Part 11 (1/2)

Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those of *Jouffroy* and *Cousin*, who-each with a terminology of his own-agree with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin's well-known treatise on ”The True, the Beautiful, and the Good,” is purely ethical, and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,-attributes which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the order of nature and the government of the universe.

In *Germany*, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic school ignore ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (_anima mundi_), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing G.o.d, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through which alone he attains to some fragmentary self-consciousness.

According to *Kant*, the reason intuitively discerns truths that are necessary, absolute, and universal. The theoretical reason discerns such truths in the realm of ontology, and in the relations and laws that underlie all subjects of physical inquiry. In like manner, the practical reason intuitively perceives the conditions and laws inherent in the objects of moral action,-that is, as Malebranche would have said, the elements of universal order, or, in the language of Clarke, the fitness of things. As the mind must of necessity contemplate and cognize objects of thought under the categories intuitively discerned by the theoretical reason, so must the will be moved by the conditions and laws intuitively discerned by the practical reason. This intuition is law and obligation.

Man can obey it, and to obey it is virtue. He can disobey it, and in so doing he does not yield to necessity, but makes a voluntary choice of wrong and evil.

It will be perceived from the historical survey in this and the previous chapter, that-as was said at the outset-*all ethical systems resolve themselves into the two cla.s.ses of which the Epicureans and the Stoics furnished the pristine types,*-those which make virtue an accident, a variable, subject to authority, occasion, or circ.u.mstance; and those which endow it with an intrinsic right, immutableness, validity, and supremacy.

On subjects of fundamental moment, opinion is of prime importance. Conduct results from feeling, and feeling from opinion. We would have the youth, from the very earliest period of his moral agency, grounded in the belief that right and wrong are immutable,-that they have no localities, no meridians,-that, with a change of surroundings, their conditions and laws vary as little as do those of planetary or stellar motion. Let him feel that right and wrong are not the mere dicta of human teaching, nay, are not created even by revelation; but let their immutable distinction express itself to his consciousness in those sublime words which belong to it, as personified in holy writ, ”Jehovah possessed me from the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him.”

This conception of the Divine and everlasting sacredness of virtue, is a perennial fountain of strength. He who has this does not imagine that he has power over the Right, can sway it by his choice, or vary its standard by his action; but it overmasters him, and, by subduing, frees him, fills and energizes his whole being, enn.o.bles all his powers, exalts and hallows all his affections, makes him a priest to G.o.d, and a king among men.

FOOTNOTES

_ 1 Compa.s.sion_ ought from its derivation to have the same meaning with _sympathy_; but in common usage it is synonymous with pity.

2 ”Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.”

3 The theory that Seneca was acquainted with St. Paul, or had any _direct_ intercourse with Christians in Rome or elsewhere, has no historical evidence, and rests on a.s.sumptions that are contradicted by known facts.

_ 4 Virtutes leniores_, as Cicero calls them.

5 The duty of society to inflict capital punishment on the murderer has been maintained on the ground of the Divine command to that effect, said to have been given to Noah, and thus to be binding on all his posterity. (Genesis ix. 5.) My own belief-founded on a careful examination of the Hebrew text-is, that the _human_ murderer is not referred to in this precept, but that it simply requires the slaying of the beast that should cause the death of a man,-a precaution which was liable to be neglected in a rude state of society, and was among the special enactments of the Mosaic law.

(Exodus xxi. 38.) If, however, the common interpretation be retained, the precept requires the shedding of the murderer's blood by the _brother_ or nearest kinsman of the murdered man, and is not obeyed by giving up the murderer to the _gallows_ and the _public executioner_. Moreover, the same series of precepts prescribes an abstinence from the natural juices of animal food, which would require an entire revolution in our shambles, kitchens, and tables.

If these precepts were Divine commandments for men of all times, they should be obeyed in full; but there is the grossest inconsistency and absurdity in holding only a portion of one of them sacred, and ignoring all the rest.

6 Latin, _virtus_, from _vir_, which denotes not, like _h.o.m.o_, simply a human being, but a man endowed with all appropriate manly attributes, and comes from the same root with _vis_, strength. The Greek synonyms of _virtus_, ??et?, is derived from ????, the G.o.d of war, who in the heroic days of Greece was the ideal man, the standard of human excellence, and whose name some lexicographers regard-as it seems to me, somewhat fancifully-as allied through its root to ????, which bears about the same relation to ?????p?? that _vir_ bears to _h.o.m.o_.

7 In the languages which have inherited or adopted the Latin _virtus_, it retains its original signification, with one striking exception, which yet is perhaps an exception in appearance rather than in reality. In the Italian, virtu is employed to signify taste, and _virtuoso_, which may denote a virtuous man, oftener means a collector of objects of taste. We have here an historical landmark.

There was a period when, under civil despotism, the old Roman manhood had entirely died out on its native soil, while ecclesiastical corruption rendered the n.o.bler idea of Christian manhood effete; and then the highest type of manhood that remained was the culture of those refined sensibilities, those ornamental arts, and that keen sense of the beautiful, in which Italy as far surpa.s.sed other lands, as it was for centuries inferior to them in physical bravery and in moral rect.i.tude.

8 It is obviously on this ground alone that we can affirm moral attributes of the Supreme Being. When we say that he is perfectly just, pure, holy, beneficent, we recognize a standard of judgment logically independent of his nature. We mean that the fitness which the human conscience recognizes as its only standard of right, is the law which he has elected for his own administration of the universe. Could we conceive of omnipotence not recognizing this law, the decrees and acts of such a being would not be necessarily right.

Omnipotence cannot make that which is fitting wrong, or that which is unfitting right. G.o.d's decrees and acts are not right because they are his, but his because they are right.

9 From _cardo_, a hinge.