It is before all things important that this division be understood, and be kept quite clear in our minds, if we would see honestly what our positive modern systems amount to. For what makes them at present so very hard to deal with, is the fact that their exponents are perpetually perplexing themselves between these two classes of answers, first giving one, and then the other, and imagining that, by a kind of confusion of substance, they can both afford solutions of the same questions. Thus they continually speak of life as though its crowning achievement were some kind of personal happiness; and then being asked to explain the nature and basis of this, they at once shift their ground, and talk to us of the laws and conditions of social happiness. Professor Huxley will again supply us with a very excellent example. He starts with the thesis that _both_ sorts of morality are strong enough to hold their own, without supernatural aid; and when we look to see on what ground he holds they are, we find it to consist in the following explanation that _one_ is. '_Given_,' he says, '_a society of human beings under certain circumstances, and the question whether a particular action on the part of one of its members will tend to increase the general happiness or not, is a question of natural knowledge, and as such is a perfectly legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.... If it can be shown by observation or experiment, that theft, murder, and adultery do not tend to diminish the happiness of society, then, in the absence of any but natural knowledge, they are not social immoralities._'
Now, in the above passage we have at least one thing. We have a short epitome of one of those classes of answers that our positive moralists are offering us. It is with this class that I shall deal in the following chapter; and point out as briefly as may be its complete irrelevance. After that, I shall go on to the other.
[8] Vide _Nineteenth Century_, No. 3, pp. 536, 537.
Society, says Professor Clifford, is the highest of all organisms;[9] and its organic nature, he tells us, is one of those great facts which our own generation has been the first to state rationally. It is our understanding of this that enables us to supply morals with a positive basis. It is, he proceeds, because society is organic, '_that actions which, as individual, are insignificant, are massed together into ... important movements. Co-operation or_ band-work _is the life of it_.' And '_it is the practice of band-work_,' he adds, that, unknown till lately though its nature was to us, has so moulded man as '_to create in him two specially human faculties, the conscience and the intellect_;' of which the former, we are told, gives us the desire for the good, and the latter instructs us how to attain this desire by action. So too Professor Huxley, once more to recur to him, says that that state of man would be '_a true_ civitas Dei, _in which each man's moral faculty shall be such as leads him to control all those desires which run counter to the good of mankind_.' And J.S. Mill, whose doubts as to the value of life we have already dwelt upon, professed to have at last satisfied himself by a precisely similar answer. He had never '_wavered in the conviction_,' he tells us, even all through his perplexity, that, if life had any value at all, '_happiness_' was its one '_end_,' and the '_test of its rule of conduct_;' but he now thought that this end was to be attained by not making it the direct end, but '_by fixing the mind on some object other than one's own happiness; on the happiness of others--on the improvement of mankind_.' The same thing is being told us on all sides, and in countless ways. The common name for this theory is Utilitarianism; and its great boast, and its special professed strength, is that it gives morals a positive basis in the acknowledged science of sociology. Whether sociology can really supply such a basis is what we now have to enquire. There are many practical rules for which it no doubt can do so; but will these rules correspond with what we mean by morals?