Practical Essays, Alexander Bain [reading e books .txt] 📗

not reciprocated. Justice, in these circumstances, is highly noble, praiseworthy, virtuous; but the applying of these lofty compliments is the proof that it does not bring happiness, and is an attempt to compensate the deficiency. There is a certain tendency, not very great as human nature is constituted, for justice to beget justice in return--for social virtue on one side to procure it on the other side. This is a certain encouragement to each man to perform his own part, in hope that the other party concerned may do the same. Still, the reciprocity occasionally fails, and with that the benefits to the just agent. It is necessary to urge strongly upon individuals, to impress upon the young, the necessity of performing their duty to society; it is equally implied, and equally indispensable, that society should perform its part to them. The suppressing of the correlative obligation of the State to the individual leaves a one-sided doctrine; the motive of the suppression, doubtless, is that society does not often fail of its duties to the individual, whereas individuals frequently fail of their duties to society. This may be the fact generally, but not always. It is not the fact where there are bad laws and corrupt administration. It is not the fact where the restraints on liberty are greater than the exigencies of the State demand. It is not the fact, so long as there is a single vestige of persecution for opinions. To be thoroughly veracious, for example, in a society that restrains the discussion and expression of opinions, is more than such a society is entitled to.

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[PLEASURES OF BENEVOLENCE CONDITIONAL.]

The same fallacy occurs in an allied theme,--the joys of Love and Benevolence. That love and benevolence are productive of great happiness is beyond question; but then the feeling must be mutual, it must be reciprocated. One-sided love or benevolence is a _virtue_, which is as much as to say it is _not_ a pleasure. The delights of benevolence are the delights of reciprocated benevolence; until reciprocated, in some form, the benevolent man has, strictly speaking, the sacrifice and nothing more. There is a great reluctance to encounter this simple naked truth; to state it in theory, at least, for it is fully admitted in practice. We fence it off by the assumption that benevolence will always have its reward somehow; that if the objects of it are ungrateful, others will make good the defect at last. Now these qualifications are very pertinent, very suitable to be urged after allowing the plain truth, that benevolence is intrinsically a sacrifice, a painful act; and that this act is redeemed, and far more than redeemed, by a fair reciprocity of benevolence. Only such an admission can keep us out of a mesh of contradictions. Like justice in itself, Benevolence in itself is painful; any virtue is pain in the first instance, although, when equally responded to, it brings a surplus of pleasure. There may be acts of a beneficent tendency that cost the performer nothing, or that even may chance to be agreeable; but these examples must not be given as the rule, or the type. It is the essence of virtuous acts, the prevailing character of the class, to tax the agent, to deprive him of some satisfaction to himself; this is what we must start from; we are then in a position to explain how and when, and under what circumstances, and with what limitations, the virtuous man, whether his virtue be justice or benevolence, is from that cause a happy man.

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It is a fallacy of the suppressed relative to describe virtue as determined by the _moral nature_ of God, as opposed to his arbitrary will. The essence of Morality is obedience to a superior, to a Law; where there is no superior there is nothing either moral or immoral. The supreme power is incapable of an immoral act. Parliament may do what is injurious, it cannot do what is illegal. So the Deity may be beneficent or maleficent, he cannot be moral or immoral.

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Among the various ways, proposed in the seventeenth century, of solving the difficulty of the mutual action of the heterogeneous agencies--matter and mind--one was a mode of Divine interference, called the "Theory of Occasional Causes". According to this view, the Deity exerted himself by a _perpetual miracle_ to bring about the mental changes corresponding to the physical agents operating on our senses--light, sound, &c. Now in the mode of action suggested there is nothing self-contradictory; but in the use of the word "miracle" there is a mistake of relativity. The meaning of a miracle is an exceptional interference; it supposes an habitual state of things, from which it is a deviation. The very idea of miracle is abolished if every act is to be alike miraculous.

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[MYSTERY CORRELATES WITH THE INTELLIGIBLE.]

We shall devote the remainder of this exposition to a still more notable class of mistakes due to the suppression of a correlative member in a relative couple--those, namely, connected with the designation, "Mystery," a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by disregarding its relative character. Mystery supposes certain things that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible, unknowable, unrevealed. When a man's conduct is entirely plain, straightforward, or accounted for, we call that an intelligible case; when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing person, we say it is all very mysterious. So, in nature, we consider that we understand certain phenomena: such as gravity, and all its consequences, in the fall of bodies, the flow of rivers, the motions of the planets, the tides. On the other hand, earthquakes and volcanoes are very mysterious; we do not know what they depend upon, how or in what circumstances they are produced. Some of the operations of living bodies are understood,--as the heart's action in the mechanical propulsion of the blood; others, and the greater number, are mysterious, as the whole process of germination and growth. Now the existence of the contrast between things plainly understood, and things not understood, gives one distinct meaning to the term Mystery. In some cases, a mystery is formed by an apparent contradiction, as in the Theological mystery of Free-will and Divine Foreknowledge; here, too, there is a contrast with the great mass of consistent and reconcilable things. But now, when we are told by sensational writers, that _everything is mysterious;_ that the simplest phenomenon in nature--the fall of a stone, the swing of a pendulum, the continuance of a ball shot in the air--are wonderful, marvellous, miraculous, our understanding is confounded; there being then nothing plain at all, there is nothing mysterious. The wonderful rises from the common; as the lofty is lofty by relation to something lower: if there is nothing common, then there is nothing wonderful; if all phenomena are mysterious, nothing is mysterious; if we are to stand aghast in amazement because three times four is twelve, what phenomenon can we take as the type of the plain and the intelligible? You must always keep up a standard of the common, the easy, the comprehensible, if you are to regard other things as wonderful, difficult, inexplicable.

[LOCKE ON THE LIMITS OF THE UNDERSTANDING.]

The real character of a MYSTERY, and what constitutes the Explanation of a fact, have been greatly misconceived. The changes of view on these points make up a chapter in the history of the education of the human mind. Perhaps the most decisive turning point was the publication of Locke's "Essay concerning Human Understanding," the motive of which, as stated in the homely and forcible language of the preface, was to ascertain what our understandings can do, what subjects they are fit to deal with, and where they should stop. I quote a few sentences:--

"If by this inquiry into the nature of the Understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us: I suppose it may be of use, to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are proved to be beyond the reach of our capacities." "The candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with this ought to satisfy us. And we shall then use our Understandings aright, when we entertain all objects in that way and proportion that they are suited to our faculties, and upon those grounds they are capable of being proposed to us." "It is of great use for the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot fathom with it all the depths of the ocean."

The course of physical science was preparing the same salutary lesson. Locke's great contemporary and friend, Isaac Newton, was his fellow-worker in this tutorial undertaking; nor should Bacon be forgotten, although there is dispute as to the extent and character of his influence. The combined operation of these great leaders of thought was apparent in the altered views of scientific inquirers as to what is competent in research--what is the proper aim of inquiry. There arose a disposition to abandon the pursuit of mysterious essences and grand pervading unities, and ascertain with precision the facts and the laws of natural phenomena. The study of astronomy was inaugurated in Greenwich Observatory. The experiments of Priestley and of Franklin farther exemplified the eighteenth-century key to the secrets of the universe.

The lesson imparted by Newton and Locke and their successors still remains to be carried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The bearing upon what constitutes a Mystery, and what constitutes Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:--

In the first place, the Understanding can never pass out of its own experience--its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love, anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours, with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our knowledge.

It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or constructive aptitudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many various compounds. We can imagine a paradise or a pandemonium; but only as made up of our own knowledge of things good and