But whence comes this common inheritance or stock of moral ideas? Their beginning, like all other beginnings of human things, is obscure, and is the least important part of them. Imagine, if you will, that Society originated in the herding of brutes, in their parental instincts, in their rude attempts at self-preservation:—Man is not man in that he resembles, but in that he differs from them. We must pass into another cycle of existence, before we can discover in him by any evidence accessible to us even the germs of our moral ideas. In the history of the world, which viewed from within is the history of the human mind, they have been slowly created by religion, by poetry, by law, having their foundation in the natural affections and in the necessity of some degree of truth and justice in a social state; they have been deepened and enlarged by the efforts of great thinkers who have idealized and connected them—by the lives of saints and prophets who have taught and exemplified them. The schools of ancient philosophy which seem so far from us—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and a few modern teachers, such as Kant and Bentham, have each of them supplied “moments” of thought to the world. The life of Christ has embodied a divine love, wisdom, patience, reasonableness. For his image, however imperfectly handed down to us, the modern world has received a standard more perfect in idea than the societies of ancient times, but also further removed from practice. For there is certainly a greater interval between the theory and practice of Christians than between the theory and practice of the Greeks and Romans; the ideal is more above us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a strange power to evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French Revolution, when the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have become corrupted by priestcraft, by casuistry, by licentiousness, by despotism, the lower have risen up and reasserted the natural sense of religion and right.
We may further remark that our moral ideas, as the world grows older, perhaps as we grow older ourselves, unless they have been undermined in us by false philosophy or the practice of mental analysis, or infected by the corruption of society or by some moral disorder in the individual, are constantly assuming a more natural and necessary character. The habit of the mind, the opinion of the world, familiarizes them to us; and they take more and more the form of immediate intuition. The moral sense comes last and not first in the order of their development, and is the instinct which we have inherited or acquired, not the nobler effort of reflection which created them and which keeps them alive. We do not stop to reason about common honesty. Whenever we are not blinded by self-deceit, as for example in judging the actions of others, we have no hesitation in determining what is right and wrong. The principles of morality, when not at variance with some desire or worldly interest of our own, or with the opinion of the public, are hardly perceived by us; but in the conflict of reason and passion they assert their authority and are not overcome without remorse.
Such is a brief outline of the history of our moral ideas. We have to distinguish, first of all, the manner in which they have grown up in the world from the manner in which they have been communicated to each of us. We may represent them to ourselves as flowing out of the boundless ocean of language and thought in little rills, which convey them to the heart and brain of each individual. But neither must we confound the theories or aspects of morality with the origin of our moral ideas. These are not the roots or “origines” of morals, but the latest efforts of reflection, the lights in which the whole moral world has been regarded by different thinkers and successive generations of men. If we ask: Which of these many theories is the true one? we may answer: All of them—moral sense, innate ideas, a priori, a posteriori notions, the philosophy of experience, the philosophy of intuition—all of them have added something to our conception of Ethics; no one of them is the whole truth. But to decide how far our ideas of morality are derived from one source or another; to determine what history, what philosophy has contributed to them; to distinguish the original, simple elements from the manifold and complex applications of them, would be a long enquiry too far removed from the question which we are now pursuing.
Bearing in mind the distinction which we have been seeking to establish between our earliest and our most mature ideas of morality, we may now proceed to state the theory of Utility, not exactly in the words, but in the spirit of one of its ablest and most moderate supporters:351—“That which alone makes actions either right or desirable is their utility, or tendency to promote the happiness of
