Exist not. We are befooled by words. We conceive wisdom, prudence, and magnanimity as distinct entities, without intercommunication. If we could but see things as they are without the tyranny of definition!
Wordsworth has a singular power of expressing articulately that which would be mere mist without him, but is of vital importance.
(Reprinted from _The Pilot_, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)
DR. ÉMILE LEGOUIS, in his singularly interesting book, _La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth_, well translated into English by Mr. T. W. Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in his early years of Godwin’s _Political Justice_. On reading _Political Justice_ now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. ‘All vice is nothing more than error and mistake’ (i. 31). { 205} ‘We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge’ (i. 57). ‘Justice . . . is coincident with utility’ (i. 121). ‘If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my exertions’ (i. 83). ‘But,’ says an objector, ‘your mother nourished you in the helplessness of infancy.’ ‘When she first subjected herself,’ replies Godwin, ‘to the necessity of these cares, she was probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . . that entitles to respect,’ and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the most meritorious person first.’ All moral science may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future’ (ii. 468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on engagements ‘would be somewhat more accurate if we said “that it was essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct”’ (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and ‘depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment’ (i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced as ‘the most odious of all monopolies’ (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman ‘the same preference that I do.’ ‘This,’ says he, ‘will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.’ It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but ‘Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity’ (i. 102). As to Godwin’s necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. ‘Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced’ (i. 297). ‘A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity’ (i. 308). ‘A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of being acted upon.