Chapter IV (3)

Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely intellectual representation of the universe has, as already said, been searching for a thing which does not exist. The very facts of Nature, as we call them, are at least half feeling. If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and to produce a statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense element, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out; and though our resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no value. We might as well try to take the clay out of a brick. It must never be forgotten that the logical processes--important as they are--cannot stand by themselves, have no standing ground of their own. They presuppose assumptions and are the expression of things that are unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest logic is a mere hooking together of links in a chain, and the last link is of no use--you can put no stress on it--unless the first is secured somewhere. The strength of the intellectual chain is no greater than that of the staple from which it hangs--and that is a human feeling The strength of Euclid is no greater than that of the axioms--and _they_ are feelings; they are unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, "I _feel_ like that." In fact all the propositions of Geometry are nothing but the analysis and elaborate expression, so to speak, of these primary convictions--and the Geometry-structure stands and falls with them. There is no such thing as intellectual truth--that is, I mean, a truth which can be stated as existing apart from feeling. If, for instance, a proposition in Geometry can be really shown to be based on the axioms, it is true, not intellectually or absolutely, but as an expression of my primary Geometrical sense; and if my giving a few pence to a crossing sweeper is based not on a mere impression of duty, or an anxiety to appear charitable, or wish to escape his importunity, but on genuine regard for the man, then it is true, not in any absolute signification, but just as an expression of what it professes to represent--namely my primary sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is the expression of the deepest feeling, and if there is an absolute truth it can only be known and expressed by him who has the absolute feeling or Being within himself.

This being so--and the nature of the intellectual processes being, like the links in a chain, transitional--it becomes obvious that the intellectual results may figure as a _means_ but never as an end in themselves. To hang any weight of reliance on them in the latter sense is like the Chinese Trick--described by Marco Polo--of throwing a rope's end up in the air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are formed as a means towards _practical_ applications. In that sense they are transitional; they are formed, not as substantial truths, but merely as links in a chain towards some definite practical result. For this purpose we may form whatever theories are convenient: if we are calculating the strength of bridges, we may adopt what generalisations we like concerning mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual and practical results; if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use of any theory that will do. The theory does not matter, as long as it hauls the practical result after it, just as it does not matter whether your cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as you can get your ship into dock with it. In this sense our Modern Science is, I conceive, admirable. For practical results and brief predictions it affords a quantity of useful generalisations--shorthand notes and conventional symbols and pocket summaries of phenomena--which bear about the same relation to the actual world that a map does to the country it is supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have any resemblance to the real thing--but, when you understand the principle on which it is formed, it is exceedingly useful for finding your way about. As long as Science therefore keeps the practical end in view, and starting from sense seeks to return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is perfectly legitimate; but the moment it credits its theory with a positive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of facts--and endeavours to pass by means of it into unverifiable and abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of space, or the remote past or future--it is simply throwing its rope's end into the sky and trying to climb up! That "the wish is father to the thought" is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the individual, feeling precedes thinking--as the body precedes the clothes. In history, the Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physiological parallel; for behind the brain and determining its action stands the great sympathetic nerve--the organ of the emotions. In fact here the brain appears as distinctly transitional. It stands between the nerves of sense on the one hand and the great sympathetic on the other.

Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole method of thinking will be revolutionised; change the axiom or primary sensation in a science, and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed; but let a new axiomatic emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play instead of unlimited grab), and the base of the science will be altered, and will necessitate a new construction.

So when people argue (on politics, morality, art, etc.) it will generally be found that they differ at the _base_; they go out, perhaps quite unconsciously, from different axioms and hence they _cannot_ agree. Occasionally of course a strict examination will show that, while agreeing at the base, one of them has made a false step in deduction; in that case his thought does _not_ represent his primary feeling, and when this is pointed out he is forced to alter it. But more often it is found that the difference lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of reason; and they disagree to the end. In this case neither is right and neither is wrong. They simply feel differently; they are different persons.

The Thought then is the expression, the outgrowth, the covering of underlying Feeling. And in the great life of Man as a whole, as in the lesser life of the individual, his continual new birth and inward growth causes his thought-systems also continually to change and be replaced by new ones. Like the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing plant or tree they give form for a time to the life within; then they fall off and are replaced. The husk prepares the bud underneath, which is to throw it off. The thought prepares and protects the feeling underneath, which growing will inevitably reject it; and when a thought has been formed it is already _false_, _i.e._, ready to fall.

We are now, then, in a position to come back to the question of a genuine Science, truly so-called.

As there is no invariable and absolute datum on the fringe of Humanity--no definable flying atom on which we can found our reasonings--and as Modern Science, considered as an actual representation of the universe, falls miserably to pieces in consequence--is it possible that we have made a mistake in the _direction_ in which we have sought for our datum; and may it be that we should look for that in the very Centre of Humanity instead of in its remotest circumference? In that direction evidently, if we could penetrate, we should expect to find, not a shadowy intellectual generalisation, but the very opposite of that--an intense immutable _feeling_ or state, an axiomatic condition of Being. Is it possible that here, blazing like a sun (if we could only see it--and the sun is its allegory in the physical world), there exists within us absolutely such a thing--the one _fact_ in the universe, of which all else are shadows, _to_ which everything has relation, and round which, itself unanalysable, all thought circles and all phenomena stand as indirect modes of expression?

Is it possible? That is the question--the question which each one of us has to solve. At any rate, let us throw this out as a suggestion. Let us suggest that as we have got nothing satisfactory by cleaning the sense-element out of phenomena, we should take the opposite course and put as much sense into them as we can!

"Facts" are, at least, half feelings. Let us acknowledge this and not empty the feeling out of them, but deepen and enlarge that which we already have in them. Who knows whether we have ever _seen_ the blue sky? Who knows whether we have ever seen each other? Is it not a commonplace to say that one man sees in the common objects of Nature what another is wholly unconscious of? "The primrose on the river's brim a yellow primrose is to him--and nothing more." To what extent may the facts of Nature thus be deepened and made more substantial to us--and whither will this process lead us?

Do we not want to feel _more_, not less, in the presence of phenomena--to enter into a living relation with the blue sky, and the incense-laden air, and the plants and the animals--nay, even with poisonous and hurtful things to have a keener _sense_ of their hurtfulness? Is it not a strange kind of science, that which wakes the mind to pursue the shadows of things, but dulls the senses to the reality of them--which causes a man to try to bottle the pure atmosphere of heaven and then to shut himself in a gas-reeking, ill-ventilated laboratory while he analyses it; or allows him to vivisect a dog, unconscious that he is blaspheming the pure and holy relation between man and the animals in doing so? Surely the man of Science (in its higher sense, that is) should be lynx-eyed as an Indian, keen-scented as a hound--with all senses and feelings trained by constant use and a pure and healthy life in close contact with Nature, and with a heart beating in sympathy with every creature. Such a man would have at command, so to speak, the keyboard of the universe; but the mechanical, unhealthy, indoor-living student--is he not really _ignorant of the facts_?--Certainly, since he has not felt them, he is.

The process of the true Science consists first in the naming and defining of phenomena (_i.e._, the facts of human consciousness), and secondly, in the discovery of the true relation of these phenomena to each other; and since the definitions of phenomena and their relations keep varying with the standpoint of the observer, the process evidently involves all experience, and ultimately the discovery of that last fact of experience to which and through which all the other facts are related. It is therefore an age-long process, and has to do with the emotional and moral part of man as well as with the logical and intellectual. It is, in fact, the discovery of the nature of Man himself, and of the true order of his being.

Modern Science--though seeking for a unity in Nature--fails to find it, because, from the nature of the case, any large body of knowledge in which all people will agree is limited to certain small regions of human experience--regions in which very likely no unity is discoverable. It takes the emerald, and breaks it up; treats of its colour and light-refracting qualities on the one hand; of its crystalline structure and hardness on the other; of its weight and density; and of its chemical properties; all separately, and producing long strings of generalisation from each aspect of the subject. But how all these qualities are conjoined together, what their relation is which _constitutes_ the emerald--yea, even the smallest bit of emerald dust--it (wisely) does not attempt to say. It takes the man and dissects him; treats of his blood, his nerves, his bones, his brain; of his senses of sight, of touch, of hearing; but of that which binds these together into a unity, of their true relation to each other in the man, it is silent.

Yet the man knows of himself that he _is_ a unity; he knows that all parts of his body have relation to _him_, and to each other; he knows that his senses of sight and hearing and touch and taste and smell are conjoined in the focus of his individual life, in his "I am;" he knows that all his faculties and powers, however much they may belong to different planes, spiritual or material, or may come under the inquisition of different Sciences, have an order of their own among each other--that there _is_ an ultimate Science of them--even though he be not yet wholly versed in it. And he knows, moreover, that in a grain of dust, or in an emerald, or in an orange, or in any object of Nature, the different attributes of the object--which the Sciences thus treat of separately--are only the reflexion of his different senses; so that the problem of the conjunction of different attributes in a body comes back to the same problem of the union of various senses and powers in himself--each individual object being only a case, externalised as it were, and made a matter of consciousness, of the general relation to each other of his own sensations and feelings. Knowing all his--I say--he sees that the understanding of Nature in general and of the laws or relations which he thinks he perceives among external things must always depend on the relations and laws which he tacitly assumes, or which he is directly conscious of, as existing between the various parts of his own being; and that the ultimate truth which Science--the divine Science--is really in search of is a moral or psychologic Truth--an understanding of what man is, and the discovery of the true relation to each other of all his faculties--involving all experience, and an exercise of every faculty physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual, instead of one set of faculties only.

Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, shall we know the law of the emerald and the orange, or of Nature generally; and the law of ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately, by intellectual investigation; it is mainly learnt by life. The relation of gravity to vitality is learnt not so much by outer experiment in a laboratory as by long experience within ourselves from the day when as infants we cannot lift ourselves above the floor, through the years of the proud strength of manhood scaling the loftiest mountains, to the hour when our disengaged spirits finally overcome and pass beyond the attraction of the earth; and just as the sense of weight--which first appears as a quite external sensation--is thus at last found to stand in most pregnant relation with our deepest selves, so of the other senses which feed the individual life--the senses of light, of warmth, of taste, of sound, of smell. Taste, which begins as it were on the tip of the tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed, a sense which identifies itself with the health and well-being of the whole body; the pleasure of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface pleasure, and its discrimination of food more than a mere regard for the nutrition of the ordinary corporeal functions. The sense of Light, which begins in the material eye, grows and deepens inwardly till the consciousness of it pervades the whole body and mind with a kind of inward illumination or divine Reason, showing the places of all things and enfolding the sense of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in the same manner is related to and leads up to Love; and Sound, in the voices of our friends or the divine chords of music, has passed away from being an external phenomenon and has established itself as the language of our most tender and intimate emotions.

All the senses thus, as they develop and deepen, are found to unite in the very focus of individual life. Slowly, and through long experience, their relation to each other, _their very meaning_ unfolds, or will unfold; and as this process takes place the man knows himself _one_, a unity, of which the various faculties are the different manifestations. Then further through his less localised feelings or more glorified senses the individual finds his relation to other individuals. Through his loves and hatreds, through his senses of attraction, repulsion, cohesion, solidarity, order, justice, charity, right, wrong and the rest--these feelings, each like the others deepening back more and more as time goes on--he gradually discovers his true and abiding relationship to other individuals, and to the divine society of which they all form a part--and so at last, if we may venture to say so, his relationship to the absolute and universal. At present, since our most important relation to each other is conceived of as one of rivalry and Competition, we of course think of the objects of Nature as being chiefly engaged in a Struggle for Existence with each other; but when we become aware of all our senses and feelings, and of ourselves as individuals, as having relation to the Absolute and universal, proceeding from it, as the branches and twigs of a tree from the trunk--then we shall become aware of a Divine or absolute science in Nature; we shall at last understand that all objects have a permanent and indissoluble relation to each other, and shall see their true meaning--though not till then.

Is it possible then that Science, having hitherto--and we shall see in time that this process has been really most valuable and important--gone outwards from the centre towards the very fringe of Humanity--emptying facts as far as possible as it went of all feeling, and reducing itself at last to the most shadowy generalisations on the very verge of sense and nonsense--is it possible, I say, that it will now return, and _first_ filling up facts with feeling as far as practicable (that is, by direct and the most living contact with Nature in every form, learning to enter into direct personal sense-relationship with every phenomenon and phase), will so gradually ascend to the great central fact and feeling, and then at last and for the first time become fully conscious of a vast organisation--absolutely perfect and intimately knit from its centre to its utmost circumference--(the true cosmos of Man--the conceptions of man and god combined)--existing inchoate or embryonic in every individual man, animal, plant, or other creature--the object of all life, experience, suffering, and toil--the ground of all sensation, and the hidden, yet proper, theme of all thought and study?

For this is it possible that Science will, speaking broadly, have to leave the laboratory and become one with Life; or that the great currents of human life will have to be turned on into these often Augean stables of intellectual pruriency?--the investigation of Nature no longer a matter of the intellect alone, but of patient listening and the quiet eye, and of love and faith, and of all deep human experience, bearing not superciliously its weight towards the interpretation of the least phenomenon--every "fact" thus deepened to its utmost--all experience (rather than experiment) courted, and filial walking with Nature, rather than tearing of veils aside--the life of the open air, and on the land and the waters, the companionship of the animals and the trees and the stars, the knowledge of their habits at first hand and through individual relationship to them, the recognition of their voices and languages, and listening well what they themselves have to say; the keenest education of the senses towards the physical powers and elements, and the acceptance of _all_ human experience, without exception--till Science become a reality.

Is it possible that in some sense, instead of reducing each branch of Science to its lowest terms, we shall have to read it in the light of its _highest_ factors, and "take it up" into the Science above--that we shall have to take up the mechanical sciences into the physical, the physical into the vital, the vital into the social and ethical, and so forth, before we can understand them? Is it possible that the phenomena of Chemistry only find their due place and importance in their relation to living beings and processes; that the phenomena of vitality and the laws of Biology and Zoology--Evolution included--can only be "explained" by their dependence on self-hood--both in plants and animals; that Political Economy and the Social Sciences (which deal with men as individual selves) must, to be understood aright, be studied in the light of those great ethical principles and enthusiasms, which to a certain extent override the individual self; and that, finally, Ethics or the study of moral problems is only comprehensible when the student has become aware of a region beyond Ethics, into which questions of morality and immorality, of right and wrong, do not and cannot enter?

Of this reversal of the ordinary scientific method Ruskin has given a great and signal instance in his treatment of Political Economy; it remains, perhaps, for others to follow his example in the other branches of Science.[31]

With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen that Science has two alternatives before it--either to be merely intellectual and to seek for its start-point in some quite external (and imaginary) thing like the Atom, or to be divine and to seek for its absolute in the innermost recesses of humanity. We have two similar alternatives in the doctrine of Evolution, which looks either to one end of the scale or the other for its interpretation--either to the amoeba or to the man--to something it knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows most of. Goethe, when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived the idea of leaf-metamorphosis, which he afterwards enunciated in the now accepted doctrine that all parts of a plant--seed-vessel, pistil, stamens, petals, sepals, stalk, etc.--may be regarded as modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this view the distinctions between the parts are effaced, and we have only one part instead of many--but the question is "what is that part?" It is of course arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is continually varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. What then is it? For the moment we are baffled.

So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole organic kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it obliterates distinctions. Geoffroy St. Hilaire proposed to show the French Academy that a Cephalopod could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by supposing the latter bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet. There is a continuous variation from the mollusc to the man--all the lines of distinction run and waver--classes and species cease to exist--and Science, instead of many, sees only _one_ thing. What then is that one thing? Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or what is it? Are we to say that man may be looked upon as a variation of a mollusc or an amoeba, or that the amoeba may be looked on as a variation of man? Here are two directions of thought; which shall we choose? But the plain truth is, the Intellect can give no satisfactory answer. Whichever, or whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite arbitrary--just as much so as the choice of the "leaf" in the other case. There is no answer to be given. And thus it is that _the appearance of the doctrine of Evolution is the signal of the destruction of Science_ (in the ordinary acceptation of the word). For Evolution is the successive obliteration of the arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by their existence _constitute_ Science, and as soon as Evolution covers the whole ground of Nature inorganic and organic (as before long it will do)--the whole of Nature runs and wavers before the eye of Science, the latter recognises that its distinctions _are_ arbitrary, and turns upon and destroys itself. This has happened before, I believe--ages back in the history of the human race--and probably will happen again.

The only conceivable answer to the question, "What is that which is now a mollusc and now a man and now an inorganic atom?"[32] is given by man himself--and his answer is, I fear, not "scientific." It is "I Am." "I am that which varies." And the force of his answer depends on what he means by the word "I." And so also the only conceivable answer to the absolute datum question is to be found in the meaning of the word "I"--in the deepening back of consciousness itself. Man is the measure of all things. If we are to use Science as a minister to the most external part of man--to provide him with cheap boots and shoes, etc.--then we do right to seek our absolute datum in his external part, and to take his _foot_ as our first measure. We found a science on feet and pounds, and it serves its purpose well enough. But if we want to find a garment for his inner being--or, rather, one that shall fit the _whole_ man--to wear which will be a delight to him and, as it were, a very interpretation of himself--it seems obvious that we must not take our measure from outside, but from his very most central principle. The whole question is, whether there _is_ any absolute datum in this direction or not. There have been men through all ages of history (and from before) who have declared that there is. They have perhaps been conscious of it in themselves. On the other hand there have been men who, starting from their feet, declared that consciousness itself was a mere incident of the human machine--as the whistle of the engine--and thus the matter stands. On the whole, at the present day, the _feet_ have it, and (notwithstanding their variety in size and boot-induced conformation) are generally accepted as the best absolute datum available.

Under the foot _régime_ the universe is generally conceived of as a medley of objects and forces, more or less orderly and distinct from man, in the midst of which man is placed--the purpose and tendency of his life being "adaptation to his environment." To understand this we may imagine Mrs. Brown in the middle of Oxford Street. 'Buses and cabs are running in different directions, carts and drays are rattling on all sides of her. This is her environment, and she has to adapt herself to it. She has to learn the laws of the vehicles and their movements, to stand on this side or on that, to run here and stop there, conceivably to jump into one at a favourable moment, to make use of the law of its movement, and so get carried to her destination as comfortably as may be. A long course of this sort of thing "adapts" Mrs. Brown considerably, and she becomes more active, both in mind and body, than before. That is all very well. But Mrs. Brown has a _destination_. (Indeed how would she ever have got into the middle of Oxford Street at all, if she had not had one? and if she did get there with no destination at all, but merely to skip about, would there be any Mrs. Brown left in a short time?) The question is, "What is the destination of Man?"

About this last question unfortunately we hear little. The theory is (I hope I am not doing it injustice) that by studying your environment sufficiently you will find out--that is, that by investigating Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Ethics, etc., you will discover the destiny of man. But this seems to me the same as saying that by studying the laws of cabs and 'buses sufficiently you will find out where you are going to. These are ways and means. Study them by all means, that is right enough; but do not think _they_ will tell you where to go. You have to use them, not they you.

In order therefore for the environment to act, there must be a destination. This I suppose is expressed in the biological dictum, "organism is made by function as well as environment." What then is the function of Man? And here we come back again to the meaning of the word "I."

Nothwithstanding then the prevalence of the foot régime, and that the heathen so furiously rage together in their belief in it, let us suggest that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot-consciousness. For, as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of colour, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third--as to the "god-intoxicated" Arab of the desert--a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus; so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the makings of a universal consciousness? That there are in us phases of consciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily senses, is a matter of daily experience; that we perceive and know things which are not conveyed to us by our bodily eyes or heard by our bodily ears, is certain; that there rise in us waves of consciousness from those around us, from the people, the race, to which we belong, is also certain; may there not then be in us the makings of a perception and knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is here and now, but which shall be good for all time and everywhere? Does there not exist, in truth, as we have already hinted--an inner Illumination--of which what we call light in the outer world is the partial expression and manifestation--by which we can ultimately see things, _as they are_, beholding all creation, the animals, the angels, the plants, the figures of our friends and all the ranks and races of human kind, in their true being and order--not by any local act of perception but by a cosmical intuition and presence, identifying ourselves with what we see? Does there not exist a perfected sense of Hearing--as of the morning-stars singing together--an understanding of the words that are spoken all through the universe, the hidden meaning of all things, the word which is creation itself--a profound and far pervading sense, of which our ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and initiation? Do we not become aware of an inner sense of Health and of Holiness--the translation and final outcome of the external sense of taste--which has power to determine for us absolutely and without any ado, without argument and without denial, what is good and appropriate to be done or suffered in every case that can arise?

And so on; it is not necessary to say more. If there are such powers in man, then there is indeed an exact science possible. Short of it there is only a temporary and phantom science. "Whatever is known to us by (direct) consciousness," says Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, "is known to us beyond possibility of question;" what is known by our local and temporary consciousness is known _for the moment_ beyond possibility of question; what is known by our permanent and universal consciousness is permanently known beyond possibility of question.[33]

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education of the eye, and the mind's eye, to the perception of geometrical forms and facts, the judgment of angles, etc.--and secondarily only a process of deductive reasoning--a body of empirical knowledge strengthened and tied together by bands of logic; the study of Natural History would be primarily an affectionate intimacy with the habits of animals and plants, and classification would be treated as a secondary matter and as a help to the former; Physiology would be studied in the first place by the method of Health--the pure body--becoming gradually transparent with all its organs to the eye of the mind--and dissection would be used to corroborate and correct the results thus attained; and so on.

[32] Compare the Sphinx-riddle: What is that which goes on four legs, etc.

[33] See for continuation of this subject the chapter on "A Rational and Humane Science," p. 219 _infra_.

DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS:

A CRITICISM OF MORALITY

The State is the actually existing realised moral life. For it is the unity of the universal essential Will with that of the individual, and this is "Morality."--HEGEL.

A criminal is literally a person accused--accused, and in the modern sense of the word convicted, of being harmful to Society. But is he there in the dock, the patch-coated brawler or burglar, really harmful to Society? is he more harmful than the mild old gentleman in the wig who pronounces sentence upon him? That is the question. Certainly he has infringed the law: and the law is in a sense the consolidated public opinion of Society: but if no one were to break the law, public opinion would ossify, and Society would die. As a matter of fact Society keeps changing its opinion. How then are we to know when it is right and when it is wrong? The Outcast of one age is the Hero of another. In execration they nailed Roger Bacon's manuscripts out in the sun and rain, to rot crucified upon planks--his bones lie in an unknown and unhonoured grave--yet to-day he is regarded as a pioneer of human thought. The hated Christian holding his ill-famed love-feasts in the darkness of the catacombs has climbed up to the throne of S. Peter and the world. The Jew moneylender whom Front-de-Boeuf could torture with impunity is become a Rothschild--guest of princes and instigator of commercial wars; and Shylock is now a highly respectable Railway Bondholder. And the Accepted of one age is the Criminal of the next. All the glories of Alexander do not condone in our eyes for his cruelty in crucifying the brave defenders of Tyre by thousands along the sea-shore; and if Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines were to appear in London to-morrow, even our most frivolous circles would be shocked, and Brigham Young by contrast seem a domestic model. The judge pronounces sentence on the prisoner now, but Society in its turn and in the lapse of years pronounces sentence on the judge. It holds in its hand a new canon, a new code of morals, and consigns its former representative and the law which he administered to a limbo of contempt.

It seems as if Society, as it progresses from point to point, forms ideals--just as the individual does. At any moment each person, consciously or unconsciously, has an ideal in his mind toward which he is working (hence the importance of literature). Similarly Society has an ideal in its mind. These ideals are tangents or vanishing points of the direction in which Society is moving at the time. It does not reach its ideal, but it goes in that direction--then, after a time, the direction of its movement changes, and it has a new ideal.

When the ideal of Society is material gain or possession, as it is largely to-day, the object of its special condemnation is the thief--not the rich thief, for he is already in possession and therefore respectable, but the poor thief. There is nothing to show that the poor thief is really more immoral or unsocial than the respectable money-grubber; but it is very clear that the money-grubber has been floating with the great current of Society, while the poor man has been swimming against it, and so has been worsted. Or when, as to-day, Society rests on private property in land, its counter-ideal is the poacher. If you go in the company of the county squire-archy and listen to the after-dinner talk you will soon think the poacher a combination of all human and diabolic vices; yet I have known a good many poachers, and either have been very lucky in my specimens or singularly prejudiced in their favour, for I have generally found them very good fellows--but with just this one blemish that they invariably regard a landlord as an emissary of the evil one! The poacher is as much in the right, probably, as the landlord, but he is not right for the time. He is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time--when for hunting purposes all land was held in common--or to a time in the future when such or similar rights shall be restored. Cæsar says of the Suevi that they tilled the ground in common and had no private lands, and there is abundant evidence that all early human communities, before they entered on the stage of modern civilisation, were communistic in character. Some of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in the same condition. In those times private property was theft. Obviously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and--like the modern landlord--would allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax--was a criminal of the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have become the respectables of modern Society. And it is quite probable that in like manner the criminals of to-day will push to the front and become the respectables of a later age.

The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian and mediæval ages is now regarded as foolish, if not wicked; and poverty, which in many times and places has been held in honour as the only garb of honesty, is condemned as criminal and indecent. Nomadism--if accompanied by poverty--is criminal in modern Society. To-day the gipsy and the tramp are hunted down. To have no settled habitation, or worse still, no place to lay your head, are suspicious matters. We close even our outhouses and barns against the son of man, and so to us the son of man comes not. And yet--at one time and in one stage of human progress--the nomadic state is the rule; and the settler is then the criminal. His crops are fired and his cattle driven off. What right has he to lay a limit to the hunting grounds, or to spoil the wild free life of the plains with his dirty agriculture?

As to the marriage relation and its attendant moralities, the forms are numerous and notorious enough. Public opinion seems to have varied through all phases and ideals, and yet there is no indication of finality. Modern investigations show that in primitive human societies the affinities admitted or barred in marriage are most various--the relation of brother and sister being even in cases allowed; in the present day such a bond as the last-mentioned would be considered inhuman and monstrous.[34] Polyandry prevails among one people or at one time, polygyny prevails among another people or at another time. In Central Africa to-day the chief offers you his wife as a mark of hospitality, in India the native Prince keeps her hidden even from his most intimate guest. Among the Japanese, public opinion holds young women--even of good birth--singularly free in their intercourse with men, _till they are married_; at Paris they are free after. In the Greek and Roman antiquity marriage seems, with some brilliant exceptions, to have been a prosaic affair--mostly a matter of convenience and housekeeping--the woman an underling--little of the ideal attaching to the relationship of man and wife. The romance of love went elsewhere. The better class of free women or Hetairai were those who gave a spiritual charm to the passion. They were an educated and recognised body, and possibly in their best times exercised a healthy and discriminating influence upon the male youth. The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates and the advice which he gives her concerning her lovers: to keep the insolent from her door, and to rejoice greatly when the accepted succeed in anything honourable, indicates this. That their influence was at times immense the mere name of Aspasia is sufficient to show; and if Plato in the Symposium reports correctly the word of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human and divine love was probably of the noblest and profoundest that has ever been given to the world.

With the influx of the North-men over Europe came a new ideal of the sexual relation, and the wife mounted more into equality with her husband than before. The romance of love, however, still went mainly outside marriage, and may, I believe, be traced in two chief forms--that of Chivalry, as an ideal devotion to simple Womanhood; and that of Minstrelsy, which took quite a different hue, individual and sentimental--the lover and his mistress (she in most cases the wife of another), the serenade, secret amour, etc.--both of which forms of Chivalry and Minstrelsy contain in themselves something new and not quite familiar to antiquity.

Finally in modern times the monogamic union has risen to pre-eminence--the splendid ideal of an equal and life-long attachment between man and wife, fruitful of children in this life, and hopeful of continuance beyond--and has become the great theme of romantic literature, and the climax of a thousand novels and poems. Yet it is just here and to-day, when this ideal after centuries of struggle has established itself, and among the nations that are in the van of civilisation--that we find the doctrine of perfect liberty in the marriage relationship being most successfully preached, and that the communalisation of social life in the future seems likely to weaken the family bond and to relax the obligation of the marriage tie.

If the Greek age, splendid as it was in itself and in its fruits of human progress, did not hold marriage very high, it was partly because the ideal passion of that period, and one which more than all else inspired it, was that of comradeship, or male friendship carried over into the region of love. The two figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton stand at the entrance of Greek history as the type of this passion, bearing its fruit (as Plato throughout maintains is its nature) in united self-devotion to the country's good. The heroic Theban legion, the "sacred band," into which no man might enter without his lover--and which was said to have remained unvanquished till it was annihilated at the battle of Chæronæa--proves to us how publicly this passion and its place in society were recognised; while its universality and the depth to which it had stirred the Greek mind are indicated by the fact that whole treatises on love, in its spiritual aspect, exist, in which no other form of the sentiment seems to be contemplated; and by the magnificent panorama of Greek statuary, which was obviously to a large extent inspired by it. In fact the most remarkable Society known to history, and its greatest men, cannot be properly considered or understood apart from this passion; yet the modern world scarcely recognises it, or if it recognises, does so chiefly to condemn it.[35]

Other instances might be quoted to show how differently moral questions are regarded in one age and another--as in the cases of Usury, Magic, Suicide, Infanticide, etc. On the whole we pride ourselves (and justly I believe) on the general advance in humanity; yet we know that to-day the merest savages can only shudder at a civilisation whose public opinion allows--as among us--the rich to wallow in their wealth, while the poor are systematically starving; and it is certain that the vivisection of animals--which on the whole is approved by our educated classes (though not by the healthier sentiment of the uneducated)--would have been stigmatised as one of the most abominable crimes by the ancient Egyptians[36]--if, that is, they could have conceived such a practice possible at all.

But not only do the moral judgments of mankind thus vary from age to age and from race to race, but--what is equally remarkable--they vary to an extraordinary degree from class to class of the same society. If the landlord class regards the poacher as a criminal, the poacher, as already hinted, looks upon the landlord as a selfish ruffian who has the police on his side; if the respectable shareholder, politely and respectably subsisting on dividends, dismisses navvies and the frequenters of public-houses as disorderly persons, the navvy in return despises the shareholder as a sneaking thief. And it is not easy to see, after all, which is in the right. It is useless to dismiss these discrepancies by supposing that one class in the nation possesses a monopoly of morality and that the other classes simply rail at the virtue they cannot attain to, for this is obviously not the case. It is almost a commonplace, and certainly a fact that cannot be contested, that every class--however sinful or outcast in the eyes of others--contains within its ranks a large proportion of generous, noble, self-sacrificing characters; so that the public opinion of one such class, however different from that of others, cannot at least be invalidated on the above ground. There are plenty of clergymen at this moment who are models of pastors--true shepherds of the people--though a large and increasing section of society persist in regarding priests as a kind of wolves in sheep's clothing. It is not uncommon to meet with professional thieves who are generous and open-handed to the last degree, and ready to part with their last penny to help a comrade in distress; with women living outside the bounds of conventional morality who are strongly religious in sentiment, and who regard atheists as _really_ wicked people; with aristocrats who have as stern material in them as quarry-men; and even with bondholders and drawing-room loungers who are as capable of bravery and self-sacrifice as many a pitman or ironworker. Yet all these classes mentioned have their codes of morality, differing in greater or lesser degree from each other; and again the question forces itself upon us: Which of them all is the true and abiding code?

It may be said, with regard to this variation of codes within the same society, that, though various codes may exist at the same time, one only is really valid, namely, that which has embodied itself in the law--that the others have been rejected because they were unworthy. But, when we come to look into this matter of law, we see that the plea can hardly be maintained. Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but always added to and always administered by the ruling class. To-day the code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability--and if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because it _is_ the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future--of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age--and its distinctive watchword is property.

The respectability of to-day is the respectability of property. There is nothing so respectable as being well-off. The Law confirms this: everything is on the side of the rich; justice is too expensive a thing for the poor man. Offences against the person hardly count for so much as those against property. You may beat your wife within an inch of her life and only get three months; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be "sent" for years. So again, gambling by thousands on Change is respectable enough, but pitch and toss for half-pence in the streets is low, and must be dealt with by the police; while it is a mere commonplace to say that the high-class swindler is "received" in society from which a more honest but patch-coated brother would infallibly be rejected. As Walt Whitman has it, "There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dressed and handsome. But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."

Thus we see that though there are, for instance in the England of to-day, a variety of classes and a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion and morality, one of these codes, namely that of the ruling class whose watchword is property, is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly suppose that in any nation from the time when it first becomes divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case. In one age--the commercial age--the code of the commercial or money-loving class is dominant; in another--the military--the code of the warrior class is dominant; in another--the religious--the code of the priestly class; and so on. And even before any question of division into classes arises, while races are yet in a rudimentary and tribal state, the utmost diversity of custom and public opinion marks the one from the other.

What, then, are we to conclude from all these variations (and the far greater number which I have not mentioned) of the respect or stigma attaching to the _same_ actions, not only among different societies in different ages or parts of the world, but even at any one time among different classes of the same society? Must we conclude that there is no such thing as a permanent moral code valid for all time; or must we still suppose that there is such a thing--though society has hitherto sought for it in vain?