Is Life Worth Living?. W. H. Mallock
will help us but a very short way towards it. By the practice of 'band-work' alone we shall never learn to construct a 'true Civitas Dei.' Band-work with the same perfection may be practised for opposite ends. Send an army in a just war or an unjust one, in either case it will need the same discipline. There must be order amongst thieves, as well as amongst honest men. There can be an orderly brothel as well as an orderly nunnery, and all order rests on co-operation. We presume co-operation. We require an end for which to co-operate.
I have already compared the science of sociology to that of medicine; and the comparison will again be a very instructive one. The aim of both sciences is to produce health; and the relation of health to happiness is in both cases the same. It is an important condition of the full enjoyment of anything: but it will by no means of itself give or guide us to the best thing. A man may be in excellent health, and yet, if he be prudent, be leading a degrading life. So, too, may a society. The Cities of the Plain may, for all we know to the contrary, have been in excellent social health; indeed, there is every reason to believe they were. They were, apparently, to a high degree strong and prosperous; and the sort of happiness that their citizens set most store by was only too generally attainable. There were not ten men to be found in them by whom the highest good had not been realised.
There are, however, two suppositions, on which the general good, or the health of the social organism, can be given a more definite meaning, and made in some sense an adequate test of conduct. And one or other of these suppositions is apparently always lurking in the positivist mind. But though, when unexpressed, and only barely assented to, they may seem to be true, their entire falsehood will appear the moment they are distinctly stated.
One of these suppositions is, that for human happiness health is alone requisite—health in the social organism including sufficient wealth and freedom; and that man's life, whenever it is not interfered with, will be moral, dignified, and delightful naturally, no matter how he lives it. But this supposition, from a moralist, is of course nonsense. For, were it true, as we have just seen, Sodom might have been as moral as the tents of Abraham; and in a perfect state there would be a fitting place for both. The social organism indeed, in its highest state of perfection, would manifest the richest variety in the development of such various parts. It might consist of a number of motley communes10 of monogamists and of free-lovers, of ascetics and sybarites, of saints and παιδερασται—each of them being stones in this true Civitas Dei, this holy city of God. Of course it may be contended that this state of things would be desirable; that, however, is quite a different question. But whatever else it was, it would certainly not be moral, in any sense in which the word has yet been used.
The second supposition I spoke of, though less openly absurd than this one, is really quite as false. It consists of a vague idea that, for some reason or other, happiness can never be distributed in an equal measure to all, unless it be not only equal in degree but also the same in kind; and that the one kind that can be thus distributed is a kind that is in harmony with our conceptions of moral excellence. Now this is indeed so far true, that there are doubtless certain kinds of happiness which, if enjoyed at all, can be enjoyed by the few alone; and that the conditions under which alone the few can enjoy them disturb the conditions of all happiness for the many. The general good, therefore, gives us at once a test by which such kinds of happiness can be condemned. But to eliminate these will by no means leave us a residue of virtue; for these so far from being co-extensive with moral evil, do in reality lie only on the borders of it; and the condemnation attached to them is a legal rather than a moral one. It is based, that is, not so much on the kind of happiness itself as on the circumstances under which we are at present obliged to seek it. Thus the practice of seduction may be said to be condemned sufficiently by the misery brought by it to its victims, and its victims' families. But suppose the victims are willing, and the families complacent, this ground of condemnation goes; though in the eye of the moralist, matters in this last will be far worse than in the former. It is therefore quite a mistake to say that the kind of happiness which it is the end of life to realise is defined or narrowed down appreciably by the fact that it is a general end. Vice can be enjoyed in common, just as well as virtue; nor if wisely regulated will it exhaust the tastes that it appeals to. Regulated with equal skill, and with equal far-sightedness, it will take its place side by side with virtue; nor will sociology or social morality give us any reason for preferring the one to the other.
We may observe accordingly, that if happiness of some certain kind be the moral test, what Professor Huxley calls 'social morality'—the rule that is, for producing the negative conditions of happiness, it is not in itself morality at all. It may indeed become so, when the consciousness that we are conforming to it becomes one of the factors of our own personal happiness. It then suffers a kind of apotheosis. It is taken up into ourselves, and becomes part and parcel of our own personal morality. But it then becomes quite a different matter, as we shall see very shortly; and even then it supplies us with but a very small part of the answer.
Thus far what has been made plain is this. General, or social happiness, unless explained farther, is simply for moral purposes an unmeaning phrase. It evades the whole question we are asking; for happiness is no more differentiated by saying that it is general, than food is by saying that everyone at a table is eating it; or than a language is by saying that every one in a room is talking it. The social happiness of all of us means nothing but the personal happiness of each of us; and if social happiness have any single meaning—in other words, if it be a test of morals—it must postulate a personal happiness of some hitherto unexplained kind. Else sociology will be subsidiary to nothing but individual license; general law will be but the protection of individual lawlessness; and the completest social morality but the condition of the completest personal un-morality. The social organism we may compare to a yew-tree. Science will explain to us how it has grown up from the ground, and how all its twigs must have fitting room to expand in. It will not show us how to clip the yew-tree into a peacock. Morality, it is true, must rest ultimately on the proved facts of sociology; and this is not only true but evident. But it rests upon them as a statue rests upon its pedestal, and the same pedestal will support an Athenè or a Priapus.
The matter, however, is not yet altogether disposed of. The type of personal happiness that social morality postulates, as a whole, we have still to seek for. But a part of it, as I just pointed out, will, beyond doubt, be a willing obedience by each to the rules that make it in its entirety within the reach of all. About this obedience, however, there is a certain thing to remember: it must be willing, not enforced. The laws will of course do all they can to enforce it; but not only can they never do this completely, but even if they could, they would not produce morality. Conduct which, if willing, we should call highly moral, we shall, if enforced only, call nothing more than legal. We do not call a wild bear tame because it is so well caged that there is no fear of its attacking us; nor do we call a man good because, though his desires are evil, we have made him afraid to gratify them. Further, it is not enough that the obedience in question be willing in the sense that it does not give us pain. If it is to be a moral quality, it must also give us positive pleasure. Indeed, it must not so much be obedience to the law as an impassioned co-operation with it.
Now this, if producible, even though no further moral aim was connected with it, would undoubtedly be of itself a moral element. Suppose two pigs, for instance, had only a single wallowing-place, and each would like naturally to wallow in it for ever. If each pig in turn were to rejoice to make room for his brother, and were consciously to regulate his delight in becoming filthy himself by an equal delight in seeing his brother becoming filthy also, we should doubtless here be in the presence of a certain moral element. And though this, in a human society, might not carry us so far as we require to be carried, it would, without doubt, if producible, carry us a certain way. The question is, Is this moral element, this impassioned and unselfish co-operation with the social law, producible, in the absence of any farther end to which the social law is to be subordinate? The positive school apparently think it is; and this opinion has a seeming foundation in fact. We will therefore carefully examine what this foundation is, and see how far it is really able to support the weight that is laid upon it.
That fact, in itself a quite undoubted one, is the possession by man of a certain special and important feeling,