Page images
PDF
EPUB

ADVICE TO The girl of THE PERIOD. | Seeking for peace in toil, which only brought You will have to know Latin and Logic and

Greek, You will have to be able correctly to speak Of Atoms and Molecules, Acids and Bases, Of the Earth in Aphelion, of the Moon and its Phases,

Of the three laws of Newton, of gases expanding,

Of how to preserve equilibrium when standing,

Of what is the green coloring matter in plants, Of the structure of elephants, beetles, and ants;

You should also be able to fluently chatter On the prevalent opinions of Mind and of Matter.

Never mind learning " to play" or "to sing," To be able to please is no longer the thing; Don't trouble your head about baking and cooking, Red faces and fingers ar'n't student-like looking;

In all household duties, whate'er there's to do, Let your brothers see to it, they've more time than you;

At table, gulp down your food, don't try to talk, Don't waste precious time by taking a walk, Don't heed the broad hints about spoiling your looks,

Let health, beauty, pleasure go, stick to your books;

Be sure a fixed hatred of mankind you show, "Superior women don't marry," you know.

[blocks in formation]

Dull discontent and weariness of brain. "Where art thou, Peace?" I cried: "Oh, soothe this pain

Of tearful longing and of throbbing thought!" A sweet voice answered. Laughter glad and

clear

Set the birds singing. Beautiful bright eyes Made a new dawn. A sweet voice an

swered: "Cease

From further fruitless searching. I am here In flower of flesh and blood, of perfect size, Quite loving your Irene! I am

PEACE!"

II.

Peace, with her chatter and infectious glee; Peace, swinging madcap on a springy bough,

With bright hair blown and tumbled anyhow;

Peace, paddling in a shoal of summer sea;
Peace, at high revel up an apple-tree;
Peace, reading with a bent and dreamy

brow;

Peace, on a footstool - very peaceful now Listening with hands clasped fondly on my knee!

No abstract noun, no mythic shape divine, No sweet elusive dream of who knows what, But just a child, she brings my heart sur

cease

Of care; and, when she puts her cheek to mine, Bliss, and complete contentment with my lot.

Yes, this is my Irene - this is PEACE. Academy. WILLIAM CANTON.

SOMEWHERE.

I GIVE this hour to sorrow: nay, refrain, Bethink thee skies e'en now are somewhere bright

For others, the green leaves are dancing light,

And lovers meet where blossom in the lane Flowers, the sky-children of the sun and rain. And somewhere torrents in their youthful

might,

Scorning the smooth path, leap the dizzy height,

And mountain summits glisten pure of stain. Somewhere for poet-brows Fame twines her

wreath;

Somewhere to noble purpose souls are won By holy living or heroic death;

Brave hearts endure, nor quail at Fortune's frown;

And somewhere there is rest for all who

breathe,

Somewhere a land where sorrow is un

known.

Spectator.

H. T. R.

From The Fortnightly Review.

RIGHT AND WRONG.

I SUPPOSE the words right and wrong enter more largely into human life than any other. They are among the first words that are uttered by children at their play: "You have no right to do this!" "That is wrong!" They are most profusely used, or abused, in the commonest affairs of daily existence by the most ignorant and uncultivated, and generally which is noteworthy - with an appeal to the universal validity of the conceptions they represent, as though, in the secure

judgment of the universe, the gainsayer

must be in bad faith. Every one talks of right as if it were the easiest thing in the world to pronounce upon. And yet in practice it is the hardest. Consider how

jurisconsult, Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. Wrong has been referred, not to the exterior act but to the interior mental state, Mens rea facit reum. The world on the whole has not doubted that what is just exists by nature, that universal obligation is a prime note of right, that a violation of right entails, according to the laws of the universe, retributive suffering upon the wrong-doer. I do not, of course, mean that the vast majority of men have ever held these views as philosophers. They made their way into the popular mind through the religious traditions which are the only philosophies available for the multitude. The morality of the old civilization of Egypt, of India, of Judea, was bound up with their religions. The same may be said of the ancient phase of Hellenic and, more strongly still, of Roman civilization. It is the special glory of Buddhism that it established the supremacy of the moral law over gods and men and the whole of sentient existence. To Christianity the human race owes the

terrible are the problems which may be raised regarding even the simplest and least-questioned rights. Parental right, for example, springing as it does from the most sacred of human relations, how easy to deride and decry it, if we regard merely the blind, irrational impulse to which each individual, the accident of an accident, supreme enforcement of the autonomy of owes his procreation! Again, think how conscience as the voice of Him whom it large a part of human activity is consumed is better to obey than man. But now the in the endeavor, mostly fruitless, to settle old ethical conceptions are everywhere

questions of right. The whole machinery

of justice, with its legislatures, its courts of various instance, its judges, advocates, and attorneys, attends continually upon this very thing. And yet the glorious uncertainty of the law has become a byword. Fleets and armies are still the last resource of civilization for determining the rights of nations. Now, as in the time of Brennus, the sword is the ultimate make. weight in the scale of justice. It may be said that the history of right throughout the ages is one long martyrdom. It is ever being crucified afresh and put to an open shame. But, speaking generally, we may assert that the idea of right has hitherto been venerated by mankind at large as absolute, supersensuous, divine. The rights, whether of nations or of the individuals of whom they are composed, have been held to rest upon ethical obligation, and that upon noumenal truth. Justice

has been accounted a matter of the will, according to the dictum of the Roman

"No

falling into discredit. The very princi. ples on which the ideas of right and wrong have hitherto rested are very widely questioned, nay, more than questioned. one," observes a recent thoughtful writer, "can deny either the reality or the intensity of the actual crisis of morality. Nor is the crisis confined to certain questions of casuistry. On the contrary, it extends to the most general rules of conduct, and through those rules to the very principles of ethics themselves." * "By-and-by," a popular professor in the Paris School of Medicine recently prophesied to his admiring pupils, "by-and-by, when the rest of the world has risen to the intellectual level of France, and true views of the nature of existence are held by the bulk of mankind, now under clerical direction, the present crude and vulgar notions re

garding morality, religion, divine providence, Deity, the soul, and so forth, will be swept entirely away, and the dicta of

* Beaussire, Les Principes de la Morale, p. 26.

science will remain the sole guides of sane - conscience and concupiscence; * the and educated men. Churchmen and laws of universal reason, or what Pro

...

moral philosophers represent the old and dying world, and we, the men of science, represent the new."* And similarly, Mr. Herbert Spencer assures us that "the establishment of the rules of right conduct upon a scientific basis is a pressing need." †

Now let us inquire what is the substitute for "the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality" proposed to the world by "men of science," as physicists modestly call themselves, in disdainful ignorance of all sciences except their own. The inquiry is of much pith and moment for this among other reasons, that the public order reposes upon the idea of right. Social relations can be explained

fessor Huxley calls "the laws of comfort." The "men of science" are agreed in anathematizing the transcendental. Their method is purely physical. They conceive of man merely as "ein geniessendes Thier," an animal whose motive principle is what they call "happiness;" who, in Bentham's phrase, "has been placed by nature under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." Such are the foundations of the new independent morality. Let us now follow it out in some of its details.

And first let us learn of one concerning whom a well-informed writer recently testified that "in this country and America he is the philosopher," and whose works,

and justified only by moral relations. Of if less implicitly received as oracles in

France and Germany, have done much to shape and color current speculation in those countries. I need hardly say that I speak of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The doctrine unfolded at such great length by this patient and perspicuous thinker appears to me to amount to this, in the last resort : that all the actions of society are determined by the actions of the individual; that all the actions of the individual are regulated by the laws of life; and that all the laws of life are purely physical. Turn we to another eminent teacher, hardly less influential. Consider the following account of human nature which Professor

course there is diversity of operation in the attempts at ethical reconstruction. But in all worketh one and the self-same spirit. They all aim at presenting the world with "an independent morality," by which they mean a morality deduced merely from physical law, grounded solely on what they call "experience," and on analysis of and deduction from experience; holding only of the positive sciences and rejecting all pure reason, all philosophy in the true sense of the word. They all in sist that there is no essential difference between the moral and the physical order; that the world of ideas is but a development of the world of phenomena. They Huxley sets before us in his "Lay Serall agree in the negation of primary and mons," enforcing it by an epigram of of final causes, of the soul and of free- Goethe: "All the multifarious and comwill. Instead of finality, they tell us, ne- plicated activities of men all, remem

cessity reigns; mechanical perhaps, or it may be dynamical, but issuing practically in the elimination of moral liberty as a useless spring in the machinery of matter. I venture to say that in the long run there are only two schools of ethics - the hedonistic and the transcendental. There are only two sides from which we can approach a question of right and wrong the physical and the spiritual. There are only two possible foundations of morality

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors]

ber, without exception - "are comprehended under three categories. Either they are directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative

* I use the word in its proper philosophical sense: "a certain power and motion of the mind, whereby men are driven to desire pleasant things that they do not possess." Listen in this connection to Professor Huxley's dogmatic utterance: "I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the idea which alone can still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the law of comfort, has been driven to discover the laws of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality" (Lay Sermons, p. 11). "A new morality" based ultimately on "the law of comfort"! Glad tidings of great joy, indeed, to a benighted nineteenth century.

positions of the body, or they tend towards knowledged facts. It cannot depend upon the continuance of the species. Even a subjective consciousness unable to manthose manifestations of intellect, of feel- ifest itself intellectually. Professor Huxing, of wit, which we rightly name the ley, like Mr. Spencer, really treats ethics higher faculties, are not excluded from as a branch of physics. And this is in

this classification, inasmuch as, to every truth the doctrine - whether explicitly one but the subject of them, they are avowed or not - of the whole Positivist known only as transitory changes in the and experimental school. Further, right, relative position of parts of the body. they will have it, is not absolute but relaSpeech, gesture, and every other form of tive, a matter of calculation and reasoning; human action are, in the long run, resolv- it is nothing but the accord of the indiable into muscular contraction." * I do vidual instinct with the social instinct; not overlook the words " to every one but the momentary harmony of the need manithe subject of them." And most certainly fested in me, and of the exigences of the I have no desire to force upon Mr. Hux- species to which I belong. In like manley's language a meaning which it does ner wrong is the absence of such accord, not logically convey. But surely he will the want of such harmony; "a natural agree with me that knowledge which is phenomenon like any other, but a pheconfined to one's inner consciousness, and nomenon that at a given moment is found can never become the property of another, to be in opposition to the eventual good cannot have much effect upon society at of the race." And this agrees with Benlarge. It may be dismissed by any phi- tham's doctrine that what we call a crime losopher aiming at the practical, which is really a miscalculation, an error in arithassuredly is Professor Huxley's aim. A metic. The old conception of conscience man, dwelling in the depths of his own as the formal principle of ethics, the inconsciousness, he tells us, may think, if ternal witness of the Supreme Judge, "a he pleases, in terms of spirit. But the prophet in its informations, a monarch in moment that man attempts to influence its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessanother, he must put away everything that ings and anathemas," is put aside as outis not muscular contraction. "Weiter worn rhetoric. The moral sense, we are bringt es kein Mensch," says the incom- assured, is not primitive, not innate, but a parable genius who, in three lines, reduces mere empirical fact transformed and eshuman life to an affair of feeding oneself, tablished by heredity; a "phenomenon" begetting children, and doing one's best (so they call it) variable and varying with to feed them. I know it may be answered, the exigences of the race. General utility, "Well, but the professor leaves us the the good of the species is, then, the only unknown and unknowable subject, beyond scientific and experimental criterion of the limits of consciousness as of physical human action, the sole rule of right and science." What of that? Pray what has wrong; and morality consists in the apmorality to do with the unknown and un- prehension of that principle, and in conknowable? "Nihil volitum quin præcog- formity with it. And so Mr. John Morley, nitum" is indeed a mediæval axiom, and in his book on "Compromise," dogmatiso, as I fear mindful of a former con- cally affirms, "Moral principles, when they troversy in this review - may be "sus- are true, are only registered generalizapect" to Professor Huxley. But although tions from experience." Human society, mediæval, it is unquestionably true. On in the view of this sage, is not an organism morality, the unknown and unknowable but a machine - just as the individual can have only a nominal influence. The real influence is left to the teaching which sees in the exercise of our highest faculties only "muscular contraction." Public morality must be founded on publicly ac

men of whom it is composed are machines; * a kind of company, as some one has happily expressed it, which insures against risks by applying the principles of

• Page 122.

* "The good man is a machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficial results." Morley's Diderot, vol. ii., p. 178.

« PreviousContinue »