Chapter II

The goal of ethics, on the other hand, is to discover the most organised system of ends, of goods, which a rational life can realise. This goal of ethics can never be fully achieved, for so long as man acts and reflects he may pursue and conceive novel ends. But though the most elaborate system of ethics is in origin an expression of personal preferences, it is not therefore arbitrary and unjustifiable by reason. My values have their roots in my nature. I can exhibit them, demonstrate that they are mutually consistent and do not defeat the interests which underlie them. Furthermore I can declare that if any one honestly questioned his heart he might find that my values represented it. It is not to psychology, then, that one must turn for knowledge of human goods. For psychology, although it may analyse the efficient causes of desire, cannot estimate the value of its objects, of the ideal form of a rational life. If psychologists talk of a normal organism, they mean one whose desires are adjusted to its environment, the one most likely to survive. If they speak of superior organisms and civilisation, they mean increased ability for adjustment to a more complex environment. Thus though psychologists speak of normal and civilised they are unable either to define or to evaluate them.

Knowledge of human goods is furnished by philosophers, when they are frank and speak for themselves; by the founders of religions, the saints, and the mystics; by the poets, and chiefly, as Socrates knew, by knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge, though it may first look back upon the behaviour studied by psychology, moves in the opposite direction toward the objects sought. These it endeavours to comprehend, to purge of contradictions, to regard intently _sub specie mortalitatis_. From the vantage point of death one becomes a spectator of human life. Thought acquires the prestige of impersonality, without the sacrifice of its warm interest in life. The point of view of death differs from seeing things _sub specie æternitatis_ both in essence and in purpose. It does not abolish time or elevate mind to the contemplation of a necessary order, which is the function of seeing things _sub specie æternitatis_, although consideration of death (as in the Phædo) may do this. It enables one to regard life in its totality and, without projecting it against the background of nature, to estimate each partial aim in the perspective of all others, and thus to distinguish the objects one truly desires.

The effort to detach oneself from the present and to incorporate it with the past and future in a satisfactory whole, which psychology does not attempt, is what makes action ethical. In the unique self the past exists in memory, which is one’s personal tradition. Thus memory, besides being the mother of the muses, is the mother of ethics and of rational action. It enables us to confront our present condition, its projects, hopes, and fears, with the past, and by comparison to evaluate the present action. It enables us to utilise the whole of our experience in the active organisation of our life and thus to attain a continuity of being. Consequently a succession of full moments does not, as Pater thought, constitute a full life. For each of those separate selves which a past moment represented and which the subsequent one renounced lives in memory to advance its claim to existence against the present; and only similar circumstances are needed, a chance odour, or gesture, or phrase, to revive it, and make one feel the desolation of its loss. These intermittances of the heart, as Proust calls them, are dependent on the infinite passive occasions of sensation, and since they never represented an ideal actively striven for, no analysis is able to penetrate to an underlying unity. On the other hand the consequence of dispossessing oneself of the past in order to live in the moment is a reduction of the personality to indecision and apathy. Besides, the past preserved in memory and the future that we anticipate enrich the present and give it its fulness of being, as a musical phrase has more significance in a symphony than when played in isolation.

As one interrogates the present, with its What shall I do? What shall I be? it expands to absorb the relevant testimony that relates it to the past and to the future. Ordinarily the present includes a fairly definite content, some concrete situation and prospect, often trivial, as a dinner to be ordered. Choice when it is not automatic can easily review the relevant factors; one’s favourite dishes, the season of the year; possible illness on the morrow. At other times the relevant relations are endless, particularly when an irrevocable choice forces us to discriminate among all the elements of our being: love, honour, country, and religion each claiming our allegiance. The infinite variety of situations that may arise and the impossibility of relating them to a definite past and a definite future are responsible for the differences of ethical systems. A philosopher’s conception of the typical situation will define his problems and dictate the general terms of his solution. Buddha saw sorrow and suffering as the main portion of human existence. His endeavour, therefore, was to emancipate mankind from them. Aristotle started with man’s desire for happiness. Therefore he analysed the actions of men, the pursuit of wealth, of honour, and of knowledge to see which conformed most with the essential nature of man. Amiel’s situation was intensely personal, but he stated his problem in universal terms. Amiel recognised from his youth the necessity of an organising purpose and a continuous effort. His culture and sympathies, however, extended to all human actions; to limit his life to one of the manifold beings he felt contained within himself seemed a violation of the ideal.

Now what is the context, the appropriate situation and problem, from which ethics should start? Is it some general aspect of life common to all people, like sorrow or suffering, or the generic nature of man, or the attempt to discover an organising purpose? Or is it our immediate context, the world to which our traditions, conduct, desires, and ambitions have engaged us? It is this world that confronts us daily. Our actions in it are the theme of the novel, the drama, and the epic, which are an almost inexhaustible field for ethical study. Each work is a representation of an action, and in proportion as the writer concentrates his imagination on the situation before him, on his _donnée_, and reveals its possibilities, the action will illustrate some ideal. Literature always retains the concrete immediacy of life, the movement of an action never being from a situation to a principle. But all the comprehensiveness of a principle, the innumerable unsuspected relations which it opens when once intuition has leapt the gap between a formula and the fact it covers is implied by an action at its close. The characters are still flesh and blood, but as they finally define themselves their situation includes all their relevant past and all that is significant in their future, so that they become transparent, and the whole moral world which they represent shines clearly through them. Hence it is possible that a profound ethics and a great work of art may introduce us to the same moral world, so that the orientation of our being, emotional and intellectual, after reading the _Ethics_ of Spinoza and _The Wings of the Dove_ say, will be identical.

If ethics is to be persuasive and reasonable it must be founded on the most complete experience possible. The context from which it arises, as in life and literature, should be rich and concrete. The defect of most ethical systems is that they quit life too abruptly. Instead of studying the complex conditions which underlie any achieved good, as psychology is contented to do, philosophers ignore them, except in their generality, and so attain a factitious unity. Consequently rationalistic philosophers invert the proper procedure of thought. They start from the typical, the general, and the rational, whereas these are the ultimate fruits of reflection. When an ethics, however, repudiates the purpose of rationalism as well as its method, it severs itself from all connection with the good. If it speaks of goods and ideals, it speaks of them only provisionally and instrumentally. Its excessive preoccupation with the conditions marks the return of ethics to that immersion in the present from which it initially arose.

Humanism differs from other ethical systems by its data and by its method. Its data are each individual in his context; his inherited values, his body, his capabilities, and the relations formed by them. It is the task of each individual to preserve himself in the world, and to establish a continuity of being. The essence of humanism is the refusal to allow any sudden break of development, any shift of basis that arbitrarily repudiates one’s past, such as breaking one’s word. Its method is to survey life in the light of death. By this means one’s personal situation can be enlarged by history, and by the contemplation of the ideals which men pursue. The more vivid the conception of an ideal society and a rational life within it, so long as it does not weaken one’s personal reality, the more likely is life to yield happiness.

Psychology and ethics deal with the same subject matter, human behaviour, but they regard it from opposite points of view. Psychology regards it externally as a physical phenomenon having already taken place in time. Like any other science psychology tries to correlate its diverse data and to reduce them to the simplest elements possible. But since psychology requires that the organisms which it studies should be essentially the same and that the environment to which they react should be stable and limited, it cannot deal with the behaviour dominated by mind. For mind is unique and its possible objects are infinite. Its language is that of meaning, purpose, end. The effort of a moral individual is to know what he wants, to know his mind. Hence ethics regards human behaviour internally and as directed towards the future. The goal of ethics is the satisfactory synthesis of the unique perspectives of different minds. It approximates this synthesis by studying the dialectic of desire, the logical implications of each purpose in relation to all other objects. In this way ethics will describe ideally how an individual may harmonise with himself and with society, which psychology can never do, and thus point the way to happiness.

_The Well of Discipline_

SHERLOCK BRONSON GASS

The lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the mallet is heard in the land chipping _Hic Jacet_ on the monuments which humanism has erected, with an epitaph which runs blithely thus:

“Humanism enjoyed four hundred years of prosperity in the later
world and then gave way to Modernism. From Mid-Fifteenth to
Mid-Nineteenth Century, Humanism traced the patterns of the
Occident. Then, with a dramatic flourish comparable to that of the
Renaissance, a new pattern was superimposed on the palimpsest of
the West, based on the concepts and methods of Natural Science.”

Meantime, while the historian waits for a deeper perspective, I am writing in the belief that there is more vitality in humanism than the lapidaries have given it credit for. Humanity, at all events, is perennial, and men are not likely to forget for long that science is not ineluctable nature itself, but only human knowledge, and that all knowledge, even knowledge of nature, is pursued at will for whatever it is worth to them in their own esteem--that behind the pursuit of natural science lies the authority of the evaluating mind.

The human worth of the sciences, I ardently echo, is beyond compare. They have, it is true, played a sardonic trick on their pursuers, and have seemed for the moment honestly to nullify any significant worth in human existence. But men may still recollect that it is they themselves who have made the nullifying discovery. They are worth at least what that discovery implies--an intelligence, a power to think and judge, and an impulse to act selectively on the basis of a sense of values--or why have they pursued the sciences at all? With these resources to start with, and science in their scrip, they may also have the humour to see that there remains to them, as of old, the eternal task of making the best of it--the very task to which science itself is a contribution. When this perception shall have grown lively enough, humanism will again come into its own.

Granted a will to return to humanism, however, the return itself will not be simple. Something, we shall find, has been lost in the meantime. Value and significance are not handed to us on a platter; they are themselves products of thought. If life, then, has seemed to be emptied of them by the findings of natural science, it is equally possible to suppose that this bathos is due to a diluted capacity for thought in precisely the field of thought where value and significance are conceived.

This is the possibility that I have set out to examine. The broad hint of it lies on the surface. If discipline of the mind has any virtue--and modernism itself with its austere regimen is its current champion--that virtue has been lifted from the field of thought where human values are explicitly involved, to a field of thought from which they are explicitly banned. By every calculation, therefore, the minds thus affected should have lost something of their capacity to think in the undisciplined area, and should have lost something of their powers to conceive or discover the values that, under happier auspices, give life its significance.