ART. III.-1. On Right and Wrong. By W. S. Lilly. Second Edition. London, 1890. 2. Types of Ethical Theory. By James Martineau, D.D., LL.D. 2 vols. Oxford; at the Clarendon Press, 1885. 3. The Methods of Ethics. Edition, London, 1884. By Henry Sidgwick. Third 4. The Science of Ethics. By Leslie Stephen. London, 1882. 5. The Data of Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. London, 1880. 6 N the long story of the making of England, no word has exercised a mightier influence than Duty, with all that it implies. The infinite nature of Duty' has been to this imperial and self-centred race a religion, a code of laws, and the heart of that intense yet not wholly inhuman pride which has stamped Englishmen all the world over, as it did the Romans, to whom in so many ways they bear a resemblance. The Nelsons, Wellingtons, and Gordons of this nineteenth century nail the signal to their masts, thunder it over the battlefield, make it their staff of pilgrimage and rod of empire in the African wastes. The Howards, Wilberforces, Shaftesburys, bear it in their bosoms as a gospel of life; and neither faint nor weary until they have accomplished the task it has laid upon them. The Faradays and Herschells are drawn by its magnetism to scientific discoveries of highest moment, undegraded by ambition. The poets hymn its sacred name with Wordsworth and Tennyson; the prophets, as little resembling one another in style or temperament as John Henry Newman resembled Thomas Carlyle, are yet agreed that Duty is the supreme utterance of the voice of conscience; that its dictates are those of the aboriginal Vicar of Christ'; and that following it we have a clue to the labyrinth in which man is entangled. But the analytic philosopher is not satisfied, and he asks, In what, after all, does the nature of Duty consist?' 6 There never was a more astounding transformation scene than follows upon this simple-seeming question. We have learned, chiefly from Carlyle, that it is the nature of English genius to be inarticulate.' It can, apparently, do anything, from writing Shakspeare's tragedies to founding empires under the Southern Cross, on condition of not being required to explain what it does in terms of philosophy. It is dominated by influences and powers which it seems to be incapable of understanding, and the very existence of which it obstinately denies. The Low Dutch temperament, as we know it in these islands, is enthusiastic, eccentric, full of unquenchable fire, adventurous Vol. 172.-No. 343. F in in the extreme, sensitive (as its landscape-painting proves) to every aspect of Nature, to sea and sky, to storm and tempest. The history of English enterprise is a daring romance, chokefull of improbabilities and individual traits of character, in virtue of which every league of salt water has owned the British flag, and one-seventh of the habitable globe has come under its sway. Yet, when we ask the most eminent thinkers of the same race,—for such, it would appear, we are to account the late Mr. Stuart Mill, and the present Mr. Herbert Spencer, -to furnish a philosophy which shall be not unequal to these transcendent facts, the result is so jejune and feeble, so intellectually commonplace, that we could wish the native metaphysician were not merely inarticulate, but had lost the gift of speech altogether. For enthusiasm he offers us mechanism; for indomitable will, motive-grinding'; for the high heroic career, which scorns emolument, a calculating or already calculated pursuit of agreeable sensation'; and by some process of diabolic chemistry he boils down Duty into a mess of pottage called 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number,' for which no Esau coming from the field, though he were but a tired farmer's man, would exchange the meanest of his Godgiven inheritances. Over against that Puritanism which, severe and forbidding in its lineaments, has yet been a power of moral goodness in the nations it has ruled, stands, like a figure of grave irony, the 'Sensism' or 'Utilitarianism,'-it has a thousand expressive names,-in whose blank denial of the Divine and the supernatural Milton would have descried the last of the Antichrists, and Carlyle did perceive the 'everlasting No,' whose main business, stretching over a couple of centuries, it would be to clear out by fire the jungle of ̧ superstition,' and then itself fall to soot and ashes. And this, we make bold to affirm, is the truth of the matter. There is no criticism so conclusive as to let a system, whether of metaphysics or any other, explain itself at length, describe its own problem, and state in terms chosen by its author the solution he has to propose; after which, we have only to ask whether between the beginning and the end, the data and the quæsita, there is a true equation. If life was given at the outset, we shall reasonably expect it in the outcome; if the Infinite or the Absolute, what man will satisfy us when his alembic yields only the Finite as the reward of his patient distillations? The dissecting table may be the final stage in materialist surgery; but our demand that life should be, so far as possible, explained, is by no means met when life has been abolished. 'L'homme,' remarks Bayle, est le morceau le plus difficile à digérer qui se se présente à tous les systèmes.'* It may be easier to digest him when the wonder and the mystery of his nature have been left out; only it is in virtue of them, and not of the ashes at the bottom of our crucible, that he is man. To leave them out is to analyse him, and human society by consequence, into jarring atoms with chaos for their dwelling-place. And England, which was built up to its present greatness by men who believed in Duty as a revelation, the highest that could be given, from out of the heart of Eternity, will be pulled down into the dust if, as various signs portend, a religion of agreeable sensations (for as many as can compass them) be recognized and acted upon by the governing majority. Worse, far worse, it is than a curious symptom of this time,' that'the pursuit of sensuous good, of personal pleasure in one shape or other, should be the universally admitted formula of man's whole duty.'† It means, according to the boast of Mr. Leslie Stephen, that the theory of an independent or autonomous conscience' is 'part of an obsolete form of speculation.' So convinced is Mr. Spencer that we are witnessing 'the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit,' that he throws aside his other work, important as he deems it, in order with the greatest possible despatch to fill up the vacuum' which has opened in front of society.§ In the Paris School of Medicine it has been lately prophesied that 'when the rest of the world has risen to the intellectual level of France, the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality, religion, divine providence, and so forth,'-there is much virtue in an etcetera, and here, as it happens, not a little suggestion of vice,' will be swept entirely away, and the dicta of science will remain the sole guides of sane and educated men.'|| What the dicta of science' thus construed will warrant the new generation in believing and practising, we shall endeavour to find out in the sequel. But we may affirm generally that they are things of which an apostle has told us that it is a shame to speak. The assailants and defenders of the established morality agree as to the likelihood of a widespread revolution in the maxims of conduct, and consequently in conduct itself, should the 'scientific' — or, in plainer terms, the materialist-basis of ethics be substituted for the religious and transcendental.' We propose to examine what the new system is, and on what grounds it is put forward. And then, if it appears not to satisfy the problem which it Sterling, 'Secret of Hegel,' ii. p. 612. + Carlyle, Miscellanies,' iii. p. 90. 'Science of Ethics, p. 314. § Data of Ethics,' pp. iii. iv. Vide Lilly, p. 38. undertakes to solve, we will briefly indicate the doctrine for which, after burning up the jungle of superstition,' it will have to make room. Such an enquiry need not deal chiefly in abstractions. It should keep in touch with the realities of life, nor lose sight of the world around us, in which all theories of morals must prove at last the worth that is in them. Their test is to be sought neither in Utopia with dreaming idealists, nor in Laputa among the inventors who turn out poems, as Mr. Jevons' logical piano does syllogisms, by machinery. This cardinal truth, that experience is the touchstone of ethics, we are happy to observe, has been kept in view throughout the learned and suggestive volume on Right and Wrong,' the title of which we have placed first at the head of this article. Its author, Mr. W. S. Lilly, whose treatise on A Century of Revolution,' published last year, was by far the most thoughtful contribution to the study of politics which the centenary of 1789 called forth, has in these pages drawn up what we may perhaps describe as an abstract and brief chronicle of the moral characteristics of the time. It is a powerful statement of principles; and if caustic and trenchant in the estimate of the prevailing ethical creed, as exhibited in all the provinces of life, from journalism to marriage and the Royal Academy, the question remains, not whether its censure is severe, but whether it is not well founded. Mr. Lilly has nothing but philosophical scorn for the morality of the swinetrough, even when the trough is gilded and decorated, and the manners of those that crowd about it are, in other respects, distinguished. His contention, that all forms of Utilitarianism must be resolved into a setting of the senses above the spiritual nature of man, and are, in fact, Materialism more or less skilfully disguised, appears to have given great offence in the quarters to which it was directed. But the true offence is not in the charge, however formulated; it is in the fact, long ago pointed out by Schiller, that a boundless duration of Being and Well-being, simply for Being and Well-being's sake, is an ideal which belongs to appetite alone, and to which only the struggle of mere animalism, longing to be infinite, gives rise.' * On one point Mr. Spencer is perfectly right. When the 'regulative system,' which took for its standard the infinite nature of Duty,' has been discarded as 'no longer fit,' a vacuum instantly appears which clamours to be filled up with something Schiller, Briefe über die æsthetische Erziehung des Menschen,' 24; ' Werke,' xii. p. 84. real. real. The infinite has been disowned; and what remains but to strive, as manfully as we may, to choke the abyss with the finite? But the finite, in practice, becomes by a fatal necessity the visible that which can be weighed and measured; nay (as Bayle suggests cannot be done with the real man), which can, by artfully devised formulas, be cooked and digested. And so we must cram with matter what the spirit has left empty and hungry. Fine words butter no parsnips,' the old English proverb tells us. Apparently they will serve to trick out specious, unsatisfying systems, such as Particular Hedonism with its maximum of beautiful moments and pleasant sensations,' which is the doctrine of Aristippus; or Rational Utilitarianism aiming at the Greatest Happiness, &c., otherwise called Altruism by those who consider that pleasure intended for others is morally good, because it is not intended for oneself. But Mr. Spencer will convince them that, unless the pleasure comes home again, it has no moral justification, agreeing after all with Bentham when he roundly declares that 'to obtain the greatest portion of happiness for himself is the object of every rational being,' and that it is, in fact, very idle to talk about duties,' we should talk about interests.* There can be no mistake as to the genuine meaning of such assertions; nor will any one who has impartially studied the Utilitarians, from Bentham to the last edition of The Data of Ethics,' complain that they are caricatured in Mr. Lilly's strong but just asseveration that they found the rules of conduct upon concupiscence, taking the word in its proper technical sense; or again, upon the laws of comfort,' as Professor Huxley has intimated; or, finally, with Mr. Spencer, on the agreeable consciousness that results from the healthy exercise of the energies of our nature,'-the said energies being reducible, in the opinion of that philosopher, to a redistribution of matter and motion,' as we learn from Section 29 of his 'Data.' Perhaps there is no better justification of Mr. Lilly's argument than the terse sentence, in which Mr. John Morley defines the good man' as a machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results.' Mr. Morley is not here using a figure of speech. When he says machine, he means it, for what is nature itself,' he enquires elsewhere, 'but a vast machine, in which our human species is no more than one weak spring?'t The identity of mechanics and morals is the very forefront of all these systems.‡ Before entering, however, upon the criticism of theories which * See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory,' ii. p. 285. we |