Part 22 (1/2)

Moral duty consists in the observance of those rules of conduct which contribute to the welfare of society, and by implication, of the individuals who compose it.

The end of society is peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the fullest and highest life attainable by man.

The rules of conduct by which this end is to be attained are discoverable--like the other so-called laws of Nature--by observation and experiment, and only in that way.

Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent with the ends of society. There is no more doubt that they are so than that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who steals or murders, breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection.

He becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature.

Criminal law indicates the ways which have proved most convenient for dealing with him.

All this would be true if men had no ”moral sense” at all, just as there are rules of perspective which must be strictly observed by a draughtsman, and are quite independent of his having any artistic sense.

CCCLXIX

The moral sense is a very complex affair--dependent in part upon a.s.sociations of pleasure and pain, approbation and disapprobation formed by education in early youth, but in part also on an innate sense of moral beauty and ugliness (how originated need not be discussed), which is possessed by some people in great strength, while some are totally devoid of it--just as some children draw, or are enchanted by music while mere infants, while others do not know ”Cherry Ripe” from ”Rule Britannia,” nor can represent the form of the simplest thing to the end of their lives.

Now for this last sort of people there is no reason why they should discharge any moral duty, except from fear of punishment in all its grades, from mere disapprobation to hanging, and the duty of society is to see that they live under wholesome fear of such punishment short, sharp, and decisive.

For the people with a keen innate sense of moral beauty there is no need of any other motive. What they want is knowledge of the things they may do and must leave undone, if the welfare of society is to be attained.

Good people so often forget this that some of them occasionally require hanging almost as much as the bad.

If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the ma.s.s in whom it is weak? I can only reply by putting another question--Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong--Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed mult.i.tude away? But they do, and always will.

People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.

Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have great respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.

CCCLXX

As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.

CCCLXXI

The cardinal fact in the University questions appears to me to be this: that the student to whose wants the mediaeval University was adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.

The mediaeval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers.

Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by deduction from ancient data.

The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods of enquiry to the ascertainment of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train pioneers.

From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education, combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not primarily an inst.i.tution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.

It is an inst.i.tution in which a man who claims to devote himself to Science or Art, should be able to find some one who can teach him what is already known, and train him in the methods of knowing more.

CCCLXXII