Essays · Herbert Spencer
MORALS AND MORAL SENTIMENTS.
This transfigured form of restraint, differing at first but little from the original form, admits of immense development. Accumulating traditions, growing in grandeur as they are repeated from generation to generation, make more and more superhuman the early-recorded hero of the race. His powers of inflicting punishment and giving happiness become ever greater, more multitudinous, and more varied; so that the dread of divine displeasure, and the desire to obtain divine approbation, acquire a certain largeness and generality. Still the conceptions remain anthropomorphic. The revengeful deity continues to be thought of in terms of human emotions, and continues to be represented as displaying these emotions in human ways. Moreover, the sentiments of right and duty, so far as they have become developed, refer mainly to divine commands and interdicts; and have little reference to the natures of the acts commanded or interdicted. In the intended offering-up of Isaac, in the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, and in the hewing to pieces of Agag, as much as in the countless atrocities committed from religious motives by various early historic races, as by some existing savage races, we see that the morality and immorality of actions, as we understand them, are at first little recognized; and that the feelings, chiefly of dread, which serve in place of them, are feelings felt towards the unseen beings supposed to issue the commands and interdicts.
Here it will be said that, as just admitted, these are not the moral sentiments properly so called. They are simply sentiments that precede and make possible those highest sentiments which do not refer either to personal benefits or evils to be expected from men, or to more remote rewards and punishments. Several comments are, however, called forth by this criticism. One is, that if we glance back at past beliefs and their correlative feelings, as shown in Dante's poem, in the mystery-plays of the middle ages, in St. Bartholomew massacres, in burnings for heresy, we get proof that in comparatively modern times right and wrong meant little else than subordination or insubordination--to a divine ruler primarily, and under him to a human ruler. Another is, that down to our own day this conception largely prevails, and is even embodied in elaborate ethical works--instance the _Essays on the Principles of Morality_, by Jonathan Dymond, which recognizes no ground of moral obligation save the will of God as expressed in the current creed. And yet a further is, that while in sermons the torments of the damned and the joys of the blessed are set forth as the dominant deterrents and incentives, and while we have prepared for us printed instructions "how to make the best of both worlds," it cannot be denied that the feelings which impel and restrain men are still largely composed of elements like those operative on the savage: the dread, partly vague, partly specific, associated with the idea of reprobation, human and divine, and the sense of satisfaction, partly vague, partly specific, associated with the idea of approbation, human and divine.
But during the growth of that civilization which has been made possible by these ego-altruistic sentiments, there have been slowly evolving the altruistic sentiments. Development of these has gone on only as fast as society has advanced to a state in which the activities are mainly peaceful. The root of all the altruistic sentiments is sympathy; and sympathy could become dominant only when the mode of life, instead of being one that habitually inflicted direct pain, became one which conferred direct and indirect benefits: the pains inflicted being mainly incidental and indirect. Adam Smith made a large step towards this truth when he recognized sympathy as giving rise to these superior controlling emotions. His _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, however, requires to be supplemented in two ways. The natural process by which sympathy becomes developed into a more and more important element of human nature has to be explained; and there has also to be explained the process by which sympathy produces the highest and most complex of the altruistic sentiments--that of justice. Respecting the first process, I can here do no more than say that sympathy may be proved, both inductively and deductively, to be the concomitant of gregariousness: the two having all along-increased by reciprocal aid.
Multiplication has ever tended to force into an association, more or less close, all creatures having kinds of food and supplies of food that permit association; and established psychological laws warrant the inference that some sympathy will inevitably result from habitual manifestations of feelings in presence of one another, and that the gregariousness being augmented by the increase of sympathy, further facilitates the development of sympathy. But there are negative and positive checks upon this development--negative, because sympathy cannot advance faster than intelligence advances, since it presupposes the power of interpreting the natural language of the various feelings, and of mentally representing those feelings; positive, because the immediate needs of self-preservation are often at variance with its promptings, as, for example, during the predatory stages of human progress. For explanations of the second process, I must refer to the _Principles of Psychology_ (§ 202, first edition, and § 215, second edition) and to _Social Statics_, part ii. chapter v.[36] Asking that in default of space these explanations may be taken for granted, let me here point out in what sense even sympathy, and the sentiments that result from it, are due to experiences of utility.
If we suppose all thought of rewards or punishments, immediate or remote, to be left out of consideration, it is clear that any one who hesitates to inflict a pain because of the vivid representation of that pain which rises in his consciousness, is restrained, not by any sense of obligation or by any formulated doctrine of utility, but by the painful association established in him. And it is clear that if, after repeated experiences of the moral discomfort he has felt from witnessing the unhappiness indirectly caused by some of his acts, he is led to check himself when again tempted to those acts, the restraint is of like nature. Conversely with the pleasure-giving acts: repetitions of kind deeds, and experiences of the sympathetic gratifications that follow, tend continually to make stronger the association between such deeds and feelings of happiness.
Eventually these experiences may be consciously generalized, and there may result a deliberate pursuit of sympathetic gratifications. There may also come to be distinctly recognized the truths that the remoter results, kind and unkind conduct, are respectively beneficial and detrimental--that due regard for others is conducive to ultimate personal welfare, and disregard of others to ultimate personal disaster; and then there may become current such summations of experience as "honesty is the best policy." But so far from regarding these intellectual recognitions of utility as preceding and causing the moral sentiment, I regard the moral sentiment as preceding such recognitions of utility, and making them possible. The pleasures and pains directly resulting in experience from sympathetic and unsympathetic actions, had first to be slowly associated with such actions, and the resulting incentives and deterrents frequently obeyed, before there could arise the perceptions that sympathetic and unsympathetic actions are remotely beneficial or detrimental to the actor; and they had to be obeyed still longer and more generally before there could arise the perceptions that they are socially beneficial or detrimental. When, however, the remote effects, personal and social, have gained general recognition, are expressed in current maxims, and lead to injunctions having the religious sanction, the sentiments that prompt sympathetic actions and check unsympathetic ones are immensely strengthened by their alliances.
Approbation and reprobation, divine and human, come to be associated in thought with the sympathetic and unsympathetic actions respectively. The commands of the creed, the legal penalties, and the code of social conduct, unitedly enforce them; and every child as it grows up, daily has impressed on it by the words and faces and voices of those around the authority of these highest principles of conduct. And now we may see why there arises a belief in the special sacredness of these highest principles, and a sense of the supreme authority of the altruistic sentiments answering to them. Many of the actions which, in early social states, received the religious sanction and gained public approbation, had the drawback that such sympathies as existed were outraged, and there was hence an imperfect satisfaction. Whereas these altruistic actions, while similarly having the religious sanction and gaining public approbation, bring a sympathetic consciousness of pleasure given or of pain prevented; and, beyond this, bring a sympathetic consciousness of human welfare at large, as being furthered by making altruistic actions habitual. Both this special and this general sympathetic consciousness become stronger and wider in proportion as the power of mental representation increases, and the imagination of consequences, immediate and remote, grows more vivid and comprehensive. Until at length these altruistic sentiments begin to call in question the authority of those ego-altruistic sentiments which once ruled unchallenged. They prompt resistance to laws that do not fulfil the conception of justice, encourage men to brave the frowns of their fellows by pursuing a course at variance with customs that are perceived to be socially injurious, and even cause dissent from the current religion; either to the extent of disbelief in those alleged divine attributes and acts not approved by this supreme moral arbiter, or to the extent of entire rejection of a creed which ascribes such attributes and acts.
Much that is required to make this hypothesis complete must stand over until, at the close of the second volume of the _Principles of Psychology_, I have space for a full exposition. What I have said will make it sufficiently clear that two fundamental errors have been made in the interpretation put upon it. Both Utility and Experience have been construed in senses much too narrow. Utility, convenient a word as it is from its comprehensiveness, has very inconvenient and misleading implications. It vividly suggests uses, and means, and proximate ends, but very faintly suggests the pleasures, positive or negative, which are the ultimate ends, and which, in the ethical meaning of the word, are alone considered; and, further, it implies conscious recognition of means and ends--implies the deliberate taking of some course to gain a perceived benefit. Experience, too, in its ordinary acceptation, connotes definite perceptions of causes and consequences, as standing in observed relations, and is not taken to include the connexions formed in consciousness between states that recur together, when the relation between them, causal or other, is not perceived. It is in their widest senses, however, that I habitually use these words, as will be manifest to every one who reads the _Principles of Psychology;_ and it is in their widest senses that I have used them in the letter to Mr. Mill. I think I have shown above that, when they are so understood, the hypothesis briefly set forth in that letter is by no means so indefensible as is supposed. At any rate, I have shown--what seemed for the present needful to show--that Mr. Hutton's versions of my views must not be accepted as correct.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.