CHAPTER VI.

The beginning of the year 1870 brought to Chauncey a proposition from the authorities of the College to deliver a course of University lectures. This gave him peculiar pleasure, and he accepted it at once. He announces it to his friends on the first day of the year.

To Mrs. Lesley.

Cambridge, Jan. 1, 1870.

... I must tell you of the New Year’s present I had this morning,—-a proposition from President Eliot, of the University, that I should give next year a course of lectures on Psychology in the new University post-graduate courses. The experiment this year is thought to be sufficiently successful to warrant a considerable extension of it for next year. I was rash enough to accept the proposition, being in the spirit of hopeful resolution appropriate to the day. Let us hope that I shall acquire by next September that sense of superiority to a learned audience which will be needed to make the task a pleasant one. My little experience in this line makes me remember most distinctly what a trial to the nerves such work is. It is, I imagine, almost as bad as preaching, which you should not let Mr. Lesley do too often.

To Miss Grace Norton.

Jan. 13, 1870.

It seems only a little time since I was in Northampton, waiting for bright days in October to cheer an expedition to

Ashfield and the hills. But Winter and I were both out of season, the one too early and the other too late; and we settled in the valley waiting for each other — or, at least, one for the other — to depart. If Winter had any motive in the matter, it was more persistent than mine; and, my patience being exhausted, I came back to Cambridge. The weather has since been equally unseasonable in the opposite direction, and not especially favorable to recovery from a chronic cough. Time, nevertheless, even of the officinal quality, is the panacea that cures all ills; and, with the aid of the normal forces of health, it has brought me to my present state of comparative salubrity, — with weaknesses, to be sure, an abnormal liability to take colds, and an invalid feebleness of the conscience which finds sophistical excuses for negligence and indolence.

. . . There is one romantic incident, however, — one rash act of heroic adventure which I have to confess or boast of. I had the temerity, on New Year’s day, to agree to give a course of lectures on Psychology next year, beginning in September, in the new post-graduate University courses, which are to be greatly increased in number. Something like the German University lecture system is aimed at, by thus bringing out such special talents or acquirements as are to be found in a community like ours, but have hitherto been turned to no public account except unsystematically in our literature. Much that can be had only by personal intercourse between a man of learning and his audience, is lost where the press is the only medium of communication. Books and Reviews, even the “North American,” cannot create that open and generous rivalry among scholars, which makes the standard of learning so high among the Germans. Indeed, the only way in which even the demand for learned books and reviews can be made as effective with us as it is in Germany is by a similar public attitude of our writers and

scholars; by their coming, not before popular, heterogeneous audiences, but before classes. Admirable as cheapness in books and the power of the press are, yet they cannot create an interest in the subjects of the most valuable books, comparable to that which the authors of them might communicate personally. This is a value in the lecture system which cheapness in books can never supersede. It is a value which no art can cheapen; but it is a value which English and American appliances of education have simply thrown away, for the most part. Much culture and learning adorn the society of both countries, which ought in some way to be connected with public education, and chiefly by raising the standard of learning in the Universities. To these considerations the President of the College is wide awake. Nowhere else in America can a college command such assistance towards laying this foundation of a University, or creating an effective demand for one. Such is my understanding of the project in which I have rashly engaged to take part; but considering that it is only just begun, and is still in the experimental stage, proper modesty does not forbid that I should try myself by a little experiment in teaching,—with the possibility in view that I may prevail against the hosts of the enemy, and put to rout the forces which ---- and ---- and ---- still continue to command for the subjugation of the human mind.

Of course, the University will recognize no distinction of sex. The classes are composed of men and women, though up to the present time no woman has been appointed lecturer. Let us hope that the question of women’s rights will be so far advanced in this new order of things that it will be merged in the wider question of human rights in general. In fact, my sympathy with Mr. Mill’s essay on this subject was rather, as I discovered on reflection, on account of principles which apply to the condition of women, emphatically, perhaps,

but not exceptionally. I agreed with your estimate, both of the quantity and quality of woman’s influence, the power she has over unreason, — in spite of her subjection; and I think it much more estimable than that which is equally peculiar to men, though this may be a prejudice of mine. And I regarded your writing to me as if I were a woman, as a compliment second only to being treated as one of the emancipated. Still, believing as I do, that human beings generally, even children, have hitherto been much more in subjection to authority than they ought to be (both directly and indirectly, or through the sanctions of punishments and rewards); and believing that the true standard of law and morality, the true well-being of all, is defeated by laws which infringe individual tastes, preferences, or sentiments, without being required for security or for compassing any obvious or important utility; and seeing that, so far as women are treated differently from men, it is mainly in consequence of some traditional and prevailing sentiments, which are not justified by any more obvious utility than an unreasoning conservatism, — I am in general ready to protest against this present state of things and in favor of larger liberty. The true standard, utility, is the basis alike of law and liberty. It requires laws with their sanctions in some of the relations of life, and equally requires the entire absence of restraints in others, both for securing the largest amounts of the most worthy enjoyments in the present conditions of human happiness, and as affording the only possibility of experiment, change, and future improvement in them. Undoubtedly, the world has greatly improved of late, in its legal and moral codes, by rationalizing the requisitions which are made on the individual through civil and popular sanctions; but it still stands in need of improvement. And it is only because woman’s condition is less improved on the whole than man’s, that her rights need to be signalized in a special manner.

As to the degree in which women are in subjection, it is true, as you say, that “greater force of character and wider experience” have more influence than sex in determining the ruler and the ruled, in all immediate personal relations. But then men have so arranged the affairs of life that, for the most part, they or their sex have the best opportunities for acquiring these qualifications for ruling. There can be no doubt that these are acquired. At any rate, whatever may be said of the origin of force of character, whether it comes, as is most likely, from the discipline of important truths and responsibilities, or not, — still it is certain that a “wider experience” cannot be innate. No doubt, a prince is better able to rule than a peasant, and therefore has a better right; still, society is just as responsible for the peasant’s subjection, since it has made the inequality by the difference in their education. In like manner, many actual relations of inequality, in themselves proper and just, are yet founded on or grow out of arbitrary discriminations, and are in their origin unjust.

You say of American women “that their legal subjection has no perceptible effect on position or character, except among the lower classes.” But does not this exception include that (much the largest) number of women who stand most in need of protection from just laws and just public sentiments, — for whom, indeed, and not for the others, a reformation of the laws is needed? I do not think that Mr. Mill has overlooked the existence of a class, — large even in England, I suppose, but much larger with us, — who are in advance of the laws and the general sentiments of society, and are practically independent of them. Such a class justifies, indeed, his hopes, but could not have justified his silence. It was not of them or for them, but rather to them, that he spoke. But whether in reality women in America are in subjection in any important respect or not, it is certain that in the estimation of

nine-tenths of American men they not only are, but ought to be. That their subjection, however, is not of the nature of servitude, but rather of religious obligation, is a part of the arrogant opinion which springs from a sentimental estimate of “the fact of sex,” and blinds men to the truths that personality is a still greater fact; that individuals embody the ends of all social institutions; that the agent is much more than a servant and is greater than any office, and should have the right to choose his or her duties, subject only to the limitations of real abilities. The needed reform is not so much a political as a social and religious one. The sense of the solidarity of interests should not rest in a slavish sentiment, which makes the servant subordinate to that superstitious object “society,” but should be founded on a feeling of personal worth, identical with the interests of all, and, as far as possible, realizing in itself all the good which social institutions compass. Though individuals are indebted to society for the most worthy kinds, as well as for larger measures, of happiness, yet the abstraction, “society,” has not in return any rights. Individuals only have rights. Whether Max Müller is correct or not in ascribing myths to a disease of language, by which words with forgotten meanings become personal or proper names, it is certain that a thousand other more important superstitions spring from that most pernicious disease, — afflicting the maturity as well as the infancy of language, — “realism,” by which a general name becomes the name of a reality, different from the objects or the qualities which it denotes in common. It is in this way that “society” has appeared to have claims which the individuals that compose it do not have; and thus a reform in logic became necessary for the overthrow of many social and religious superstitions. In fact, the two warfares, the philosophical and the social, or the theoretical and the practical, have been carried on side by side from the days of the schoolmen; and it is not an accident, but an historical consequence, that Mr. Mill is the modern champion at once of nominalism in logic and of individualism in sociology.

It is under the rights of individuals, then, that I would place the rights of women; and it seems to me that those who agitate specially for the latter are not usually actuated by the true principle of liberty, since what they demand is not equal exemption of all persons from oppression, or at any rate arbitrary authority, but they ask an increase of the range of authority by conferring it equally on all. So far as this is really regarded as an indirect means to the end of true liberty, it may be justified; but the usual motives are, in fact, the love of power and a wish to share it, and a false notion that inequality is in itself unjust. What is properly meant by the equality which is essential to justice is only the generality, or the equal and strict applicability of its rules; but these rules may themselves consist of definitions of proper inequalities in rights and duties. An arbitrary inequality, or one which is founded on mere custom and unreasoning sentiment, will be unjust, provided, as is likely to be the case, it not only deprives individuals of powers which might be usefully exercised, but also interferes with those pursuits of happiness which belong more essentially to the individual.

The suffrage is originally based on the expedient rather than the just; though, when once acquired, it may become a right through considerations more essential to the existence and well-being of society than those of expediency. That the suffrage, as it now exists, is based on more important grounds than can be urged for any extension of it, is manifest from this consideration at least: that any important infringement of the existing right would lead to social anarchy, to something much more serious in motives and consequences than the war of words about its extension, which, so far from endangering the citizen’s security, adds rather to his entertainment.

I think, nevertheless, that the present limitation of the suffrage with us is a groundless impertinence. . . . To attempt to persuade women that the suffrage does not properly belong to their sphere may be well enough; but to take away all choice in the matter by positive enactments of law is inconsistent with the very principle of liberty. It is not, therefore, for the benefit of woman, but simply for liberty’s sake, that I would demand for her this right.

To Mrs. Lesley.

Cambridge, Feb. 8, 1870.

I promise myself, if I am very good, that I shall go out to Italy next summer for a short trip, and while I am making final preparations for my lectures. But I ought to keep the promise, perhaps, to myself, since keeping it secret is the only way in which I can be sure of keeping it at all. I imagine that the interest of metaphysics and of travelling will make an agreeable variety. If I find introspection wearisome, I shall have a ready relief at hand, and shall not be in danger of losing my faith in the existence of an external world. If I find so great an extension of externality a bore, I can with profit and without loss of time turn my eyes inward. Isn’t this a generous programme, — an excursion into two worlds at once? The great Kant recommends, for the study of anthropology, in lieu of foreign travels, a residence in some great city, situated on a great river or other thoroughfare of the tide of humanity; and, with an amusing naïveté, — remembering that he was never more than fifty miles away from Königsberg, and considering what must be the travel through that city, — he recommends it as peculiarly fitted for the study of human nature. Perhaps Philadelphia will serve my turn, if Cambridge and the commerce of the Charles have not brought me into sufficient contact with varieties of mankind. Still, Kant

for himself advised rightly; for under his microscope there was doubtless more variety of human nature in his native city than he could, in the distant views of a traveller, have found elsewhere. The naturalist travels only to collect, not to examine, his specimens, unless they are by their very nature spread abroad, as in geology; but if they fly into his museum, all the better: the fatigues and expenses of travel are avoided. But even Kant might have been justified in travelling to visit his friends; and this is a motive which still induces me to hope to see you before many more days.

To Miss Jane Norton.

Philadelphia, Feb. 26, 1870.

I received your last letter only a few days before coming here, where I am happily domesticated with my friends the Lesleys; and now, after the first absorbing interests of my visit, I can turn with the greater pleasure to old times and friends far away. I cannot recall the date of my last letter; but it was some time early in January, I think, and ought to have reached you before the date of yours. Perhaps it has been miscarried or lost, or it may be at the bottom of the ocean and not so happy as my last letter to you, or as the prophet Jonah, — to survive the floods and be delivered from the deep to teach you. . . . Why didn’t you give me the promised moral lecture, instead of ironically charging me with being a Millite? For you see that I have so nearly attained that unsexed condition of mind that I have generalized like a man, and applied like a woman, your observation on not liking to appear to be a partisan of Mr. Mill. I suppose that such partisanship is as great a sin in me as it could be in you. . . . But all the personal feeling toward my philosopher of which I am conscious is founded on the fact that he is the least capable of being a partisan leader. There is the very least of personal power in his writings. He only wished, and is only fitted, to

draw with him the co-partisans of truth; for, as Mr. Goldwin Smith says, “there is reason to suspect that his intellect is the inflexible and incorruptible servant of the truth.” He had no such following as that of Comte, or other passionate and conceited lovers of what they conceive to be true. But enough of Mr. Mill. . . .

Though I did not have the pleasure of seeing Ashfield or the Curtises last fall, I had a partial substitute on Thursday evening by going with Mary, and as one of an immense audience in the great opera-house of this city listening to Mr. Curtis’s lecture. The buttoned-up frock-coat and the well-known tones and manner, and the eloquence with which he set forth the perils and the folly of our American system of civil appointments, carried me back to the pleasant old days.

I find my friends here unusually well this winter, and as happy as good people can be. Mr. Lesley, having got educated into the care and conditions of his sensitive nervous system, keeps pretty well, though his enthusiasm still tempts him to overexertion. Think of preaching eight Sundays in succession, with the week-days full of work! Still, he has learned to keep within certain limits which grim monitors set to his work. I consider myself quite a moral man, — so far as observing the laws of health is concerned, — compared with him. And the little girls, as we still call them, are as well and happy as if their parents were not the invalids they are. It is hardly a pity that ---- has grown to womanhood; for she combines most attractively the charming unconsciousness of the child with the charming consciousness of the woman, and has such grace of nature as to bridge over the awkward chasm of hobbledehoyhood. It surprises me sometimes, and makes me doubt my theory of the great dependence of human beings for their characters and powers on the moulding influences of life and circumstances, to see how completely she seems the fulfilment of infantile prophesies; but, then, I reflect that she

has always been in the same mould, strongly influenced by the same characters as those that she may have inherited. I think, certainly, that some are born good and some bad, in a certain sense; that is, the most fundamental conditions of virtue, or the absence of them, are, or may be, inherited.

Great sensitiveness or capacity for enjoyment or suffering, with a memory capable of recalling vividly past pleasures and pains, are natural endowments leading to prudence and power of sympathy. Socrates called virtue a kind of knowledge, and in one sense it is. It comes from adequately recalling past goods and evils, and therefore realizing vividly the present pleasures and pains of others through sympathy, and securing their pleasures and our own and avoiding pains through prudence. Infants in arms may show differences in these respects.

You see how cunningly I wander round to my favorite subject! I am easily persuaded that it demands a little further elucidation; and you know that it is easier to utter what flows freely from the moral consciousness than to cast about for those exceptional truths of fact that are called news; which, so far from representing the real life we lead, are, in fact, its monstrosities. “History is little more than a register of the crimes, the follies, and the misfortunes of mankind;” for in this way only does that great stranger, the past of our race, interest us in detail. We like the details, both good and bad, of our friends’ and acquaintances’ peculiar circumstances; but philosophy alone teaches us life. Let us, therefore, listen to philosophy. I will indite you a psychological lecture.

It may make the matter of our debate clearer, to state what may be admitted, according to the philosophy I profess, to be innate and heritable elements of character and mental powers. Every active and sentient being that is born has, independently of any predetermined channels of activity and sensibility, certain general capacities for them, the degrees and

proportions of which may be regarded as predeterminations of character. A certain degree of both is essential to constitute that amount of mental life which is peculiar to the human race, and probably depends on the size of its brain. Certain proportions between the original activity and sensibility will constitute varying innate capacities, which are independent of education and of special organization. The boy strikes out into the world with greater innate force of spontaneity and strength of passion, — supposing the conditions of nutrition and general health to be the same. A greater nervous sensibility than his, combined with less nervous spontaneity, will make the nature more impressionable and receptive, less aggressive, and less impertinently or idly inquisitive. They will predispose to the education or growth of the emotional nature, and especially the tender emotion in its various relations, and to greater capacities for sympathy. Persons and intimate personal relations thus become, as we may say, by nature, the objects of a predominant interest, perhaps of an engrossing one ; and objects which force themselves on the attention will constitute themselves the teachers of those who are so endowed as to be attracted by them. But it is clear that the purpose of a general and catholic education is not to exaggerate one-sidedness. It is all the more necessary that the education by inanimate things and impersonal affairs should be systematically prosecuted.

There are, no doubt, many other and more special predisposing causes to the choice of the mode of life, and the objects of study, in the original or physical constitution. But these are not to be regarded as divinely ordained or right, simply because they are inborn; for customs and circumstances of life accordant with, and constantly associated with them, must react to increase them, like other physical qualities, and render them more regularly heritable in the varieties or classes which custom thus determines. It may not be best for the human race,

with reference to its future conditions and possibilities of happiness, to be constituted as it now is at birth, — any more than it was best to be as it was when born a less intelligent and social race, with fewer arts and social acquisitions. As to what is absolutely best for the human race, in its circumstances as well as in its adaptations, — in its heaven as well as in its fitness for it, — this is not known to us; and, since the relatively best is not to be found completely revealed in the nature and inheritance of the race at any single epoch of its progress, — not at present any more than at any past time, — and since experience and experimental science is the last resort, the authority of all authorities, the largest scope should be given to their determinations. On this ground, the largest liberty consistent with the existence and the most obvious well-being of society should be left to nature; that is, to the individual choice. Individualism is thus vindicated as a means to an end, — the end of social improvement. The possibility of monstrosities in nature is also the possibility of amelioration, — when what we need is enlightenment, and not merely a more effective motive to conform to known types and prescriptions. Living Nature is a never-ending experiment in the possibilities of her laws; and I believe in regard to our race what you think, at least of the individuals, — that, in the possibilities of progress and development, natural charms can be attained which are by no means inherent in character, and qualities may become instinctive or inbred which are now only acquired through education. There is a nature above nature, a nature of infinite possibilities in which we wander, — as well as the powers that hem us in and guide our several steps.

To Mr. Norton.

Cambridge, March 21, 1870.

. . . The newspaper man is the type of the worst side of our modern civilization, — its shams and artificialities. It is

he, and not the man of science, who presents the widest contrast to the poet. He deals with human interests in the gross, without delicacy. He numbers and paragraphs them, but never weighs them; and we, his readers, are apt to follow his lead. No discrimination of interests, no refining or artistic judgments, find place in his pursuit. To shock the nerves and arrest the attention of the busy multitude, whether agreeably or disagreeably, with facts or fictions, is his whole affair. The man of science often seems but little better, — not less a gossip but a more eccentric one, prizing a fact for a fact, with not even a correct judgment of whether it has any interest at all. Still, where he does not show imagination he is redeemed by a great faith of which the newspaper man has nothing. He may not be governed by a clear insight of remote though real relations: still, he is moved by a true faith in the possibilities of real but undiscovered ones, and so he prizes his facts genuinely.

My muse suggests that on this theme I might survey the great past of which you are a pious witness, when there were no newspaper men, and when men were governed, if not beneficently by reason, at any rate by great passions and noble devotions, so that Fine Art was possible. I am not overmuch inclined, however, to admire this old and now impossible concentration, or the kind of nobleness and the possibility of individual distinction, the incentive to individual ambition, which it implied. Humanity is conscious of too many and too massive interests to allow such concentration and singleness of purpose. It is utilitarian reason, and not religious passion, which must govern the modern world. “Fixed ideas,” once controlling elements, are now subservient instruments of great purposes or characters. They are still needed for discipline, but are not worshipped as masters. Representative men are, to be sure, no longer possible: the identification of a man and an idea, so that personal and

moral or æsthetic motives may reinforce each other, and history be presented to us in fine ideals of works and characters intensively grand but proportionately narrow, — in other words, perfection, under more or less arbitrary limitations, is not a leading modern aspiration. Our great men are the wise and painstaking promoters and guardians of extensive interests. They show moral greatness in fitness for great responsibilities which the needs of a highly organized society may impose upon them, and not merely in what their special genius, or combined taste and ability, define for them. They are lost, it is true, in the bright day they work in; yet they may be absolutely brighter than the religiously great artist or scholar or philosopher or reformer, who stands out against the surrounding darkness of barbarism. These personages present moral greatness in its elemental form, and in perfect correlation to the rudeness and violence of the ages to which they belong, in which all life was passionate. We cannot be too grateful for them; but this does not constitute them our types, — at least, not examples of what we would be perfect in, though types of perfection in their way. In the spirit of this distinction, we see in our day the great Christian type in the character of Jesus, studied as a phenomenon of a by-gone time, as an example to be imitated only “in the spirit,” or in its most essential but least particular qualities, and as almost identical with moral greatness itself.

I find on reflection that, instead of being indebted to Spontaneity for my inspiration, I am really led into this train of reflections by the questions of Miss Grace’s letter, and am anticipating what I should properly reserve for my answer to her. Nevertheless, all this is naturally connected with the suggestive thoughts in your letter on the conditions and prospects of modern society. I find it hard to admit that the future of Europe, which seems so dark to you, may have to pass, as you appear to anticipate, through phases like those

of the first thirteen centuries, attractive as the brighter side of that picture may be and dark as the worse side of modem life may seem. From what you say (if you can recall it at this late day) and from Macaulay’s observation that what modern civilization has to fear is no longer the incursions of outside barbarians but an irruption of the barbarism at its very heart, in the populations of its own great cities, we can see with sufficient clearness where the danger lies. The causes are, as you say, no longer political (at least in the modern historical sense of the word), but immediately social. To meet them, social science will have to amend essentially that fine Greek invention, the free city and its government. We have improved greatly on the Greek idea, and applied it with success to the government of empires through our representative system, but democracy is now the least successful in its earliest applications. . . .

The latest and best scientific explanation attributes the decline and fall of Roman civilization, not to the strength of outside barbarism, but to an avoidable governmental and financial mismanagement; and it would be a very improbable result of modern studies of social problems to find that the intrinsically weak inside barbarism of modern society is unmanageable, and must be permitted to undermine civilization in its turn. That the power of wealth, more firmly seated now than ever before in the history of mankind, must give way again to princely and military powers; that wars shall again be waged against it, instead of with its permission and aid; that all the mediæval train of horrors shall follow, — destruction not only of life, but of subsistence, followed by famine and pestilence, by diseases more fatal than warfare itself and unknown to modern life; and all this as the result of the ferment of social agitation, not peculiar to modern times, in a class, the offspring of cities and our defective city systems, subdued already in its rank and file by want and

debility, and likely to be the first victims of such a state of things, — is to me incredible. Of course, our rulers may make fatal mistakes, as the Romans did. One fatal mistake would be in not sustaining the class of prosperous and independent yeomanry, the true backbone of civilized communities as now constituted. Yet the privileges of wealth ought to be — will have to be — circumscribed. The rapacity of wealth is, of course, the taproot of all these evils, the source of the hostility which threatens social revolutions. We have got to amend the great Roman invention, the laws of property, as well as the constitutions of large cities and the management of their populations. But a scientific study of the subject from the point of view of utilitarian political economy will, I am convinced, meet the demands of the revolutionists at a point far short of their programme. It would be easier for it to do so, but for the complication introduced by the city problem. Looked at rationally and from a utilitarian point of view, the rights of private ownership, the protection of the individual in the possession, accumulation, consumption, productive administration, and posthumous disposal of his surplus gain, — is founded simply and solely in the motives they afford to his making such gains, and adding them, as he really does (in spite of his seeming private appropriation of them), to the store of public wealth. Without these laws or their main features, society would fast relapse into barbarism and ruin, and the first to suffer and to perish would be the rank and file of the discontented revolutionists themselves; and revolution would be checked at the very outset, provided the better parts of the population were not previously and fatally weakened, as in the Middle Ages, by persistently injurious and short-sighted legislation. But so far as the laws of property are inherently, or through changed circumstances have come to be productive, not of increased gains, but of a large and permanent class of unproductive consumers, so far they are devices of legalized robbery, and must be abrogated or amended, if justice is ever to be effected by legislation, through whatever political powers. It is perhaps unfortunate that the problem will have to be solved through democratic agencies and the unavoidable ascendency of the will of the masses in political matters. But, after all, it is a real question, which is the more untoward instrument for the truly just and wise philanthropist to work with, — the ignorant and prejudiced masses whose benefit is sought, or the equally prejudiced aristocracies, blinded by self-interest, whose unjust privileges must be curtailed? I am not an ardent admirer of democracy; but at the same time I regard the anti-democratic Macaulayan doctrine (I may say misapprehension) of democratic tendencies as not less unphilosophical and sentimental than such stupid worship of mere numbers. It is an equally stupid spite. Macaulay showed his utter incapacity for dealing philosophically with political problems in speaking, as he does, of the privileges of wealth, as if they were absolute rights, with no ulterior foundation; and in treating democracy as if it were essentially hostile to what in fact are the very conditions of its ascendency over despotic powers. Democracies and aristocracies are both blind, and if led by men of their own sort must inevitably carry the state with them to destruction. But do not let us dwell despondingly on the powers and tendencies of the instruments we have to deal with. What if there is in our hammer nothing but heaviness and inertia?

I have little to add byway of news. I met Mr. Godkin last Saturday at our club dinner. He had the evening before given his lecture on “Rationalism in Legislation,” which I did not hear, but hope to read in the “North American Review,” where he has consented to publish it.

I am studying a little for my lectures, or lessons as I shall call them, in mental science. I do not intend to read written lectures but to comment on a text-book, to expound and

explain the difficult topics and doctrines of Bain’s book, and expatiate on the interesting ones. I do not see the propriety of proving my competency to teach, by rivalling all the authors, and taking a step in advance of the latest. In most of the courses hitherto, the teachers have chosen the more laborious, but less difficult, task of reading written lectures; thus sacrificing, it seems to me, what such exercises can afford peculiarly and in contrast to books. I shall, if possible, excite discussion in the class. Perhaps, if I can do no better, I may have confederates to give the exercises the vivacity and interest there is in actual debate, and such as even the most artistically written dialogues cannot emulate. The dullest will listen eagerly to real metaphysical discussions. But, as I began with saying, it is not rational to trust to Spontaneity, happy and inimitable as her inspirations sometimes are; so I shall prepare a few written nucleuses for occasional use. I have often thought of you in connection with the scheme of these University lectures, and the opportunities it affords for bringing cultivated people together; its freedom from the narrowness of mere pedagogism.

I hope that you fully understand that letters from Florence are marked events among “the immortal incidents of [my] Cambridge;” and that you will regard the fact from the point of view of Christianity rather than that of political economy. And give my kindest, most affectionate regards to all.

To Mrs. Lesley.

Cambridge, March 22, 1870.

It is more than a fortnight since I left you. ... I really felt a little homesick when I arrived at this uninhabited room, where no one waited to welcome me, except the old books and the old work. I did not care to brush the dust from them, and they did not seem to care whether I did or not.

. . . What does Mr. Lesley think of Mr. Alfred Wallace’s estimate of geological time in the last two numbers of “Nature”? I should like to have an evening’s talk with him about it. I like the ingenious suggestion that in the past sixty thousand years species have changed at a comparatively slow pace on account of the comparatively equable climates which astronomy indicates for this period. It is somewhat like the exception he makes in a former paper as to the changes to which the human race has been subject, and tends in the same way to shorten the estimates of the previous ages of creation. But I don’t feel so much confidence, as Mr. Wallace seems to have, in the limit of one hundred million years which the physicists set. The history of the solar system and the data derived from the mechanical theory of heat seem to me too much matters of mere guessing. The physical data are exact enough, so far as they go; but the physical history of the universe is known in too few of its elements to warrant such confident chronology, even if we leave miracle altogether out of account. To speculate exclusively on the little that we know, in place of speculating totally on our ignorance, is going to the opposite extreme. I should rather think the geologist himself entitled to the first word on the subject, or, at least, to as much time as he wants. To take the present rates of cooling and loss of force in the earth and the sun as typical and universal facts, and to calculate solely on them, is too suspiciously simple to be a probable account of nature. It smacks too much of cosmogonic theories.

I am still inclined to believe that the history of the solar system is not an entirely regular development or a simple specimen of universal progress out of an original “homogeneity” (as it is now the fashion to call the old nebula), and that science ought to free itself entirely from this unscientific prejudice which cannot be proven or tested any better than miracle, and is prompted chiefly by the impatient love of simplicity

that characterizes all transcendental speculation (either abstract or concrete), i. e. theories of inexperienced phenomena. Only the facts of life, or the histories of living organisms, show decisively a regular external order, and this, so far from being typical, is found to depend, in the last analysis, on an almost infinitely complicated, but self-conserving combination of the internal, elementary orders of nature, or laws of matter, living and dead; and it shows itself decisively only in the development of the individual organism, and but vaguely in the development or history of species.

The physical laws of nature are thus to my mind the only real types of the general order in the universe. Life builds an order out of these, which, so far from exhibiting in its stages of development an epitome of the general order, ought to be regarded, so far as evidence can guide us, as an entirely exceptional and precarious state of things, lying within the compass of natural possibilities, but far from illustrating the general results of the interactions of natural forces. These results present themselves to my imagination as they did to old Aristotle’s as an infinitely complex and confused movement, without apparent beginning or end or tendency, but showing at every turn the intimate play of action and counteraction in the balanced forces from which they spring. Gravitation and heat are the two most powerful and pervading causes of this movement; but the laws of heat are known only on one side, — its wasting action, its tendency to diffuse the mechanical energies of nature. Cosmogonic physicists, like Professor W. Thomson, assume that this is all that is to be known about it, and do not inquire what may become of it in the spaces through which it is diffused, or how a round of actions can be effected through it and the agency of gravitation which would not tend to uncompensated movements, or to that transition from one chaos to another which the modern cosmogonists assume as the general order of nature.

This scepticism of mine is now called “materialism.” It is not the same as the ancient doctrine of this hateful name, since it is not opposed to the same orthodoxy; for even orthodoxy is subject to change! Perhaps I should say something like this in the evening’s talk, if my eloquence were not checked before arriving at the last sentences by crushing objections. Now, I have it all my own way, and get safely through my peroration. Such is the privilege of letters — and sermons! but one has to imagine the applause.

I send in the same mail with this a slate for Mr. Lesley’s editorials. I find that the lead-pencil flows on the surface of it almost as freely, if not quite, as ink. Give my true love to all.

To Miss Grace Norton.

March 25, 1870.

The principles of this art [jugglery] are really very few, but their applications are manifold. And this is in the main true of the much more dignified and impressive shows, — the mysteries and problems of human nature. Forgive my drawing a moral, after all; but your studies in history and my studies in psychology, which happen to be nearly parallel, suggest it. While you have been studying types and theories of character in mediaeval history, I have been reading how the finest, most amiable phases of human nature are consistent with the entirely selfish origin and nature of its fundamental elements. How the capacity for sympathy and disinterested actions and the foundation of the higher justice can come into our volitions, without being originally planted there, — as the sentimental orthodox psychologists maintain that they are, — is a problem which my author, Mr. Bain, has attempted; and, though his explanations do not seem fully adequate or on a level with their theme, yet it is true, as he says in reply to Mr. Martineau’s criticisms of another of his theories, that “scientific

explanations have often a repulsive and disenchanting effect, and the scientific man is not made answerable for this.” We plainly see this in tricks. Why shouldn’t it be so in more serious matters? Mr. Martineau and his school may prefer the enchantment to the explanation, as many do in regard to tricks; but do not let them rest under the further illusion that they compass both in what they are pleased to call philosophy, that fine composition of poetry under the forms of science, of which Hegelianism is the most notable modern epic. The tendency of an idea to become the reality, considered as a distinct source of the active impulses in the mind, and the tendency of “fixed ideas” to thwart the operations of the will, whose nature it is to urge us from pain or to pleasure in ourselves, where alone they really exist to us, — are the basis of his explanations. Not only the phenomena of ordinary and mesmeric or somnambulic dreaming, and the effects in waking moments of ideas in conjunction with states of excitement or under the influence of great passions, like that of fear, or of great concentration, as in the fascination of a precipice, or the depression of a painful recollection, culminating sometimes in insanity, and commonly exhibited by it, — not only these exceptional phenomena, but also facts of wider and deeper import in human nature, find their explanation in this tendency. “The only way,” Mr. Bain says, “that I am able to explain the great fact of our nature denominated Sympathy, — fellow-feeling, pity, compassion, disinterestedness, — is by reference to this tendency of an idea to act itself out,” through which the perceptions of the outward signs of pleasure and pain urge us to act as if they were our own. The utilitarian does not differ from other moral beings in this respect. He also must be irrational to the extent of being habitually urged in his conduct by ideal, in place of actual, pleasures and pains, by goods and evils which are not present except in idea.

Now, the natures which are the most capable of thus living

out of themselves are also those most prone to passionate as opposed to rational actions; that is, to act from motives which are not real and present pleasures and pains in themselves, but which replace them by a susceptibility to the excitement of ideas. This susceptibility goes even further in most cases. In all moral actions but those of the extreme utilitarian, whose motives or sanctions, as well as his standard of conduct, come through his sympathetic nature, and by an immediate reference of conduct to the goods and evils felt through ideas, —in all other cases, the excitement does not take the immediate form of sympathy, but has apparently an absolute character. Indeed, the motive power of moral ideas is not ordinarily, if it ever is, derived immediately from any connection between them and ideas of good and evil as ends; and it is regarded by most psychologists as a unique power, whatever may be the source of the ideas which exert it. The ideas of right and wrong are certainly not the same as those of good and evil simply. In the last analysis, they are a commanded good and a forbidden evil. The element of authority is essential to them. Hence, the introspective psychologists have naturally been unable to discover the moral nature in the mere capacity for sympathy. But they are mistaken in assuming that the “moral imperative” is unique as a motive power, or is underived. Indeed, in the more tractable intellects, allied to the human, as in the more intelligent dogs, the education of the conscience, both as an active force and as a power of judgment, is capable of being carried much further than the capacity for sympathy would account for, great as this is in these animals. Right and wrong in a dog’s conscience may be supposed to differ from those of a more highly sympathetic nature, in having in much larger proportion the element of pure authority. They are, perhaps, the commanded and forbidden simply, — the connected ideas of good and evil being simply those of reward and punishment. So a dog could never be a utilitarian, or feel the “good of all” as a commanding motive, and as the warrant of his master’s authority. “Conscience is an education under authority,” and its force is primarily the various motives which authority addresses to us. These are not unique, but borrowed powers, — love, fear, and all the train of pains and pleasures under human control, the goods and evils of rewards and punishments, with their moral representatives, approbation and disapprobation.

But here, again, as in the case of pure sympathy or disinterestedness, the actual goods and evils or rewards and punishments, or even the reference to them through actual approval or condemnation, may be wholly replaced by the power of ideas, when these have acquired the requisite associations. And here, again, the utilitarian is like all other moral agents. He differs only as to the authority which he acknowledges as final, or as the test or ultimate authority of all proximate authorities. He simply denies an absolute, intuitive standard, and for an outward standard substitutes the good of all in place of the will of God; or, if he identifies these, it is by limiting his definition of the latter by his ideas of the former; and, if he is a practical utilitarian as well, then also his controlling motive to right conduct is the good it does, commanding him through his sympathies, since, as before, this is only present to him in idea, and is objective only through the excitement of ideas, or by the quality through which ideas tend to act themselves out.

Now, this quality, and the temper which conduces to it, in a perfectly sane mind, I regard as a chief constituent, when existing in a high degree, of what you describe as noble passion; and, when wrought into the character or the persistent and habitual tendencies of the will, it seems to me to be essential to the finest types of character. But, besides this, there is an element in what would commonly be understood by noble passion or energy of moral activity, which comes from

without or is objective, and dependent not merely on fineness of nature, but on historical causes, — on the times, the manners, and the prevailing religious, æsthetic, and moral conceptions. We ought to discriminate in an historical personage between the admirable qualities which are intrinsic and excite to universal and genuine imitation, and other charms which give attractiveness to him and his times, yet are not the pure gold, but the ornaments, the images, the sacred vessels, or, it may be, the utensils which are wrought from it. The charm of the forms into which genuine excellence has entered may be easily confounded with their intrinsic worth, — especially since genuineness, not fearing singularity, nor yet seeking it, will fall naturally into a diversity of outward embodiments, in some of which falseness will seek by imitation to hide itself; and since imitation has thus gained by association a bad character, and individuality an equally factitious good one. But this is not worse than the utilitarian insensibility to association, as opposed to æsthetic feeling, which would estimate an antique coin, for example, solely by its weight and quality of metal.

There were times when the relations of men to wealth, to its acquisition and administration, were inconsistent with the highest types of character, and were instinctively shunned as an impertinence and a moral obstacle; but for the modern man to seek the kingdom of heaven by this road would be like seeking to resemble a man of genius by imitating his eccentricities. There may be cases, even in modern times, in which wealth is truly felt to be such an obstacle,—the instance lately of wealth in slaves,—but these are fortunately cases of casuistry or individual morality, and do not any longer demand that poverty shall be preached. Or, to come to the true theme of this discussion, there were times in which the problem of noble life demanded for its solution a greater concentration and singleness of purpose, — even an escape from “the world,” — and the consideration of fewer objects of a

universal and disinterested character than are embraced in the moral scope of to-day. These conditions gave to the controlling ideas much more the character of ruling passions, and even led to the insane forms of moral action or to fanaticisms.

“It is easy to die for an idea when we have but one.” Beyond the utilitarian or beneficent measure of an idea thus made effective, there is an æsthetic charm in this very intensity, provided we can forget the cost, or overlook the narrowness and the poverty of the conditions to which such wealth of character is related. Such refining or æsthetic views are easy in historical perspective. The grand cathedral hides the squalid hovel. But the refining process cannot be applied by the living to their own age. The meanness, the corruption, the vice of it, meet them at every turn. That these are really less than in past times, and that great resources of moral energy, less conspicuous, but not less real, are guiding it toward a better future cannot be made clear to the imagination, and can only be evidenced by dry comparative statistics to the utilitarian understanding. But if the monument of our age, the religious edifice on which thousands of busy hands and studious minds are laboring, be the future material well-being of mankind, dedicated to the worship of happier and purer lives, and to a like pious care for posterity, will it be a less glorious monument or less deserving of future admiration than the cathedral? We are apt to think of the old cathedral-builders as all animated by the “quality of noble passion and the finer sensibilities, faculties, and emotions;” but may not a future age see in our enterprises a similar elevation of moral purpose? Some of the leading spirits of our times are as disinterested and devoted, and find in their aims, whether in politics, industry, or science, as powerful a stimulus to noble passion as the leaders of that age. The masses in all ages are led by the few in all that raises them much above the level of animal wants. Their moral powers are chiefly comprised under the

principles of imitation and authority, or in the faculties of folllowing and obeying. There are also the selfish rich in all ages alike. Posterity will see the money of the rich and the labor of the poor, or all that remains of either, glorified in the monuments, whether religious or utilitarian, whether material ones dedicated to immaterial interests, or immaterial ones dedicated to material interests, that commemorate the nobly disinterested, or the few that really live for mankind.

The moral type of modern times, besides being familiar, and thus disenchanted, is more broadly based on ordinary and universal human interests. Its catholicity is its only distinction. Hence, an æsthetic charm is missed; but shall we on that account call it a lower type? Do not let us forget that the picturesqueness of past types is in great measure relative and an historical illusion, like the charm and attractiveness of some old fashions of dress or of architecture. The qualities which determine individuality or its charm, cannot be used for distinctions of rank. They are not, as the naturalists say, “ordinal characters.” The orders of moral excellence cannot be made to depend on them: though individuality itself is a sign of genuineness, and in this has its charm, as when we judge from such characters in a painting that it is a faithful portrait. The intensity of the energy of moral feeling, provided this feeling rises to that stage of efficiency and steadiness of purpose which can justly be expected of it, is not in any higher degree the measure of its nobility, even though occasion should prove it equal to heroic action. It must also be rationally directed, else it may be insane rather than noble. The utility of its end, in which should be included the refinements of real life, must be this measure, though an absorption in ideas which spurns pleasure and wealth, and foregoes the innocent enjoyments and the goods of common human nature without feeling the sacrifice, must always be to us æsthetically fine. It is not moral, because it is inimitable. The

spirit of it only touches our life. It does not demand our approbation, since it involves no real sacrifice; but it commands our admiration, and appeals to æsthetic and religious emotion. Such types are to be prized, as all fine things are; if they could be common, an essential element of their worth and attractiveness would be wanting. They belong to our religious nature. The condition of moral esteem is that the sacrifice should be real and felt to be such, both by ourselves and by the objects of our esteem. Such esteem, to be morally effective, cannot consist with a small estimate of the goods to be sacrificed. This belongs to our utilitarian moral nature. So also a religious type, to be morally effective, must be real. A purely fictitious ideal is morally inert. Hence, a myth which has ceased to command faith is morally dead also.

But I have moralized enough to prove at least that I believe in modem times and types, if not to throw any light on the problems of your letter. If I have been wandering in all these pages around the real questions without having touched them, the fault is in the monologue. The Socratic dialectic, or art of getting at clear issues and a common understanding, is, as you say, the better way. If we had been taking one of the charming walks [about Florence] which might have furnished hints and illustrations, our talk would have been less connected perhaps, but could hardly have wandered more widely or more at will. Don’t take this moralizing as a specimen of a psychological lecture, but only as a letter. I can imagine the patiently attentive, somewhat puzzled look, expressive of “What is he driving at?” in the audience listening to such a “brief.” Extemporizing and watching the faces of the audience, as lawyers do before a jury, may make up for a want of illustrative and expansive power in my pen. But this letter is long enough without—long enough to refute — any suggestion of a defect in the way of expansion.

To the Same.

July 16, 1870.

... A true morality does not forbid selfish pleasures, except so far as they, in the long run, inflict harm on others, or more harm than the agent himself would incur for them, if it fell on him instead of others. Comte’s “altruism” falsely makes the good of others the sole end, instead of the restraining limit and proper guide of conduct. In the long run, the privileges of wealth — that is, most of them — conduce to the benefit of society; and so the law allows of prodigality, though morality marks debit against it in its unbalanced accounts. . . . Moreover, a certain social and moral rank, involving substantial dignities and privileges, is an order which society confers as a quasi means of payment of its debts; and whoever fills or aspires to this rank undertakes to act upon, and is therefore bound by, a stricter code of morals than mankind at large; and in this way I agree with you. I think that the privileges of wealth might and should be curtailed. A moral aristocracy among the wealthy should admit to its freedom no one who uses his claims on the public goods for costly and entirely selfish gratifications. I do not entirely like the figure of “stewardship,” as defining the relations of the rich man to society. What he, in fact, possesses in our modern economy is the right to dispose, for his own gratification, of a certain portion of the property, the actual goods, which industry is constantly creating or employing. If he refrains from using this privilege, it is the same for the time being as if he had given all his possessions back to society. His money, in the hands of his banker, is circulated by loans; and his houses and lands are occupied and used just as if he did not exist. As a rich man, he is simply one who has the power to take of the goods offered for ultimate exchange as much as he pleases, up to the limits of his so-called possessions. He may consume

these goods himself, or give them to be consumed by his beneficiaries; but he is not properly a steward simply as a rich man. He is more exactly a butler. As the creator of his fortune, or as a business administrator, through whom the wealth is increased by the appliances of industry, he is properly called a steward, and in that capacity is as useful and honorable a citizen as the merely rich man can be. Beyond that, his powers and means of doing good are very limited, nothing comparable to his apparent powers as a benefactor, or his real powers as a consumer. His peculiar duties to society as a merely rich man are chiefly negative, and are involved in the obligation not to do the harm he has it in his power to do, —not to waste the goods he has at his command, and not to diminish the productive use of his wealth by the industrious.

You ask to what times precisely I refer in saying that there were times when the relations of men to wealth were inconsistent with the highest types of character. I really had in mind conditions of society, rather than actual historical periods, but of such as history affords examples. When a title to property acquired by war, or by any form of violence, was regarded as equally honorable with the title of industry, or even more honorable, and when Cæsar reduced the value of gold one-quarter by the enormity of his plunder, — the possession of great wealth could not but be associated with conduct and traits of character which the highest ideals, even of ancient times, reprobated, and which early Christianity unquestionably associated so strongly with the things that are Cæsar’s, that for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven was next to impossible. The same condition of society existed throughout the whole supremacy of Rome, and was the chief cause of the decline and fall; and the advent of the strictly modern era was marked by the change of relation of the wealthy and industrious to the state

and to princely power,—the state henceforward, from being the brigand it was, becoming a borrower and an honorable debtor. In all this period, and even now in India, the noble passion for a better life is seen dissociated from wealth. But now, with us and in Europe, since feudalism and the slave-trade no longer confer titles of property, or none that are not countersigned by a more authentic and honorable authority, the rich man may feel that he is not of the company of those who owe their possessions to the victims of violence: he may feel, and be, of the company of the innocent. Still, his means of positive beneficence, even as a friend of the poor, depend upon possessions more strictly his own than worldly goods can be. If he has not the heart of charity, and the head too, he had much better give his money to be bestowed by those who have; otherwise, his munificence will be only a variety of prodigality. As giving leisure and opportunity for the culture of the mind and heart, wealth appears in the most honorable relation it can sustain to the problem of noble living. . . .

I do not think that the universality and the utilitarian or humanitarian character of the modern types of noble endeavor are at all inconsistent with that concentration of thought and feeling in individuals, which is the condition of hearty, earnest strength of action. When I spoke of the greater concentration and limitation of aims which characterized the middle ages, I was not thinking of the narrowness of individual pursuits, but of the narrowness of the range of pursuits within the conception of noble life. Offices, devotions, opportunities for noble effort, have multiplied since then, and have acquired a more distinct reference to the universal ends of human happiness; but it does not follow that the individual actor now, more than then, must scatter his energies fruitlessly over the whole field they cover. It is one of the constituent elements of the idea of progress that there shall be specialization as

well as differentiation in the development: that is, offices or functions are multiplied and co-ordinated, or adapted as a system to some common end; and all the parts of the organism become more and more specialized or limited in their several functions. The lung-tissue becomes fitted for nothing but respiration; the skin-tissue for nothing but transpiration; the gland, the nerve, and the muscle are each a tissue of general inabilities, with one special proficiency; but all are determined in their agency by the ends of a common life. The common life in which the moral nobilities of the Middle Ages found their ends — in other words, the essential religion of the Middle Ages —was itself narrow, but capable of inspiring with heroic energy every special devotee. It brought heaven nearer to his work; but each workman was no more a specialist than now, — not so much so. The idea for which it is easy to die, if we have only it, is not the idea of our special service, but of its chief end.

I am curious, by the way, to learn from you whether the interest you have in knowing who said that “it is easy to die for an idea when we have but one,” is from the merit of the observation itself, or from a vague consciousness of having heard it before? I remember, with the distinctness of yesterday, having long ago communicated that maxim to you as a saying of the sage Gurney; I thought when I quoted it that you would remember it, and need I say that I counted on the rhetorical effect of the association? Perhaps the vague memory which prompts your question, if that be the case, was just as effective for the purpose. Having shown you what a wily rhetorician I am capable of being, I will go back to the Middle Ages.

The difference between the essential religions of those and of our times appears, as you say, “not so much among the leaders of the world as the led.” The masses of our times are essentially unreligious, or, what comes to the same thing, their

religion is not that of the leaders. The imaginations of the uneducated are incapable of being animated by the enthusiasms that inspire our men of genius. The essential religion of the leaders is not sufficiently sensuous to reach them; and the only remedy I can conceive is the education of the masses.

As to Art, the love of it, except as the result of a special and systematic culture, and as an acquisition of the educated, must grow up in a people with Art itself, and with a sentiment of it as a distinction in which the people have a conscious pride. To be a persistent and effective sentiment, other than a love of the beautiful in general, it must be like a mother’s love for her children, greater because they are hers than because they are beautiful.

And, speaking of the sensuous in religion, the Roman Church bases her power on its catholicity. Is not this “the power of bells and banners over the human soul,” of which you speak, — the power, namely, of the senses over the human soul? The startling, vivid, pungent effects on the senses are connected by an original endowment of our natures with a whole circle of emotions. Terror, anger, mirth, enthusiasm, are in turn excited by them. The first essential psychological principle of the bell or the banner is that which causes terror in the birds or anger in the bull, mirth in the child, or enthusiasm in the devotee, according as other and subordinate sensuous effects and mental associations determine the specific character of the emotions.

You see that I have followed the question-and-answer system, or rather the answer system, in spite of your injunction, “that a letter should bear some impress of one’s circumstances;” but I am not sure that I have in fact violated the rule, since the only voluntary reflections which I have to set forth are those inspired by your letter. Whether I have answered all your questions, or any, in a manner entirely satisfactory, I

have, at any rate, dogmatized enough for one letter; and, to modify the otherwise unmitigated omniscience of my style, I will propound one problem in return.

Tell me, from your point of observation, what is going to be the result of the war announced in this morning’s telegrams.

To Mr. Norton.

Cambridge, Aug. 10, 1870.

Letters grow more charming and interesting as our correspondences are lengthened out, partly, perhaps, because from the necessity of the case they become, in default of any better, the normal mode of intercourse, and become as precious to us as the sign language is to the deaf and dumb.

... I am sure you will regard charitably my evident disposition to review you, and will consider that you are in a measure responsible for this tendency from my training under you in the “North American Review,” for which, by the way, I have not written for a very long time. I have just finished reading Mr. Wallace’s book of essays on Natural Selection, which I may notice, if I do not lose my interest in it before coming round to it again. It is a very clever book.

I never told you of my acquaintance with Charles Salter, See p. 199. ⁵¹ formerly Unitarian minister in West Cambridge, who died very suddenly last spring, on a voyage to Europe. I came to know him quite intimately last fall and winter, and exchanged opinions on theological and kindred subjects quite freely. He was studying law, having given up the ministry on account of doubts on fundamental tenets in theology. This change was a matter of very serious concern with him, and was made from the most modest and conscientious motives, such as an unwillingness to dogmatize beyond the limits of his own assurance. He appeared to me to be a most accomplished

and sensible man; and unlike most radicals he had no philosophical substitutes for, or original proofs of, the religious doctrines he had undertaken to teach; but he seemed to be governed in his views of religious doctrines, much more than most men, by moods of feeling. He felt the force of sceptical objections most when it was his duty to remove or ignore them, but freedom from this responsibility restored his confidence. His mind and character interested me a great deal, though I am not at all sure that I have indicated the interest or can express it.

. . . The Gurneys are in Cambridge most of the time this summer, interested in the progress of their house. I occasionally see them, and share with them the summer comforts of Shady Hill. Mr. Norton’s place at Cambridge, then occupied by Professor Gurney. ⁵² I was for two days last week the guest of James Thayer, in Milton, and devoted most of one day to a call on the Lesleys at Brush Hill.

. . . What you say of the responsibility of the glittering generalities of our Revolutionary politics for the irrationality of political creeds in Europe seems to me quite true, though not the whole truth, or a complete explanation of the matter. As the revolutionists borrow from us, so we borrowed from the philosophers certain half truths, really founded in utility and in history, but needing the interpretations and qualifications of the philosophic reason. But the philosophic reason is out of place in a quarrel, and resigns its influence to the sentimentalist and the maximist, and these fight fallacy with fallacy. Against the fallacies of divine rights, whether in king or capitalists, the fallacies of liberty and equality are good thunder; and, so long as force is an efficient means of supporting or overthrowing convictions, they are legitimate arguments. But these are the staples of politics in Europe. Ergo, &c.

Forgive my resorting to the emphasis of the syllogism as if I were arguing against any thing you say. I wish only to transfer part of the responsibility of Utopian politics to the hard necessities of the case. The ideal absurdities of Utopia are in part at least induced by the actual absurdities of Europe. Two of the causes you mention, the deep-rooted, religion-sanctioned, actual abuses in the social conditions of Europe, and the delusive aims and absurd expectations of the revolutionists, — are in a great measure responsible for each other, like the polar conditions, or the two electricities of electric induction. I am the more inclined to this opinion, since we have outgrown our old sentimental creed from the lack of opposition to it, which, I think, was the condition of its very existence; while it seems to me to remain still the creed of European republicans from the continuance of the opposition. But this is only an incidental point of your most interesting discussion; and, having performed my patriotic duty in respect to it, I fully agree with you in regard to the deplorable consequences of the facts, however interpreted. There seems no escape from them, only a mitigation by making the revolution as rapid and complete as possible. This will not achieve perfection, but will afford the only basis on which substantial progress is possible. Perhaps the best service France or Louis Napoleon could do at the present juncture would be to republicanize Europe, as some prophet has predicted he will do as a last desperate measure.

From this the transition is natural enough, though somewhat abrupt, to the consideration of the part which utilitarian reason has to play in such a tragedy. Reason is quite out of place in dealing with the idea militant, with passions or sentiments, in assisting their direct actual power over the human will; but it is ever ready, in moments of reflection and in peace, to harmonize conflicting passions and sentiments by the only certain and universal standard of well-being and

duty. Utility does not oppose itself, as many intuitive or sentimental moralists suppose, to the proper jurisdiction of feeling, — to devotion or to the passionate love of the beautiful. Its philosophy does not contend for the sanction of utility as the sole and sufficing motive to conduct. It only proposes a standard as the proper test — a negative test it may be — of every motive. It does not propose to measure beforehand the positive elements of possible human excellences, the highest aims or the supremest delights. Its real enemy is a priori conviction, or prejudice asserting itself as its own justification, or sentiment born of strife and narrowness, and sanctioned only by custom and traditional religious authority. So far as a feeling is ultimate and an immediate source of human happiness or excellence, it is its own positive standard and sanction. Utility tests it only negatively in its consistency with other interests and feelings, and with the maximum of all in all sentient beings measured both by intensity and rank, — not moral rank, for this is a resultant, an acquired or conferred dignity. The inductions and criticisms by which this test is applied may be long and difficult, and may not be possible for an individual observer of social conditions, — being like the inductions of astronomy or other physical sciences; but, as the result of many centuries of observation, they are embodied in the best or wisest moral codes or exemplars, which come to us sanctioned by many associations, not in themselves rightly authoritative, but often more influential (and usefully so) than their rational grounds could be, except with the most refined and enlightened.

There is an antithesis between utility and beauty, between the useful and the beautiful, which is often mistaken for an antagonism. A useful thing is a means simply, and not an end in itself. A beautiful thing belongs to the class of ends in themselves, or absolute ends, to which also belongs every ultimate source of pleasure of whatever rank or intensity.

The beautiful thing agrees with the class to which it belongs in having no ulterior end, or only an incidental one, like Mr. Darwin’s uses of color in birds and flowers; but it differs from its class generally in having a high rank, an intrinsic dignity or preferability in kind, which depends on its mental relationships and affinities. But whether the pursuit of the beautiful be right or wrong is not determined by its rank as a pleasure, although this rank, depending on its broad relationships, would be likely enough to insure that consistency with the maximum of excellence or happiness or pleasure or wellbeing, or by whatever name we call the true ultimate standard of moral excellence. Now so far is the pursuit of the useful from being inconsistent with the pursuit of the beautiful, that it really presupposes such ultimate ends as the grounds of its utility.

But it is not the beautiful alone or even pre-eminently, but the whole class of ends in themselves — all our pleasures and those of all sentient beings — that constitute the grounds of utility. It is a mistake, however, which all, or almost all the opponents of the utilitarian philosophy make, as well as many of its advocates, to suppose that the measure of a pleasure in this philosophy is simply its intensity as a feeling, and not also its rank or preferability in kind, or a certain dignity it has in the spiritual hierarchy independent of and antecedent to its proper moral rank. This moral rank is a derived dignity, and is determined by preferability or weight with the will on the whole and as compared with the sum of the pleasures or ends that are sacrificed for it, both in ourselves and others. But in this estimate the intrinsic value of a pleasure, independent of its intensity and depending on its extent in our natures and in our lives, should be taken into account. Thus, the intuitive moralist is correct in affirming intrinsic differences of dignity in ends, at least as motives in the developed will, or in any but the most elementary of

mental natures; but he errs again in supposing that these are the same as moral differences or original distinctions of right and wrong. They are unquestionably the grounds, which, along with the intensities of feelings as pleasures or pains, determine the moral rank of actions or rules of conduct.

To allow these original differences of rank in ends may seem to be granting to the intuitive moralist all that he demands, and leaving nothing distinctive in the utilitarian philosophy. But this is far from being the case, either theoretically or practically. In theory, this philosophy has still to insist distinctively that no rule or principle of conduct, except its own fundamental maxim of the greatest universal benevolence and disinterestedness, can be received on the authority of any sense or sentiment or properly intuitive power, or be ultimately and authoritatively determined to be right, except by the longest acquaintance with the conditions of well-being, and the general consequence or effects on well-being of acting on the rule. Some of the most fundamental and important rules of morality, chiefly negative in form, are, it is true, quite simple corollaries from obvious conditions of well-being and the fundamental axiom of the greatest good; and it is also true practically that more influential sanctions than utility are necessary to enforce its injunctions, and are therefore sanctioned by it. Moreover, what is called the conscience, or strong and controlling aversions to certain classes of actions and admirations or approvals of other classes, should be respected and carefully fostered, even though in some matters it leads wrong; since a faulty conscience is more useful or less harmful on the whole than unprincipled conduct, even in the best disposed natures. But practically, also, the utilitarian philosophy has a distinctive lesson to teach, or rather many lessons, — a whole world of abuses to correct, which subsist by the very same sanctions or the same kind of sanctions the intuitive morality adopts as the basis of right and wrong.

Such are the self-sanctioned prejudices, time-sanctioned iniquities, religious absurdities, all of which can claim the same grounds of justification as those on which the intuitive morality would base the ten commandments; namely, that most people, or at least somebody, feels them to be right. That somebody, say the pope, should be infallible in his feelings, is a necessary corner-stone of this philosophy, and most of the unorthodox or radical advocates of it claim this infallibility for themselves ; but it follows from their principles that in cases of dispute some pope, — whether the Roman pontiff or not, — some holiest man, must be the final arbiter. The aims and lessons of the utilitarian philosophy are not, however, in any way opposed to, but are rather in alliance with all that is noble and beautiful and delightful in the possibilities of human nature. It is only incidentally, or perhaps by a mistake of its true scope and interests, that it turns attention away from æsthetic pursuits to the broader but perhaps on the whole not worthier interests of science or industry or politics.

I do not think that you at all overestimate the spiritual rank of æsthetic pleasures. They are intimately associated with the fundamental quality of moral nobility; they consist with generosity and sympathy, and are inconsistent with monopoly, thus differing from merely sensual pleasures, though like these they are ends in themselves. Again, they are refined pleasures. All that is disagreeable or loathsome is removed; and the special end of the fine arts is this refinement or abstraction of the beautiful. Moreover, they are pleasures of the higher senses, and have extensive intellectual affinities This is Mr. Bain’s analysis, which, whether complete or not, is the best I have seen. æsthetic pleasures doubtless belong, as you say, to the most sensitive, susceptible, and passionate natures; and they were doubtless more pursued, but I think for a different reason and not from

temperament, by the men of the thirteenth century than by those of the nineteenth. There is nothing in the aims of our times inconsistent with them, except, perhaps, the catholicity and variety of modern interests, and a consequent want of concentration and general sympathy and of public patronage of them. Instead of whole communities devoting their surplus wealth to them, and re-enforcing them with the powerful sentiments of patriotism and religion, we have now, and probably can have, only schools or at best colonies of artists, who must inevitably seem narrow in their aims compared to the men with whom Art meant not only beauty, but the highest honors and public spirit and religion. A great general may be entirely absorbed in the problems of the art of war, but his enthusiasm for his pursuit cannot be said to be independent of the patriotic ardor of his soldiers. And so, though no doubt, as you say, the best Gothic artists were distinctly and consciously moved not through devout passion, but through plain æsthetic joy, yet the intensity and quality of their feeling must have depended on an appreciation of their work, which sprung from other than æsthetic motives, — from national or race pride, from patriotism or religious devotion. Indeed, as you go on to say, the happiness of the Gothic artists was “in the successful solution of problems they had to solve. It was the delight of beauty joined with the excitement of genuine scientific achievements but this adjunct is not an æsthetic motive, though it be the last infirmity of noble minds.