Part 3 (1/2)
”In the genesis of an idea, the successive experiences, be they of sounds, colors, touches, tastes, or be they of the special objects that combine many of these into groups, have so much in common that each, when it occurs, can be definitely thought of as like those which preceded it. But in the genesis of an emotion, the successive experiences so far differ that each of them, when it occurs, suggests past experiences which are not specifically similar, but have only a general similarity; and, at the same time, it suggests benefits or evils in past experience which likewise are various in their special natures, though they have a certain community of general nature. Hence it results that the consciousness aroused is a mult.i.tudinous confused consciousness, in which, along with a certain kind of combination among impressions received from without, there is a vague cloud of ideal combinations akin to them, and a vague ma.s.s of ideal feelings of pleasure or pain that were a.s.sociated with them. We have abundant proof that feelings grow up without reference to recognized causes and consequences, and without the possessor of them being able to say why they have grown up, though a.n.a.lysis, nevertheless, shows that they have been formed out of connected experiences. The experiences of utility I refer to are those which become registered, not as distinctly recognized connections between certain kinds of acts and certain kinds of remote results, but those which become registered in the shape of a.s.sociations between groups of feelings that have often recurred together, though the relation between them has not been consciously generalized”--a.s.sociations which though little perceived, nevertheless serve as incentives or deterrents. Much deeper down than the history of the human race must we go to find the beginnings of these connections.
The appearances and sounds which excite in the infant a vague dread indicate danger; and do so because they are the physiological accompaniments of destructive action.
”What we call the natural language of anger is due to a partial contraction of those muscles which actual combat would call into play; and all marks of irritation, down to that pa.s.sing shade over the brow which accompanies slight annoyance, are incipient stages of these same contractions. Conversely with the natural language of pleasure, and of that state of mind which we call amicable feeling; this, too, has a physical interpretation.”
Of the altruistic sentiments, Spencer says: ”The development of these has gone on only as fast as society has advanced to a state in which the activities are mainly peaceful. The root of all the altruistic sentiments is sympathy, and sympathy could become dominant only when the mode of life, instead of being one that habitually inflicted direct pain, became one which conferred direct and indirect benefits; the pains inflicted being mainly incidental and indirect.” Sympathy is ”the concomitant of gregariousness; the two having all along increased by reciprocal aid.”
”If we suppose all thought of rewards or punishments, immediate or remote, to be left out of consideration, it is clear that any one who hesitates to inflict a pain because of the vivid representation of that pain which rises in his consciousness, is restrained not by any sense of obligation or by any formulated doctrine of utility, but by the painful a.s.sociations established in him. And it is clear that if, after repeated experiences of the moral discomfort he has felt from witnessing the unhappiness indirectly caused by some of his acts, he is led to check himself when again tempted to those acts, the restraint is of like nature. Conversely with the pleasure-giving acts, repet.i.tions of kind deeds and experiences of the sympathetic gratifications that follow tend continually to make stronger the a.s.sociation between deeds and feelings of happiness.”
Spencer continues: ”Eventually these experiences may be consciously generalized, and there may result a deliberate pursuit of the sympathetic gratifications. There may also come to be distinctly recognized the truths that the remoter results are respectively detrimental and beneficial--that due regard for others is conducive to ultimate personal welfare, and disregard of others to ultimate personal disaster; and then there may become current such summations of experience as 'honesty is the best policy.' But so far from regarding these intellectual recognitions of utility as preceding and causing the moral sentiment, I regard the moral sentiment as preceding such recognitions of utility and making them possible. The pleasures and pains directly resulting, in experience, from sympathetic and unsympathetic actions, had first to be slowly a.s.sociated with such actions, and the resulting incentives and deterrents frequently obeyed, before there could arise the perceptions that sympathetic and unsympathetic actions are remotely beneficial or detrimental to the actor; and they had to be obeyed still longer and more generally before there could arise the perceptions that they are socially beneficial and detrimental. When, however, the remote effects, personal and social, have gained general recognition, are expressed in current maxims, and lead to injunctions having the religious sanction, the sentiments that prompt sympathetic actions and check unsympathetic ones, are immensely strengthened by their alliances. Approbation and reprobation, divine and human, come to be a.s.sociated in thought with the sympathetic and unsympathetic actions respectively. The commands of a creed, the legal penalties, and the code of social conduct, mutually enforce them; and every child, as it grows up, daily has impressed on it, by the words and faces and voices of those around, the authority of these highest principles.”
The altruistic sentiments develop, and altruistic action becomes habitual, ”until at length these altruistic sentiments begin to call in question the authority of those ego-altruistic sentiments which once ruled unchallenged.”
And Spencer sums up his objections to the interpretation of his theory of the development of the moral sentiment as follows: ”What I have said will make it clear that two fundamental errors have been made in the interpretation put upon it. Both Utility and Experience have been construed in senses much too narrow.
”Utility, convenient a word as it is from its comprehensiveness, has very inconvenient and misleading implications. It vividly suggests uses and means and proximate ends, but very faintly suggests the pleasures, positive or negative, which are the ultimate ends, and which, in the ethical meaning of the word, are alone considered; and, further, it implies conscious recognition of means and ends--implies the deliberate taking of some course to gain a perceived benefit. Experience, too, in its ordinary acceptation, connotes definite perceptions of causes and consequences, as standing in observed relations, and is not taken to include the connections found in consciousness between states that occur together, when the relation between them, causal or other, is not perceived. It is in their widest senses, however, that I habitually use these words, as will be manifest to every one who reads the 'Principles of Psychology.'”
In his essay on Prison Ethics (1860), Spencer says: ”The antagonistic schools of morals, like many other antagonistic schools, are both right and both wrong. The _a priori_ school has its truth; the _a posteriori_ school has its truth; and for the proper guidance of conduct there should be due recognition of both. On the one hand, it is a.s.serted that there is an absolute standard of rect.i.tude; and respecting certain cla.s.ses of actions, it is rightly a.s.serted. From the fundamental laws of life and the conditions of social existence are deducible certain imperative limitations to individual action--limitations which are essential to a perfect life, individual and social; or, in other words, essential to the greatest possible happiness. And these limitations, following inevitably as they do from undeniable first principles, deep as the nature of life itself, const.i.tute what we may distinguish as absolute morality.
”On the other hand, it is contended, and in a sense rightly contended, that with men as they are, and society as it is, the dictates of absolute morality are impracticable. Legal control, which involves the infliction of pain, alike on those who are restrained and on those who pay the cost of restraining them, is proved by this fact to be not absolutely moral, seeing that absolute morality is the regulation of conduct in such way that pain shall not be inflicted. Wherefore, if it be admitted that legal control is at present indispensable, it must be admitted that these _a priori_ rules cannot be immediately carried out.
And hence it follows that we must adapt our laws and actions to the existing character of mankind--that we must estimate the good or evil resulting from this or that arrangement, and so reach _a posteriori_ a code fitted for the time being. In short, we must fall back on expediency.” Spencer then goes on to argue that an advanced penal code is as impossible to an early stage of civilization as is an advanced form of government; a b.l.o.o.d.y penal code is both a natural product of the time and a needful restraint for the time, and is also the only one which could be carried out by the existing administration.
The aim of morality is life, of absolute morality complete life; society is therefore justified in coercing the criminal who breaks through the conditions of life or constrains us to do so. Coercion is legitimate to the extent of compelling rest.i.tution, and preventing a repet.i.tion of aggressions; no further. Less b.l.o.o.d.y systems of punishment, wherever introduced, have borne excellent fruit. It may be deductively shown that the best of all systems must be that best calculated to reform the criminal; too severe punishment, instead of awakening a sense of guilt, prevents the same, begetting a sense of injustice towards the inflicting power, which causes resentment; so that, even if the criminal, on reentering society, commits no further crime, he is restrained by the lowest of motives--fear. The industrial system applied in prisons must have the best results--counteracting habits of idleness, strengthening self-control, and educating the will.
The principle of freedom, which runs through all Spencer's works, is especially enounced again, in his essay, ”The Man versus the State”
(1884), in which he combats ”the great political superst.i.tion” of so-called ”paternal government.” He says: ”Reduced to its lowest terms, every proposal to interfere with citizens' activities further than by enforcing their mutual limitations, is a proposal to improve life by breaking through the fundamental conditions of life.”[40]
In ”The Data of Ethics” (published 1874), Mr. Spencer a.s.sumes a somewhat different standpoint from that of his earlier works bearing on morals.
The course of reasoning contained in this book is as follows:--
The doctrine that correlatives imply one another has, for one of its common examples, the relation between the conceptions of whole and part.
Beyond the primary truth that no idea of a whole can be framed without a nascent idea of parts const.i.tuting it, and that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some whole to which it belongs, there is the secondary truth that there can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole. Still less, when part and whole are dynamically related, and least of all when the whole is organic, can the part be understood except by comprehension of the whole to which it belongs. This truth holds not only of material but also of immaterial aggregates.
Conduct is a whole and, in a sense, an organic whole, and Ethics, of which it is a part, cannot be understood except through the understanding of the whole of conduct.
A definition of conduct must exclude purposeless actions,--such, for instance, as those of an epileptic in a fit. Hence the definition emerges either: acts adjusted to ends; or, the adjustment of acts to ends; according as we contemplate the formed body of acts, or think of the form alone. And conduct, in its full acceptation, must be taken as comprehending all adjustments of acts to ends, from the simplest to the most complex, whatever their special natures and whether they are considered separately or in their totality.
A large part of conduct is non-ethical, indifferent; this pa.s.ses, by small degrees and in countless ways, into conduct which is either moral or immoral.
The acts of all living creatures, as acts adjusted to ends, come within the definition of conduct; the conduct of the higher animals as compared with that of man, and of the lower animals as compared with the higher, differs mainly in that the adjustments of acts to ends is relatively simple and relatively incomplete. And as in other cases, so in this case, we must interpret the more developed by the less developed; human conduct as a part of the whole of the conduct of animate beings. And further: as, in order to understand the part of human conduct with which Ethics is concerned, we must study it as a part of human conduct as a whole, and in order to understand human conduct, we must again study it as a part of the whole of conduct exhibited in animate beings, so, in order to comprehend this too, we must regard it as an outcome of former, less developed conduct, out of which it has arisen. Our first step must be to study the evolution of conduct.
Morphology deals with physical structure, physiology with the processes carried on in the body. But we enter on the subject of conduct when we begin to study such combinations among the actions of sensory and motor-organs as are externally manifested.
We saw that conduct is distinguished from the totality of actions by the exclusion of purposeless actions; but during evolution this distinction arises by degrees. We trace up conduct to the vertebrates and through the vertebrates to man, and find that here the adjustments of acts to ends are both more numerous and better than among lower mammals; and we find the same thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of lower. These better adjustments favor, not only prolongation, but also increased amount of life.
And among these adjustments of acts to ends, there are not only such as further individual life but also, evolving with these, such as favor the life of the species. Race-maintaining conduct, like self-maintaining conduct, arises gradually out of that which cannot be called conduct.
The mult.i.tudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the earth are engaged in a continuous struggle for existence, in which the adjustments of acts to ends, being imperfectly evolved, miss completeness because they cannot be made by one creature without other creatures being prevented from making them. This imperfectly evolved conduct introduces us, by ant.i.thesis, to conduct which is perfectly evolved,--such adjustments that each creature may make them without preventing other creatures making them also. The conditions of such conduct cannot exist in predatory savage life; nor can it exist where there remains antagonism between individuals forming a group, or between groups of individuals,--two traits of life necessarily a.s.sociated, since the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression of individuals on one another also. Hence the limit of evolution can be reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies; can be approached only as war decreases and dies out.
The principle of beneficence is not derived by Spencer from the principle of freedom, in ”Social Statics”; and here, as in the latter book, Spencer has difficulty with it. He says: ”A gap in this outline must now be filled up. There remains a further advance not yet even hinted. For beyond so behaving that each achieves his ends without preventing others from achieving their ends, the members of a society may give mutual help in the achievement of ends. And if either indirectly by industrial cooperation, or directly by volunteered aid, fellow-citizens can make easier for one another the adjustments of acts to ends, then their conduct a.s.sumes a still higher phase of evolution; since whatever facilitates the making of adjustments by each increases the totality of the adjustments made, and serves to render the lives of all more complete.”