§ 9.

How completely, indeed, conceptions of right and wrong in these matters depend upon the balance of impulses existing in men, may be worth considering a moment. And first, observe that no tracing out of actions to their final good or bad consequences, is, by itself, capable of generating approbation, or reprobation, of those actions. Could it do this, men’s moral codes would be high or low, according as they made these analyses well or ill, that is—according to their intellectual acuteness. Whence it would follow, that in all ages and nations, men of equal intelligence should have like ethical theories, whilst contemporaries should have unlike ones, if their reflective powers are unlike. But facts do not answer to these inferences. On the contrary, they point to the law above specified. Both history and daily experience prove to us that men’s ideas of rectitude correspond to the sentiments and instincts predominating in them (pp. 25, 159, 350). We constantly read of tyrants Edition: current; Page: [430] defending their claims to unlimited sway as being Divinely authorized. The rights of rival princes were of old asserted by their respective partisans, and are still asserted by modern legitimists, with the same warmth that the most ardent democrat asserts the rights of man. To those living in the feudal times, so unquestionable seemed the duty of serfs to obey their lords, that Luther (no doubt acting conscientiously) urged the barons to vengeance on the rebellious peasants, calling on all who could “to stab them, out them down, and dash their brains out, as if they were mad dogs.” Moreover, we shall find, that absence of the ethical sentiment completely disables the mind from realizing the abstract title of the human being to freedom. Thus, with all his high reasoning powers, Plato could conceive of nothing better for his ideal republic than a system of class despotism; and, indeed, up to his time, and long after it, there seems to have existed no man who saw anything wrong in slavery. It is narrated of Colonel D’Oyley, the first governor of Jamaica, that within a few days after having issued an order “for the distribution to the army of 1701 Bibles,” he signed another order for the “payment of the summe of twenty pounds sterling, out of the impost money, to pay for fifteen doggs, brought by John Hoy, for the hunting of the negroes.” The holding of slaves by ministers of religion in America is a parallel fact. We read that the Chinese cannot understand why European women are treated with respect; and that they attribute the circumstance to the exercise of demoniacal arts by them over the men. Here and there amongst ourselves, analogous phenomena may be detected. For example, Dr. Moberly, of Winchester College, has written a book to defend fagging, which he says, as a system of school-government, gives “more security of essential deep-seated goodness than any other which can be devised.” Again, in a recent pamphlet, signed “A Country Parson,” it is maintained, that “you must convert the Chartist spirit as you would reform the drunkard’s spirit, by showing that it is a rebellion against the laws of God.” But the strangest peculiarity exhibited by those deficient in sense of rights—or rather Edition: current; Page: [431] that which looks the strangest to us—is their inability to recognize their own claims. We are told, for instance, by Lieutenant Bernarda that in the Portuguese settlements on the African coast, the free negroes are “taunted by the slaves as having no white man to look after them, and see them righted when oppressed;” and it is said that in America the slaves themselves look down upon the free blacks, and call them rubbish. Which anomalous-looking facts are, however, easily conceivable when we remember that here in England, in this nineteenth century, most women defend that state of servitude in which they are held by men.

To account, by any current hypothesis, for the numberless disagreements in men’s ideas of right and wrong here briefly exemplified, seems scarcely possible. But on the theory that opinion is a resultant of moral forces, whose equilibrium varies with every race and epoch—that is, with every phase of adaptation—the rationale is self-evident. Nor, indeed, considering the matter closely, does it appear that society could ever hold together were not opinion thus dependent upon the balance of feelings. For were it otherwise, races yet needing coercive government might reason their way to the conclusion that coercive government was bad, as readily as more advanced races. The Russians might see despotism to be wrong, and free institutions to be right, as clearly as we do. And did they see this, social dissolution would ensue; for it is not conceivable that they would any longer remain contented under that stringent rule needed to keep them in the social state.