A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



CI 



lived, even if he lived a thousand years. When 

 we look at a starry sky, the spectacle whose 

 awfuluess Kant compared with that of the moral 

 sense, does it help out our poetic emotion to reflect 

 that these specks are really very very big, and 

 very very hot, and very very far away ? Their 

 heat and their bigness oppress us; we should 

 like them to be taken still farther away, the 

 great blazing lumps. But when we think of the 

 unseen planets that surround them, of the won- 

 ders of life, of reason, of love, that may dwell 

 therein, then indeed there is something sublime 

 in the sight. Fitness and kinship : these are the 

 truly great things for us, riot force and massive- 

 uess and length of days. 



Length of days, said the old rabbi, is meas- 

 ured not by their number, but by the work that 

 is done in them. We are all to be swept away 

 in the final ruin of the earth. The thought of 

 that ending is a sad thought ; there is no use in 

 trying to deny this. But it has nothing to do 

 with right and wrong ; it belongs to another 

 subject. Like All-father Odin, we must ride out 

 gayly to do battle with the wolf of doom, even 

 if there be no Balder to come back and continue 

 our work. . At any rate the right will have 

 been done ; and the past is safer than all store- 

 houses. 



The conclusion of the matter is, that belief 

 in God and in a future life is a source of refined 

 and elevated pleasure to those who can hold it. 

 But the foregoing of a refined and elevated pleas- 

 ure, because it appears that we have no right to 

 indulge in it, is not in itself, and cannot produce 

 as its consequence, a decline of morality. 



There is another theory of the facts of the 

 moral sense set forth in the succeeding discourse, 

 and this seems to me to be the true one. The 

 voice of conscience is the voice of our father 

 man who is within us ; the accumulated instinct 

 of the race is poured into each one of us, and 

 overflows us, as if the ocean were poured into a 

 cup. 1 Our evidence for this explanation is that 

 the cause assigned is a vera causa it undoubtedly 

 exists ; there is no perhaps about that. And 

 those who have tried tell us that it is sufficient ; 

 the explanation, like the fact, " covers the whole 

 voluntary field." The lightest and the gravest 

 action may be consciously done in and for man. 

 And the sympathetic aspect of Nature is ex- 

 plained to us in the same way. In so far as our 

 conception of Nature is akin to our minds that 



1 Schopenhauer. There is a most remarkable arti- 

 cle on the " Natural History of Morals " in the North 

 British Revieiv, December, 1867. 



conceive it, man made it ; and man made us, 

 with the necessity to conceive it in this way. 1 



I do not, however, suppose that morality 

 would practically gain much from the wide ac- 

 ceptance of true views about its nature, except 

 in a way which I shall presently suggest. I 

 neither admit the moral influence of theism in 

 the past, nor look forward to the moral influence 

 of humanism in the future. Virtue is a habit, 

 not a sentiment or an -ism. The doctrine of 

 total depravity seems to have been succeeded by 

 a doctrine of partial depravity, according to 

 which there is hope for human affairs, but still 

 men cannot go straight unless some tremendous, 

 all-embracing theory has a finger in the pie. 

 Theories are most important and excellent things 

 when they help us to see the matter as it really 

 is, and so to judge what is the right thing to do 

 in regard to it. They are the guides of action, 

 but not the springs of it. Now the spring of 

 virtuous action is the social instinct, which is set 

 to work by the practice of comradeship. The 

 union of men in a common effort for a common 

 object — band-work, if I may venture to translate 

 cooperation into English — this is, and always has 

 been, the true school of character. Except in 

 times of severe struggle for national existence, 

 the practice of virtue by masses of men has 

 always been coincident with municipal freedom, 

 and with the vigor of such unions as are not large 

 enough to take from each man his conscious share 

 in the work and in the direction of it. 



What really affects morality is not religious 

 belief, but a practice which, in some times and 

 places, is thought to be religious — namely, the 

 practice of submitting human life to clerical con- 

 trol. The apparently destructive tendency of 

 modern times, which arouses fear and the fore- 

 boding of evil in the minds of many of the best 

 of men, seems to me to be not mainly an intel- 

 lectual movement. It has its intellectual side, 

 but that side is the least important, and touches 

 comparatively few souls. The true core of it is 

 a firm resolve of men to know the right at first 

 hand, which has grown out of the strong impulse 

 given to the moral sense by political freedom. 

 Fuch a resolve is a necessary condition to the 

 existence of a pure and noble theism like that of 

 the third discourse, which learns what God is like 

 by thinking of man's love for man. Although 

 that doctrine has been prefigured and led up to 



1 For an admirable exposition of the doctrine of the 

 social origin of our conceptions, see Prof. Croom 

 Robertson's paper, " How we come by our Knowl- 

 edge," in the first number of this review. 



