MATERIALISM AND MORALITY. 489 



the exercise of virtue and benevolence." "A deep and intelligent 

 sympathy with the race " is to supply the place of the old sanctions. 

 I pity the race. There is no conceivable motive why we should trouble 

 ourselves about the welfare of others if they are mere automatic organ- 

 isms. The " agreeable consciousness that results from the healthy ex- 

 ercise of the energies of our nature " is grotesquely inadequate to sup- 

 port the old rule of right action, " Fais ce que dois, advienne que 

 pourra." Physical science is utterly unable to supply any reason why 

 we should " prefer a noble life before a long." If ever M. Renan, 

 who is of the house and lineage of Balaam, the son of Beor, said a 

 true word, it is this, " L'interet personnel n'inspire que la lachete." It 

 is an insult to my understanding to tell me that selfishness, however 

 sublimated, will yield the same fruits as self-sacrifice ; that from natu- 

 ral history, from physiology, from chemistry, you can derive the ele- 

 ments of moral force. Justice, duty, love, are the idlest of words, if 

 no echo come back to them from beyond the grave. " Virtue will 

 never cease to be admirable so long as man is man," a Teutonic mate- 

 rialist urges. I entirely agree. But if you empty the human mammal 

 of the ideas of God, right, responsibility, immortality, he ceases to 

 be man. " 'A had him from me Christian, and, look, if the fat villain 

 have not transformed him ape ! " And then assuredly virtue will cease 

 to be admirable to him. Not indeed that I am now pleading for 

 Christianity. Still less am I pleading for any special form of it. There 

 is little in Christian morality that is exclusively Christian ; and I am 

 not prepared to assert that many of the most precious of the ethical 

 elements of our civilization might not survive a general decay of spe- 

 cifically Christian dogmas. My present contention is more general. 

 It is this : that morality can have root only in the spiritual nature of 

 man. If from that happy soil, watered by the river of life and re- 

 freshed by the dews of heaven, you transplant it to the rocks and 

 sands of materialism, wither and die it must. " Independent morali- 

 ty." Yes. I quite allow that, in a sense, morality is independent. It 

 is independent of all systems, religious and metaphysical ; of all facts, 

 psychologic.il or historical. It is, as Kant has so well shown — that is 

 to me the great achievement of his philosophy — it is a formal law, 

 transcending all persons and all conditions, and sovereign over all : a 

 law of ideal relation, universally obligatory upon all wills. It is as 

 absolute as are the laws of mathematics, and concerning it even God 

 is not free ; for it has its source in his nature, and "he can not deny 

 himself." In this sense it is independent ; but it is not independent 

 of*personality. How can we predicate ethicalness or unethicalness of 

 a thing ? I maintain, then, that whether morality be regarded subject- 

 ively or objectively, materialism is fatal to it. Only a person is capable 

 of a moral act ; and materialism destroys personality. No action can be 

 obligatory, in the strict sense, unless it is binding upon us without re- 

 gard to its consequences and without reference to any personal end. 



