and act accordingly, which is the most obvious falsehood that could be uttered on any subject; or we may mean—indeed, if we mean anything we must mean—that they would give a full assent, and act accordingly, could their present state of mind undergo a complete change, and their eyes be opened, which at present are fast closed. But according to the positivist theory, this hypothesis is in most cases an impossibility. The moral end, as we have seen, is an inward state of the heart; and the heart, on the showing of the positivists, is for each man an absolute solitude. No one can gain admission to it but by his assistance; and to the larger part no one can ever gain admission at all.
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal myriads live alone.
So says Mr. Matthew Arnold; and the gentle Keble utters the same sentiment, remarking, with a delicate pathos, how seldom those even who have known us best and longest
Thus in the recesses of his own soul each man is, for the positivist, as much alone as if he were the only conscious thing in the universe; and his whole inner life, when he dies, will, to use some words of George Eliot's that I have already quoted,
Unread for ever.
No one shall enquire into his inward thoughts, much less shall anyone judge him for them. To no one except himself can he in any way have to answer for them.
Such is the condition of the individual according to the positivist theory. It is evident, therefore, that one of the first results of positivism is to destroy even the rudiments of any machinery by which one man could govern, with authority, the inward kingdom of another; and the moral imperative is reduced to an empty vaunt. For what can be an emptier flourish than for one set of men, and these a confessed minority, to proclaim imperious laws to others, which they can never get the others to obey, and which are essentially meaningless to the only people to whom they are not superfluous? Suppose that, on positive grounds, I find pleasure in humility, and my friend finds pleasure in pride, and so far as we can form a judgment the happiness of us both is equal; what possible grounds can I have for calling my state better than his? Were I a theist, I should have the best of grounds, for I should believe that hereafter my friend's present contentment would be dissipated, and would give place to despair. But as a positivist, if his contentment do but last his lifetime, what can I say except this, that he has chosen what, for him, was his better part for ever, and no God or man will ever take it away from him? To say then that his immoral state was worse than my moral state would be a phrase incapable of any practical meaning. It might mean that, could my friend be made to think as I do, he would be happier than he is at present; but we have here an impossible hypothesis, and an unverifiable conclusion. It is true enough that I might present to my friend some image of my own inward state, and of all the happiness it gave me; but if, having compared his happiness and mine as well as he could, he still liked his own best, exhortation would have no power, and reproach no meaning.
Here, then, are three results—simple, immediate, and necessary—of positivism, on the moral end. Of the three characteristics at present supposed essential to it, positivism eliminates two and materially modifies the third.
In the first place, the importance of the moral end is altogether changed in character. It has nothing in it whatever of the infinite, and a scientific forecast can already see the end of it.
In the second place, it is nothing absolute, and not being absolute is incapable of being enforced.
In the third place, its value, such as it is, is measured only by the conscious happiness that its possession gives us, or the conscious pains that its loss gives us.
Still it may be contended with plausibility that the moral end, when once seen, is sufficient to attract us by its own inalienable charm, and can hold its own independently of any further theories as to its nature and its universality. It remains now to come to practical life, and see if this really be so; to see if the pleasures in life that are supposed the highest will not lose their attractiveness when robbed of the three characteristics of which the positive theory robs them.
[11] Vide Pessimism, by James Sully.
[12] Professor Clifford; 'Ethics of Belief,' Contemporary Review, Jan. 1877.
[13] 'An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create a world in which posterity will live!'—Professor Clifford.
[14] Goethe, translated by Carlyle.
CHAPTER V. LOVE AS A TEST OF GOODNESS.Τον τας Αφροδιτας
Φιλτατων θαλαμων
Κληδουχον, ου σεβιζομεν,
Περθοντα.—Euripides.
I will again re-state, in other words than my own, the theory we are now going to test by the actual facts of life. 'The assertion,' says Professor Huxley, 'that morality is in any way dependent on certain philosophical problems, produces the same effect on my mind as if one should say that a man's vision depends on his theory of sight, or that he has no business to be sure that ginger is hot in his mouth, unless he has formed definite views as to the nature of ginger.' Or, to put the matter in slightly different language, the sorts of happiness, we are told, that are secured to us by moral conduct are facts, so far as regards our own consciousness of them, as simple, as constant and as universal, as is the perception of the outer world secured to us by our eyesight, or as the sensation formed on the palate by the application of ginger to it.
Love, for instance, according to this view, is as simple a delight for men in its highest forms as it is for animals in its lowest. What George Eliot calls 'the treasure of human affection' depends as little for its value on any beliefs outside itself as does the treasure of animal appetite; and just as no want of religious faith can deprive the animals of the last, so no want of religious faith can deprive mankind of the first. It will remain a stable possession to us, amid the wreck of creeds, giving life a solemn and intense value of its own. It will never fail us as a sure test of conduct. Whatever guides us to this treasure we shall know is moral; whatever tends to withdraw us from it we shall know is immoral.
Such is the positivist theory as to all the higher pleasures of life, of which affection confessedly is one of the chief, and also the most obviously human. Let us proceed now from generalities to special concrete facts, and see how far this theory is borne out by them. And we can find none better than those which are now before us—the special concrete facts of affection, and of sexual affection in particular.
The affection of man for woman—or, as it will be best to call it, love—has been ever since time was, one of the chief elements in the life of man. But it was not till Christianity had very fully developed itself that it assumed the peculiar importance that is now claimed for it. For the ancient world it was a passion sure to come to most men, and that would bring joy or sorrow to them as the case might be. The worldly wisdom of some convinced them that it gave more joy than sorrow; so they took and used it as long as it chanced to please them. The worldly wisdom of others convinced them that it gave more sorrow than joy, so they did all they could, like Lucretius, to school themselves into a contempt for it. But for the modern world it is on quite a different footing, and its value does not depend on such a chance balance of pains and pleasures. The latter are not of the same nature as the former, and so cannot be outweighed by them. In the judgment of the modern world,
Than never to have loved at all.
To love, in fact, though not exactly said to be incumbent upon all men, is yet endowed with something that is almost of the nature of a duty. If a man cannot love, it is looked on as a sort of moral misfortune, if not as a moral fault in him. And when a man can love, and does love successfully, then it is held that his whole nature has burst out into blossom. The imaginative literature of the modern world centres chiefly about this human crisis; and its importance in literature is but a reflection of its importance in life. It is, as it were, the sun of the world of sentiment—the source of its lights and colours, and also of its shadows. It is the crown of man's existence; it gives life its highest quality; and, if we can believe what those who have known it tell us, earth under its influence seems to be melting into, and to be almost joined with, heaven.
All this language, however, about love, no matter how true in a certain sense it may be, is emphatically true about it in a certain sense only, and is by no means to be taken without reserve. It is emphatically not true about love in general, but only about love as modified in a certain special
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