Part 8 (1/2)
One more extract. ”From the very nature of an intellectual soul it is proper to man that, as soon as he knows what a whole is, and what a part is, he knows that every whole is greater than its part; and so of the rest. But what is a whole, and what a part, that he cannot know except through sensory impressions. And therefore Aristotle shows that the knowledge of principles comes to us through the senses.” (St.
Thos., 1a 2ae, q. 51, art. 1, in corp.)
7. Thus the propositions that _right is to be done, benefactors to be requited_, are self-evident, necessary truths, to any child who has learned by experience the meaning of _right_, of _kindness_, and of a _return of kindness._ ”Yes, but”--some one will say--”how ever does he get to know what _right_ and _wrong_ are? Surely sensory experience cannot teach him that.” We answer, man's thoughts begin in sense, and are perfected by reflection. Let us take the idea of _wrong_, the key to all other elementary moral ideas. The steps by which a child comes to the fulness of the idea of _wrong_ may be these. First, the thing is _forbidden_: then one gets _punished_ for it. Punishment and prohibition enter in by eye and ear and other senses besides. Then the thing is _offensive_ to those we love and revere. Then it is _bad for us_. Then it is _shameful, shabby, unfair, unkind, selfish, hateful to G.o.d_. All these points of the idea of wrong are grasped by the intellect, beginning with sensory presentations of what is seen and felt and heard said. Again with the idea of _ought_. This idea is sometimes said to defy a.n.a.lysis. But we have gone about (c. vi.) to a.n.a.lyse it into two elements, _nature requiring, nature's King commanding_. The idea of _wrong_ we a.n.a.lysed into a breach of this natural requirement, and this Divine command or law. Primary moral ideas, then, yield to intellectual a.n.a.lysis. They are of this style: _to be done, as I wish to be rational and please G.o.d: not to be done, unless I wish to spoil myself and disobey my Maker_. But primary moral ideas, compared together, make primary moral judgments. Primary moral judgments, therefore, arise in the intellect, by the same process as other beliefs arise there in matters of necessary truth.
8. Thus, applying the principle known as _Occham's razor_, that ”ent.i.ties are not to be multiplied without reason,” we refuse to acknowledge any Moral Sense, distinct from Intellect. We know of no peculiar faculty, specially made to receive ”ideas, pleasures and pains in the moral order.” (Mackintosh, _Ethics_, p. 206.) Most of all, we emphatically protest against any blind power being accredited as the organ of morality. We cannot accept for our theory of morals, that everything is right which warms the breast with a glow of enthusiasm, and all those actions wrong, at which emotional people are p.r.o.ne to cry out, _dreadful, shocking_. We cannot accept emotions for arbitrators, where it most concerns reasonable beings to have what the Apostle calls ”enlightened eyes of the heart” (Ephes. i. 18), that we may ”know to refuse the evil and to choose the good.” (Isaias vii.
15.) A judge may have his emotions, but his charge to the jury must be dictated, not by his heart, but by his knowledge of the law. And the voice of conscience, whatever feelings it may stir, must be an intellectual utterance, and, to be worth anything in a case of difficulty, a reasoned conclusion, based on observation of facts, and application of principles, and consultation with moral theologians and casuists. A subjective and emotional standard of right and wrong is as treacherous and untrustworthy as the emotional justification of those good people, who come of a sudden to ”feel converted.”
9. It would be unnecessary, except for the wrong-headedness of philosophers, to observe that conscience requires educating. As moral virtue is a habit of appet.i.te, rational or irrational, a formation resulting from frequent acts; and as the child needs to be aided and a.s.sisted from without towards the performance of such acts, in order to overcome the frequent resistance of appet.i.te to reason (c. v., s.
ii., n. 4, p. 71): so the springs of conscience are certain intellectual habits, whereby the subject is cognisant of the principles of natural law, and of their bearing on his own conduct, habits which, like the habits of moral virtue, require to be formed by acts from within and succour from without, since merely the rudiments of the habit are supplied by nature. Even the first principles of morality want formulating and pointing out to children, like the axioms of geometry. The mother tells her little one: ”Ernest, or Frank, be a good boy:” while the schoolmaster explains to Master Ernest that two straight lines cannot possibly enclose a s.p.a.ce. There is something in the boy's mind that goes along with and bears out both the teaching of his master and his mother's exhortation: something that says within him: ”To be sure, those lines can't enclose a s.p.a.ce:”
”Certainly, I ought to be good.” It is not merely on authority that he accepts these propositions. His own understanding welcomes and approves them: so much so, that once he has understood them, he would not believe the contrary for being told it. You would not persuade a child that it was right to pull mother's hair; or that half an orange was literally, as Hesiod says, ”more than the whole.” He would answer that it could not be, that he knew better.
10. On one ground there is greater need of education for the conscience than for any other intellectual formation: that is because of the power of evil to fascinate and blind on practical issues of duty. Cicero well puts it:
”We are amazed and perplexed by variety of opinions and strife of authorities; and because there is not the same divergence upon matters of sense, we fancy that the senses afford natural certainty, while, for moral matters, because some men take one view, some another, and the same men different views at different times, we consider that any settlement that can be arrived at is merely conventional, which is a huge mistake. The fact is, there is no parent, nor nurse, nor schoolmaster, nor poet, nor stage play, to corrupt the judgments of sense, nor consent of the mult.i.tude to wrench them away from the truth. It is for minds and consciences that all the snares are set, as well by the agency of those whom I have just mentioned, who take us in our tender and inexperienced age, and ingrain and fas.h.i.+on us as they will, as also by that counterfeit presentment of good, which lurks in the folds of every sense, the mother of all evil, pleasure, under whose seductive blandishments men fail to recognise the moral good that nature offers, because it is unaccompanied by this itching desire and satisfaction.” (Cicero, _De Legibus_, i, 17.)
_Readings_.--St. Thos., 1a, q. 79, art. 11-13; Plato, _Protagoras_, 325, 326; John Grote, _Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy,_ pp.
169, 207, 208; Cardinal Newman, _Grammar of a.s.sent_, pp. l02-112.
SECTION II.--_Of the invariability of Primary Moral Judgments_.
1. The following narrative is taken from Grote's History of Greece, c.
81.:
”It was a proud day for the Carthaginian general [Footnote 12] when he stood as master on the ground of Himera; enabled to fulfil the duty, and satisfy the exigencies, of revenge for his slain grandfather.
Tragical indeed was the consummation of this long-cherished purpose.... All the male captives, 3,000 in number, were conveyed to the precise spot where Hamilkar had been slain, and there put to death with indignity, as an expiatory satisfaction to his lost honour. No man can read the account of this wholesale ma.s.sacre without horror and repugnance. Yet we cannot doubt, that among all the acts of Hannibal's life, this was the one in which he most gloried; that it realized in the most complete and emphatic manner, his concurrent _aspirations of filial sentiment, religious obligation, and honour as a patriot_; [Footnote 13] that to show mercy would have been regarded as a mean dereliction of these esteemed impulses.... Doubtless, the feelings of Hannibal were cordially shared, and the plenitude of his revenge envied, by the army around him. So different, sometimes so totally contrary, is the tone and direction of the moral sentiments, among different ages and nations.”
[Footnote 12: Hannibal, B.C. 409, therefore not the victor of Cannae.]
[Footnote 13: Italics mine.]
We may supplement this story by another from Herodotus (iii., 38):
”Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked, 'What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died.' To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks were standing by, and knew by the aid of an interpreter all that was said--'What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers, at their decease?' The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. Such is the way of men; and Pindar was right in my judgment, when he said, 'Convention is king over all.'”
2. If any one held that the natural law of conscience was natural in the same way as the sense of temperature: if one held to the existence of a Moral Sense in all men, settling questions of right and wrong, as surely as all men know sweet things from bitter by tasting them: these stories, and they could be multiplied by hundreds, abundantly suffice to confute the error. There is no authentic copy of the moral law, printed, framed, and hung up by the hand of Nature, in the inner sanctuary of every human heart. Man has to learn his duties as he learns the principles of health, the laws of mechanics, the construction and navigation of vessels, the theorems of geometry, or any other art or science. And he is just as likely to go wrong, and has gone wrong as grievously, in his judgments on moral matters as on any other subject of human knowledge. The knowledge of duties is _natural_ (as explained in the previous section, n. 2), not because it comes spontaneously, but because it is necessary to our nature for the development and perfection of the same. Thus a man _ought_, so far as he can, to learn his duties: but we cannot say of a man, as such, that he _ought_ to learn geometry or navigation. If a man does not know his duties, he is excused by ignorance, according to the rules under which ignorance excuses (c. iii., s. i., nn. 3-5, p. 27). If a man does not know navigation, there is no question of _excuse_ for what he was not bound to learn, but he may suffer _loss_ by his want of knowledge.
3. It was furthermore observed above (l.c.), that the _natural_ law was so called as being found expressed more or less perfectly in the minds of all men, and therefore being a proper element of human nature. It remains to see how much this universal natural expression amounts to. That is at once apparent from our previous explanation of _synderesis_. (s. i., nn. 5, seq., p. 139.) Not a complete and accurate knowledge of the natural law is found in all minds, far from it; but _synderesis_ is found in all. This is apparent from Mr.
Grote's own phrases, ”aspirations of filial sentiment,” ”religious obligation,” ”honour as a patriot,” _Parents are to be honoured, we must do our duty to G.o.d and to our country_: there Hannibal was at one with the most approved teachers of morality. Callatian and Greek agreed in the recognition of the commandment, _Honour thy father and thy mother_. That was the major premiss of them both, in the moral syllogism (s. i., n. 3, p. 135), which ruled their respective consciences. Their difference was upon the _applying minor_, as it is called; the Greek regarding the dissolution of the body into its elements by fire, and so saving it from corruption, as the best means of honouring the dead: the Callatians preferring to raise their parents as it were to life again, by making them the food of their living children. Hannibal, again, had before his mind the grand principle of retribution, that wrongdoing must be expiated by suffering. But he had not heard the words ”Vengeance is Mine;” and mistakenly supposed it to rest with himself to appoint and carry out his own measure of revenge. Whether he was quite so invincibly ignorant on this point, as Grote represents, is open to doubt. At any rate he was correct in the primary moral judgment on which he proceeded.
_Reading_.--St. Thos., 1a 2ae, q. 94, art. 6.
SECTION III.--_Of the immutability of the Natural Law_.
1. Besides printing, many methods are now in vogue for multiplying copies of a doc.u.ment. Commonly the doc.u.ment is written out with special ink on special paper: the copy thus used is called a _stencil_; and from it other copies are struck off. We will suppose the stencil to be that page of the Eternal Law written in the Mind of G.o.d, which regulates _human acts_, technically so called. The copies struck off from that stencil will be the Natural Law in the mind of this man and of that. Now, as all who are familiar with copying processes know too well, it happens at times that a copy comes out very faint, and in parts not at all. These faint and partial copies represent the Natural Law as it is imperfectly developed in the minds of many men. In this sense, and as we may say _subjectively_, the Natural Law is mutable, very mutable indeed. Still, as no one would say that the doc.u.ment had been altered, because some copies of it were bad, so it is not strictly correct to say that the Natural Law varies with these subjective varieties. Appeal would be made to a full and perfectly printed impression of the doc.u.ment, one that rendered the stencil exactly. The Natural Law must be viewed in like manner, as it would exist in a mind perfectly enlightened concerning the whole duty of man, and exactly reproducing in itself that portion of the Eternal Law which ordains such duty. Were such a mind to discern a natural obligation to lie differently at two different times, all the relevant circ.u.mstances being alike in both cases, and the moral solution different, then only could the Natural Law be held to have changed.
2. But this is clearly impossible. The conclusion of a geometrical theorem is a truth for all time. There is no difference here between a complicated theorem, having many conditions, and a simpler theorem with fewer. It is indeed easier for a few than for many conditions to be all present together: but the enunciation of the conclusion supposes _all_ the conditions, whatever their number. The same in a practical manner, as in the stability of a bridge. The bridge that would stand in England, would stand in Ceylon. If it would not, there must have occurred some change in the conditions, as the heat of the tropical sun upon the girders. A point of casuistry also, however knotty, once determined, is determined for ever and aye, for the circ.u.mstances under which it was determined. The Natural Law in this sense is absolutely immutable, no less in each particular application than in the most general principles. We must uniformly pa.s.s the same judgment on the same case. What is once right and reasonable, is always right and reasonable, in the same matter. Where to-day there is only one right course, there cannot to-morrow be two, unless circ.u.mstances have altered. The Natural Law is thus far immutable, every jot and t.i.ttle.