The New Ethics

I. FORESIGHT AND REPENTANCE.

SINCE psychology and ethics are partners, ethics is bound to take the first chance to return psychology’s lead. As long as psychology put full-fledged faculties of free will and conscience into the soul’s original outfit, it was all very well for ethics to respond with inexplicable intuitions and categorical imperatives. Now that psychology is telling us that the will is simply “the sum total of our mental states in so far as they involve attentive guidance of conduct, ” and its sole sphere of action “the attentive furthering of our interest in one act or desire as against all others present to our minds at the same time, ” ethics can no longer put us off with cut and dried rules for keeping a fixed, formal self out of mischief, but must show us how, from the raw materials of appetites, passions, and instincts, with the customs, institutions, and ideals of the race for our models, to create, each man for himself, an individuality of ever tightening coherence and ever expanding dimensions.

This twofold task, to preserve the unity of life at the same time that we multiply and magnify the interests we unify, gives to ethics at once its difficulty and its zest. Either half of this task would be easy and stupid. If unification, simplicity, peace, is our sole aim, we have but to call in the monks and the mystics, the lamas and the mental healers, for a half dozen lessons and treatments. If, on the other hand, we aim at bulk, complexity, tension, almost any business man, or club woman, or “globe-trotter, ” or debauchee,can teach us as much as that. To challenge the simple unity of our habitual lives by every interest that promises enlargement and enrichment, and in turn to challenge each new interest in the name of a singleness of purpose which it may stretch as much as it please, but on no account shall break,— this double task is hard indeed; the zest of this game is great.

In a task so difficult as this of relating ever new materials to each other in the unity of an organic whole, failure is the only road to success. For there are ten thousand possible combinations of our appetites, desires, interests, and affections, of which only one precise, definite way can be right, and all the rest must be wrong. As Aristotle learned from the Pythagoreans, virtue is definite, or limited: vice is indefinite, or infinite. It is so easy to miss the mark that any fool can be vicious; so hard to hit it that the strongest man’s first efforts go astray. “Adam’s fall ” was foreordained by stronger powers than even the decree of a God. For every son of Adam, sin, or the missing of the perfect mark, is a psychological necessity. Nothing short of a miracle could prevent a man’s first, experimental adjustments of his environment to himself from being the failures they are. For in every art and craft, in every game and sport where skill is involved, the progressive elimination of errors is the only way to a perfection which is ever approximated, but never completely attained.

Yet the difficulty of the moral life is at the same time its glory. For the very source of the difficulty may be turned into a weapon of conquest. The difficulty is all due to the organic connection of experience. If experiences stood alone, disconnected, the moral problem would be simple indeed. Hunger feasting is better than hunger starved; thirst drinking is better than thirst unquenched; weariness resting is better than weariness at work. If the feast, or the drink, or the rest were the only things to be considered, then the gratification of each desire as fast as it arose would be the whole duty of man. None but a fool could err. But, on the other hand, the wise man would be no better off than the fool. There would be no use for his wisdom; no world of morals to conquer.

Foresight is the first great step in this career of moral conquest. The mind within and the world without are parallel streams of close-linked sequences, in which what goes in as present cause comes out as future effect. This linkage at the same time binds and sets us free. It binds us to the effect, if we take the cause. It sets us free in the effect, if the effect is foreseen, and the cause is chosen with a view to the effect. These streams of sequence repeat themselves. They are reducible to constant types. They can be accepted or rejected as wholes. To accept such a whole, taking an undesirable present cause for the sake of a desirable future effect, is active foresight, or courage. To reject a whole, foregoing a desired present cause in order to escape an undesirable future effect, is passive foresight, or temperance. Foresight reads into present appetite its future meaning; and if backed up by temperance and courage, rejects or accepts the immediate gratification according as its total effect is repugnant or desirable.

It is at this point that vice creeps into life. If virtue is choosing the whole life history, so far as it can be foreseen, in each gratification or repression of a particular desire, vice is the sacrificing of the whole self to a single desire. How is this possible ?

Partly through ignorance, or lack of foresight. Yet vice due to ignorance is pardonable, and is hardly to be called vice at all. It is sheer stupidity. This, however, which was the explanation of Socrates, lets us off too easily.

Vice is due chiefly to inattention; not ignorance, but thoughtlessness. “I see the better and approve; yet I pursue the worse.” In this case knowledge is not absent, but defective. It is on the margin, not in the focus of consciousness. In the language of physiological psychology, a present appetite presents its claims on great billows of nerve commotion which come rolling in with all the tang and pungency which are the characteristic marks of immediate peripheral excitation. The future consequences of the gratification of that appetite, on the contrary, are represented by the tiny, faint, feeble waves which flow over from some other brain centre, excited long ago, when the connection of this particular cause with its natural effect was first experienced. In such an unequal contest between powerful vibrations shot swift and straight along the tingling nerves from the seat of immediate peripheral commotion, and the meagre, measured flow of faded impressions whose initial velocity and force were long since spent, what wonder that the remote effect seems dim, vague, and unreal, and that the immediate gratification of the insistent, clamorous appetite or passion wins the day! This is the modern explanation of Aristotle’s old problem of incontinence.

Whence then comes repentance? From the changed proportions in which acts present themselves to our afterthought. “The tumult and the shouting dies. " The appetite, once so urgent and insistent, lies prostrate and exhausted. Its clamorous messages stop. The pleasure it brought dies down; vanishes into the thin air of memory and symbolical representation, out of which it can only call to us with hollow, ghostlike voice. On the contrary, the effect, whether it be physical pains, or the felt contempt of others, or the sense of our own shame, gets physical reinforcement from without, or invades those cells of the brain where memory of the consequences of this indulgence lie, latent but never dead, and stirs them to the very depths. Now all the vividness and pungency and tang are on their side. They cry out Fool ! Shame! Sin! Guilt! Condemnation! Then we wonder how we could have been fools enough to take into our lives such a miserable combination of cause and effect as this has proved to be. The act we did and the act we repent of doing are in one sense the same. But we did it with the attractive cause in the foreground, and the repulsive effect in the background. We repent of the same act with the repulsive effect vivid in the foreground of present consciousness, and the attractive cause in the dim background of memory. Then we vow that we will never admit that combination into our lives again.

Will we keep our vow? That depends on our ability to recall the point of view we gained in the mood of penitence the next time a similar combination presents itself. It will come on as before, with the attractive offer of some immediate good in the foreground, and the unwelcome effect trailing obscurely in the rear. If we take it as it comes, adding to the presentation no contribution of our own, we shall repeat the folly and vice of the past; become again the passive slaves of circumstance; the easy prey of appetite and passion; the stupid victims of the serpent’s subtlety.

Our freedom, our moral salvation, lies in our power to call up our past experience of penitence and lay this revived picture of the act, with effect in the foreground, on top of the vivid picture which appetite presents. If we succeed in making the picture we reproduce from within the one which determines our action, we shall act wisely and well. By reflecting often upon the pictures drawn for us in our moments of penitence, by reviving them at intervals when they are not immediately needed, and by forming the habit of always calling them up in moments of temptation, we can give to these pictures, painted by our own penitence, the control of our lives. This is our charter of freedom; and though precept, example, and the experience of others may be called in to supplement our own personal experience, this power to revive the actual or borrowed lessons of repentance is the only freedom we have. Call it memory, attention, foresight, prudence, watchfulness, ideal construction, or what name we please, the secret of our freedom, the key to character, the control of conduct, lies exclusively in this power to force into the foreground considerations which of themselves tend to slip into the background, so that, as in a well-constructed cyclorama, where actual walls and fences join on to painted walls and fences without apparent break, the immediately presented desire, backed up by all the impetus of immediate physical excitation, shall count for precisely its proportionate worth in a representation of the total consequences of which it is the cause.

II. SOCIAL SYMPATHY AND RESPONSIBILITY.

If I were the only person in the world, if all the other forces were material things, with no wills of their own, then the single principle of inserting into the stream of sequence the causes which lead to the future I desire for myself, and excluding those of which I have had reason to repent, would be the whole of ethics. Fortunately life is not so simple and monotonous as all that. The world is full of other wills as eager, as interesting, as strenuous, as brave as we, in our best moments, know our own to be. By sympathy, imagination, insight, and affection we can enrich our lives an hundred-fold by making their aims and aspirations, their interests and struggles, their joys and sorrows our own. Not only can we do this, but to some extent we must. It is impossible to live an isolated life, apart from our fellows. Man is by nature social. Alone he becomes inhuman. A life which has no outlet in sympathy with other lives is unendurable. If men cannot find some one to love, they insist on at least finding some one to quarrel with, or defy, or maltreat, or at least despise. Even hatred and cruelty and pride have this social motive at their heart; and in spite of themselves are witnesses to the essentially social nature of man, and the soul of latent goodness buried beneath the hardest of corrupted and perverted hearts.

Our social nature complicates and at the same time elevates enormously the moral problem. It is no longer a question of dovetailing together the petty fragments of my own little life so as to make their paltry contents a coherent whole; I now have the harder and more glorious task of making my life as a whole an effective and harmonious element in the larger whole which includes the lives of my fellows and myself. Here again there is a vast task for the imagination to perform; a more spacious cyclorama for it to construct. Not merely the effects upon myself, but the consequences for as many of my fellows as my act directly and traceably affects,

I must now represent. Before I can permit an act to find a place in my present conduct I must foresee, not only what it means for my own future, but for the future of all my neighbors who come within the range of its influence.

For their future is, in proportion to the closeness of the ties that bind us, almost as completely in my control as it is in their own. Indeed, if I be the stronger person, if I have clear foresight where their prevision is dim, if I grasp firmly aims which they hold but feebly, their future may be even more in my hands than it is in their own. Thus the parent is more responsible for the child’s future than is the child himself. The husband often holds the alternative of life or death for his wife in his hands, according as he is patient, forbearing, considerate, and kind, or exacting, inconsiderate, cross, and cruel. The wife, on the other hand, more often holds the future of her husband’s character in her hands, making him sober and honest if she is winsome and sincere; driving him to drink if she is slovenly and querulous ; leading him into dishonesty if she is extravagant and vain. Every person of any considerable strength of character can recall many an instance in which by a half hour’s conversation, followed up by occasional suggestions afterward, he has changed the whole subsequent career of another person. To one who has discovered the secret of this power, a week permitted to pass by without thus changing the life-currents of half a dozen of his fellows would seem a wicked, wanton waste of life’s chief privilege and joy. I could name a quiet, modest man who at a low estimate has changed directly and radically for the better a thousand human lives; and indirectly, to an appreciable degree, certainly not less than a hundred thousand. He is no professional preacher or evangelist; and the greater part of this vast work has been done in quiet conversation, mainly in his own home, and by correspondence.

Such power of one man over another is in no way inconsistent with the freedom and responsibility of them both. In psychical as in physical causation many antecedents enter into each effect. When I pull the trigger of my shotgun, and by so doing shoot a partridge, I am by no means the only cause of the bird’s death. The maker of the powder, the maker of the shot, the man who put them together in the cartridge, the maker of the gun, the dog that helped me find the bird, and countless other forces, which we express in such general terms as the laws of chemistry and physics, enter into the production of the effect. Nevertheless, my pulling the trigger, though not the whole cause, is a real cause. Precisely so when I offer my boy a quarter for shooting a partridge, and under the influence of that inducement he goes hunting, he is just as free in trying to secure the reward as I am in offering it. Both my desire for the partridge which leads me to offer the prize and his desire for the quarter are factors in producing the result. We are both free in our acts, and both share responsibility for the shooting of the bird. For that act figured alike in his future and in my future as an element in a desired whole. The same external fact may enter as an element in the freedom of thousands of persons. A great work of art, for example, is an expression of the freedom not only of the artist who paints or writes, but of all who see or read in it that which they long for and admire. The goods of the will and the spirit, unlike the goods of the mill and the market, are “in widest commonalty spread.” They refuse to be made objects of exclusive possession. I cannot intensely cherish an idea, or entertain a plan, for which my fellows shall not be either the better or the worse. Every conscious act deliberately chosen and accepted is an act of freedom, and every word or deed goes forth from us freighted with social consequence, and weighted to that precise extent with moral responsibility.

Hence social imagination or sympathy is the second great instrument of morality, as individual imagination or foresight was the first. If our individual salvation is by foresight and repentance, our social salvation is through imagination and love. No logical “reconciliation of egoism and altruism ” is possible; for that would involve reducing one of the two elements to terms of the other. Both are facts of human experience, found in every normal life. I live my own life by setting before myself a future, and taking the means that lead thereto. I find this life worth living in proportion to the length and breadth and height of the aims I set before myself, and the wisdom and skill I bring to bear upon their achievement. But I cannot make my own aims long, wide, or high, without at the same time taking account of the aims of my fellows. I may clash with them, and try to use them as means to my own ends. That leads to strife and bitterness, sorrow and shame. Either my own ends are defeated if, as is generally the case, my fellows prove stronger than I; or else they are won at such cost of injury to others that in comparison they seem poor and pitiful, not worth the winning. This is the experience of the normal man; and though by pride and hardness of heart one may make shift to endure a comparatively egoistic life, no person can find it so good as never to be haunted by visions a better, which sympathy and love might bring.

On the other hand, if I generously take into account the aims of my fellow man, and live in them with the same eagerness with which I live in my own, using for him the same foresight and adaptation of means to ends that I would use for myself, throwing my own resources into the scale of his interests when his resources are inadequate, sharing with him the sorrow of temporary defeat, and the triumph of hard won victories, I find my own life more than doubled by this share in the life of another. The little that I add to his foresight and strength, if given with sympathy and love, when added to the energy, latent or active, which he already has, works wonders out of all proportion to the results I could achieve in my life alone, or which he alone could achieve in his. Love not merely adds; it multiplies ; as in the story of the loaves and fishes. It not only increases; it magnifies the life, alike of him who gives and him who receives. Just why it should do so is hard to explain in purely egoistic terms; as hard as to explain to an oyster why dogs like to run and bark; or to a heap of sand why the particles of a crystal arrange themselves in the wondrous ways they do. It is a simple, ultimate fact of experience that just as a life of individual foresight is on the whole better worth living than the life of hand to mouth gratification, so the life of loving sympathy is a life infinitely more blessed than the best success the poor self-centred egoist can ever know. If a selfish life were found on the basis of wide experience and comprehensive generalization to be a more blessed and glorious life than the life of loving sympathy, then the selfish life would be the life we ought to live: precisely as if houses in which the centre of gravity falls outside the base were the most stable and graceful structures men could build, that would be the style of architecture we all “ought ” to adopt. Ethics and architecture are both ideal pursuits, in the sense that they have as their object to make a present ideal plan into a future fact. But both must build their ideals out of the solid facts of past experience. It is just as undeniable, unescapable a fact of ethics that the aim of a noble and blessed life must fall outside its own individual interests, as it is an undeniable, unescapable law of architecture that the centre of gravity of a stable, graceful structure must fall within its base.

Still the appeal to brute fact, though valid, is not ultimate. There is a reason for the fact that structures in which the centre of gravity falls outside the base are unstable; and physics formulates that reason in the law of gravitation. So there is a reason why a selfish life is unsatisfactory; and ethics formulates that reason in the law of love. These facts are so; but they have to be so because they could not find a place in the total system of things if they were otherwise. A universe of consistent egoists would not be a permanent possibility. It could only exist temporarily as a hell in process of its own speedy disruption and dissolution.

Yet just as a man can forget his own future, and in so doing wrong his own soul, a man can be blind to the consequence of his act for his neighbor, and in so doing wrong society and his own social nature. The root of all social sin is this blindness to social consequence. Hence the great task of sound ethics is to stimulate the social imagination. We must be continually prodding our sense of social consequence to keep it wide awake. We must be asking ourselves at each point of contact with the lives of others such pointed questions as these: How would you like to be this tailor or washerwoman whose bill you have neglected to pay ? How would you like to be the customer to whom you are selling these adulterated or inferior goods ? How would you like to be the investor in this stock company which you are promoting with water ? How would you like to be the taxpayer of the city which you are plundering by lending your official sanction to contracts and deals which make its buildings and supplies and services cost more than any private individual would have to pay ? How would you like to be the employer whose time and tools and materials you are wasting at every chance you get to loaf and shirk and neglect the duties you are paid to perform ? How would you like to be the clerk or saleswoman in the store where you are reaping extra dividends by imposing harder conditions than the state of trade and the market compel you to adopt? How would you like to be the stoker or weaver or mechanic on the wages you pay and the conditions of labor you impose? How would you like to live out the dreary, degraded, outcast future of the woman you wantonly ruin for a moment’s passionate pleasure ? How would you like to be the man whose good name you injure by slander and false accusation? How would you like to be the business rival whom you deprive of his little all by using your greater wealth in temporary cut-throat competition?

These are the kind of questions the social imagination is asking of us at every turn. There are severe conditions of trade, politics, war, which often compel us to do cruel things and strike hard, crushing blows. For these conditions we are not always individually responsible. The individual who will hold his place, and maintain an effective position in the practical affairs of the world, must repeatedly do the things he hates to do, and file his silent protest, and work for such gradual change of conditions as will make such hard, cruel acts no longer necessary. We must sometimes collect the rent of the poor widow, and exact the task from the sick woman, and pay low wages to the man with a large family, and turn out the wellmeaning but inefficient employee. We must resist good men in the interest of better things they cannot see, and discipline children for reasons which they cannot comprehend. Yet even in these cases where we have to sacrifice other people, we must at least feel the sacrifice ; we must be as sorry for them as we would be for ourselves if we were in their place. We must not turn out the inefficient employee, unless we would be willing to resign his place ourselves, if we held it, and were in it as inefficient as he. We must not exact the rent or the task from the poor widow or the sick saleswoman, unless on the whole if we were in their places we should be willing to pay the rent or perform the task. Even this principle will not entirely remove hardship, privation, and cruelty from our complex modern life. But it will very greatly reduce it; and it will take out of life what is the cruelest element of it all, —— the hardness of human hearts.

To sternly refuse any gain that is purchased by another’s loss, or any pleasure bought with another’s pain; to make this sensitiveness to the interests of others a living stream, a growing plant within our individual hearts; to challenge every domestic and personal relat on, every industrial and business connection, every political and official performance, every social and intellectual aspiration, by this searching test of social consequence to those our act affects, — this is the second stage of the moral life; this is one of the two great commandments of Christianity.

III. AUTHORITY AND PUNISHMENT.

To see the whole effect upon ourselves, and upon others, of each act which we perform is the secret of the moral life. Yet we are shortsighted by nature, and often blinded by prejudice and passion. The child at first is scarcely able to see vividly and clearly beyond the present moment and his individual desires. And in many respects we all remain mere children to the end. Is not the moral task then impossible ?

Hard it is indeed. Impossible, too, it would be, if we had no tools to work with; no helps in this hard task. Fortunately we have the needed helps, and they come first in the authority of our parents and rulers. Their wider experience enables them to see what the child cannot see. Their commandments, therefore, if they are wise and good, point in the direction of consequences which the child cannot see at the time, but which, when he does see, he will accept as desirable. An act which leads to an unseen good consequence, done in obedience to trusted authority, or respected law, is right. The person who does such an act is righteous. And the righteousness of it rests on faith: faith in the goodness and wisdom of the person he obeys. Righteousness at this stagej therefore, is goodness “going it blind, ” as the slang plirase is; or, in more orthodox terms, walking by faith, and not by sight.

As long as the child walks in implicit trust in the wisdom and goodness of his parents he cannot go far astray. Ignorant, shortsighted, inexperienced as he is, he nevertheless is guided by a vicarious intelligence, in which the wisdom and experience of the race are reproduced and interpreted for him in each new crisis by the insight of love. What wonder, then, that the commandment, Honor thy father and thy mother, whether in Hebrew or Chinese legislation, is the great commandment with promise! Not only does the obedient child in particular cases get the consequences which he afterwards comes to see were desirable, but he acquires habits of doing the kind of acts which lead to desirable consequences, and of refraining from the kind of acts which lead to undesirable consequences. These habits are the broad base on which all subsequent character rests, as on a solid rock deeply sunk in the firm soil of the unconscious. As our bodies are first nourished by our mother’s milk, our souls are built up first out of the habits of acting which we derive directly from doing what our mothers tell us to do in thousands of specific, concrete cases, and refraining from doing the things their gentle wisdom firmly forbids. The love of mothers is the cord that ties each newborn soul fast to the wisdom and experience of the race. “We are suckled at the breast of the universal ethos,” chiefly through the vicarious maternal intelligence. Hence the awful waste, amounting to a crime against both the hard won ideals and standards of the race, and the future character of the child, when indolent, or vain, or ambitious mothers turn over the formative years of their children to ignorant, undeveloped nurses! Though the chances are that the average nurse will prove quite as wise and good a guide to the young mind as a mother who is capable of turning her child over to the exclusive training of any other guide than herself. The pity is not so much that the ambitious mother relinquishes her highest and holiest function as that there are children born who have mothers capable of doing it. Given such mothers, the nurses are often a great improvement on them.

The derivative, vicarious nature of righteousness at this stage makes clear the need and justification of punishment. The mother sees a great, far-off good, which the child cannot see at all. She commands the child to act in a way to secure this good as a consequence. He disobeys. He loses the consequence which she desires for him. He weakens the indispensable habit of obedience, on which countless other great goods beyond his vision depend. He cannot see vividly either the specific good at which she aims, nor the general good that flows from the habit of implicit obedience. She then brings within the range of his keen and vivid experience some such minor and transitory evil as a spanking, or being sent supperless to bed; and makes him understand that, if he cannot see the good of obedience, he can count with certainty on these evils of disobedience. Punishment, then, is an act of the truest kindness and consideration. It is a help to that instinctive and implicit obedience to authority, on which the child’s greatest good at this stage of his development depends. No child will permanently resent such well-meant punishment. As Mrs. Browning says:—

The withholding of punishment in such cases is the real cruelty; and the mother who is weak enough to do it is a mawkish sentimentalist, to whom a few passing cries and tears are of more consequence than the future welfare and permanent character of her child. From this point of view, punishment is an act of mercy and kindness, as Plato shows us so clearly in the Gorgias. Every mother who believes her child to be ever so little below the angels is bound to substitute the gentler evils of artificial punishment for the greater evils of a life of unpunished naughtiness.

All moral punishment, whether inflicted by parents, schools, colleges, or courts of justice, is of this nature. It helps the offender to see both ends of his deed. When he commits the offense, he sees vividly only one end of it, the temporary advantage to himself as an individual. He does not see with equal vividness the other end, the injury to the interests of others, and to his own best self as a potential participant in these larger interests. Punishment attempts to bring home to him, if not in the precise terms of his offense, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, at least a partial equivalent, in privation of money or liberty, or public favor, the other end of his act, which at the time of acting he did not keenly and vividly appreciate. Such strict retribution is the best favor we can confer on an offender, so long as he remains unrepentant. To give him less than this is to cut him off from his only chance to get a right view of his own wrong act. It is the only way to open his eyes to see his act in its totality.

What if a man repents ? Shall we still punish him? Not if the repentance is genuine and thoroughgoing. What, then, is true repentance ? An evil act, as we have seen, has two ends: one attractive to the individual for the sake of which he does it; the other injurious to his own better self and to the interests of others. This second end the wrongdoer does not see clearly when he commits the offense. Afterwards he sees it, in its natural consequences; in the indignation of the offended, in the condemnation of society, in the imminence of punishment. This second part of his act, when it comes home to him, he does not like, but wishes himself well out of it. This, however, is not repentance ; and no amount of tears and promises and importunities should ever deceive us into accepting this dislike of unpleasant consequences for a genuine repentance of the wrong act. Every wise parent, every efficient college officer, every just judge, must harden his heart against all these selfish lamentations, and discount them in advance as a probable part of the culprit’s natural programme. Dislike of unpleasant consequences to one’s self is not repentance. Repentance must reach back to the original act, and include both the pleasant cause and its unpleasant consequences to others, as well as to one’s self, in the unity of one total deed, and then repudiate that deed as a whole. When repentance does that, it does the whole moral work which punishment aims to do. To inflict punishment after such repentance is inexcusable and wanton brutality.

The theory of punishment is clear: its application is the most difficult of tasks. It is very hard to discriminate in many cases real repentance from dislike of unpleasant personal consequences. Then it is hard to justify severity toward one who is believed to be unrepentant, and absolute forgiveness to one who has shown evidence of true penitence. Whoever has to administer punishment on a large scale, and attempts to be inflexibly retributive to the impenitent and infinitely merciful toward the penitent, must expect to be grossly misunderstood and severely criticised for all he does, and all he refrains from doing. If the way of the transgressor is hard, the way of the moral punisher is harder. The state practically confesses its inability to discriminate true from false repentance; and lowers its practice from the moral plane of retribution or forgiveness to the merely legal plane of social protection, giving to the executive a power of pardon by which to correct the more glaring mistakes of the courts. In view of the clumsiness of the means at its disposal, the great diversity of moral condition in its citizens, and the impersonality of its relations, probably this protective theory of punishment, which says to the offender, “I punish you, not for stealing sheep, but to prevent other sheep from being stolen,” is the best working theory for practical jurisprudence. But it is utterly unmoral. It has no place in the family. Only in extreme cases is it defensible in school and college. In settling personal quarrels it should have small place. Uncompromising retribution to the impenitent, unreserved forgiveness to the penitent, which Christianity sets forth as the attitude of God, is the only right course for men who are called to perform this infinitely difficult task of moral punishment.

IV. THE SYMBOLICAL VALIDITY OF MORAL LAWS.

The success of the ethical life depends on keeping the consequences of our acts, for ourselves and for others, vividly in the foreground of the mind. Personal authority of parents and rulers, supported by swift sure penalties for disobedience, is the first great help to the good life. But we cannot always have parents, tutors, and governors standing over us to tell us what to do and what not to do; to reward us if we do right and punish us if we do wrong. Still less can we afford to rely on natural penalties alone, as they teach us their lessons in the slow and costly school of experience. The next stage of moral development employs as symbols of the consequences we cannot foresee and appreciate maxims to guide the individual life, and laws to represent the claims of our fellows upon us. These maxims and laws have no intrinsic worth. Their authority is all derived and representative. Yet inasmuch as they represent individual or social consequences, they have all the authority of the consequences themselves. More than that, since consequences are particular and limited, while these maxims and laws are universal, these maxims and laws, derivative and representative symbols though they are, have a sacredness and authority far higher and greater than that of any particular consequences for which in a given case they happen to stand.

These maxims and laws are like the items on a merchant’s ledger; or, better still, like the currency which represents the countless varieties of commodities and services we buy and sell. The items on the ledger, the bills in the pocketbook, have no intrinsic value. Yet it were far better for a merchant to be careless about his cotton cloth, or molasses, or any particular commodity in which he deals, than to be careless about his accounts which represent commodities of all kinds: better for any one of us to forget where we laid our coat, or our shoes or umbrella, than to leave lying around loose the dollar bills, which are symbols of the value of these and a thousand other articles we possess. Precisely so, the authority and dignity of moral maxims and laws are in no way impaired by frankly acknowledging their intrinsic worthlessness. To violate one of these maxims, to break one of these laws, is as foolish and wicked as it would be to set fire to a merchant’s ledger, or to tear up one’s dollar bills. These maxims and laws are our moral currency, coined by the experience of the race, and stamped with universal approval. Their authority rests on the consequences which they represent; and their validity, as representative of those consequences, is attested by the experience of the race in innumerable cases. A moral law is a prophecy of consequences based on the widest possible induction. Hence the man who seeks a satisfactory future for himself, and for those his act affects, in other words the moral man, must obey these maxims and laws in all ordinary cases without stopping to verify the consequences they represent, any more than an ordinary citizen investigates the solvency of the government every time he receives its legal tender notes.

This illustration at the same time reveals the almost universal validity of moral laws, and yet leaves the necessary room for rare and imperative exceptions. A man may find it wise to burn dollar bills. If he is in camp, and likely to perish with cold, and no other kindling is available, he will kindle his fire with dollar bills. He will be very reluctant to do it, however. He will realize that he is kindling a very costly fire. He will consent to do it only as a last resort, and when the fire is worth more to him, not merely than the intrinsic,but than the symbolic value of the bills. Now there may be rare cases when a moral law must be broken on the same principle that a man kindles a fire with dollar bills. The cases will be about as rare when it will be right to steal or lie as it is rare to find circumstances when it is wise to build a fire with dollar bills. They come perhaps once or twice in a lifetime to one or two in every thousand men. The breaking of a moral law always involves evil consequences, far outweighing any particular good that can ordinarily be gained thereby, through weakening confidence and respect for the validity and authority of the law itself. Yet there are exceptional, abnormal conditions of war, or sickness, or insanity, or moral perversity, where the defense of precious interests against pathological and perverse conditions may warrant the breaking of a moral law, on the same principle that impending freezing would warrant the lighting of a thousand-dollar fire.

One hesitates to give examples of circumstances which justify the breaking of a moral law, for fear of giving to exceptions a portion of the emphasis which belongs exclusively to the rule, and falling into the moral abyss of a Jesuitical casuistry. Yet it is an invariable rule of teaching never to give an abstract principle without its accompanying concrete case. Hence, if cases must be given, the lie to divert the murderer from his victim, the horse seized to carry the wounded man to the surgeon, the lie that withholds the story of a repented wrong from the scandalmonger who would wreck the happiness of a home by peddling it abroad, are instances of the extreme urgency that might warrant the building of a thousand - dollar bonfire which takes place whenever we break a moral law. The law against adultery, on the other hand, admits of no conceivable exception; for no good could possibly be gained thereby that would be commensurate with the undermining of the foundations of the home.

Moral laws are the coined treasures of the moral experience of the race, stamped with social approval. As such they are binding on each individual, as the only terms on which he can be admitted to a free exchange of the moral goods of the society of which he is a member. No man can command the respect of himself or of society who permits himself to fall below the level of these rigid requirements.

The mere keeping of the law, however, does not make one a moral man. It may insure a certain mediocrity of conduct which passes for respectability. But one is not morally free, he does not get the characteristic dignity and joy of the moral life, until he is lifted clear above a slavish conformity to law into hearty appreciation of the meaning of the law and enthusiastic devotion to the great end at which all laws aim. A juiceless, soulless, loveless Pharisaism is the best morality mere law can give. To protest against the slavery and insincerity of such a scheme was no small part of the negative side of the mission of Jesus and Paul.

Yet the freedom which Jesus brings, the freedom which all true ethical systems insist on as the very breath of the moral life, is not freedom from but freedom in the requirements of the law. It is not freedom to break the law, except in those very rare instances cited above, where the very principle on which the law is founded demands the breaking of the letter of the law in the interest of its own spiritual fulfillment. It is doubtless true that no man keeps any law aright who would not dare to break it. I lack the true respect for life which is at the heart of the law against murder if I would not kill a murderer to prevent him from taking the life of an innocent victim. I do not really love the right relation between persons which is the heart of truth if I would not dare to deceive a scandal-monger, intent on sowing seeds of bitterness and hate. I do not love that welfare of mankind which is the significance and justification of property if I would be afraid to drive off a horse which did not belong to me to take the wounded man to the surgeon in time to save unnecessary amputation or needless death. I do not believe in that union of happy hearts which is the soul of marriage if I would not, like Caponsacchi, risk hopeless misunderstanding, and shock convention, in order to let the light of love shine on a nature from which it had been monstrously, cruelly, wantonly withheld.

There is nothing antinomian in this freedom in the law. He who will attempt the rôle of Caponsacchi must, like him, have a purity of heart as high above the literal requirements of external law as are the frosty stars of heaven above the murky mists of earth. He who drives off the horse to the surgeon honestly must be one who would sooner cut off his right hand than touch his neighbor’s spear of grass for any lesser cause. He who will tell the truthful lie to the scandal-monger must be one who would go to the stake before he would give the word or even the look of falsehood to any right-minded man who had a right to know the truth for which he asks. He who will slay a murderer guiltlessly must be one who would rather, like Socrates, die a thousand deaths than betray the slightest claim his fellows have upon him. No man may break the least of the moral commandments unless the spirit that is expressed within the commandment itself bids him break it. And such breaking is the highest fulfillment.

This theoretical explanation of moral laws, witii its justification of exceptions in extreme cases, is absolutely essential to a rational system of ethics. Yet it must not blind us to the practically supreme and absolute authority of these laws in ordinary conduct. These moral laws are, as Professor Dewey happily terms them, tools of analysis. They break up a complex situation into its essential parts, and tell us to what class of acts the proposed act belongs, and whether that class of acts is one which we ought to do or not.

The practical man in a case of moral conduct asks what class an act belongs to; and then,having classified it, follows implicitly the dictates of the moral law on that class of cases. Gambling, stealing, drunkenness, slandering, loafing, he will recognize at a glance as things to be refrained from, in obedience to the laws that condemn them. He will not stop to inquire into the grounds of such condemnation in each special case. To know the ground of the law, however, helps us to classify doubtful cases; as, for instance, whether buying stocks on margins is gambling; whether the spoils system in politics is stealing; whether moderate drinking is incipient drunkenness ; whether good - natured gossip about our neighbor’s failings is scandal; whether a three months’ vacation is loafing, and the like. Once properly classified, however, the man who is wise will turn over his ordinary conduct on these points to the automatic working of habit. Habit is the great time-saving device of our moral as well as our mental and physical life. To translate the moral laws which the race has worked out for us into unconscious habits of action is the crowning step in the conquest of character. These laws are our great moral safeguards. They come to us long before we are able to form any theory of their origin or authority, and abide with us long after our speculations are forgotten. If ethical theory is compelled to question their meaning and challenge their authority, it does so in the interest of a deeper morality, which appeals from the letter of the law to the spirit of life of which all laws are the symbolic expression.

William De Witt Hyde.