WE
BEGIN to
see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle
and law of our aesthetic being, the universality of a principle and law which
is that of all being arid which we must therefore hold steadily in view in
regard to all human activities. It rests on a truth on which the sages have
always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it may be constantly
disputed. It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking
for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above
ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity; the truth which we
glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great
secret of life, that which it is in labour to discover and to make real to its
self-knowledge.
The seeking for God is also, subjectively, the seeking for
our highest, truest, fullest, largest self. It is the seeking for a Reality
which the appearances of life conceal because they only partially express it or
because they express it from behind veils and figures, by oppositions and
contraries, often by what seem to be perversions and opposites of the Real. It
is the seeking for something whose completeness comes only by a concrete and
all-occupying sense of the Infinite and Absolute; it can be established in its
integrality only by finding a value of the infinite in all finite things and by
the attempt - necessary, inevitable, however
impossible or paradoxical it may seem to the normal reason - to raise all relativities to their absolutes and to
reconcile their differences, oppositions and contraries by elevation and
sublimation to some highest term in which all these are unified. Some perfect
highest term there is by which all our imperfect lower terms can be justified
and their discords harmonised if once we can induce them to be its conscious
expressions, to exist not for themselves but for That, as contributory values
of that
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highest Truth, fractional measures of that highest and largest common
measure. A One there is in which all the entangled discords of this
multiplicity of separated, conflicting, intertwining, colliding ideas, forces,
tendencies, instincts, impulses, aspects, appearances which we call life, can
find the unity of their diversity, the harmony of their divergences, the
justification of their claims, the correction of their perversions and
aberrations, the solution of their problems and disputes. Knowledge seeks for
that in order that Life may know its own true meaning and transform itself into
the highest and most harmonious possible expression of a divine Reality. All seeks
for that, each power feels out for it in its own way: the infrarational gropes
for it blindly along the line of its instincts, needs, impulses; the rational lays
for it its trap of logic and order, follows out and gathers together its
diversities, analyses them in order to synthetise; the supra- rational gets
behind and above things and into their inmost parts, there to touch and lay
hands on the Reality itself in its core and essence and enlighten all its
infinite details from that secret
centre.
This truth comes most easily home to us in Religion and in Art,
in the cult of the spiritual and in the cult of the beautiful, because there we
get
away
most thoroughly from the unrestful pressure of the
outward appearances of life, the urgent siege of its necessities, the deafening
clamour of its utilities. There we are not compelled at every turn to make
terms with some gross material claim, some vulgar but inevitable necessity of
the hour and the moment. We have leisure and breathing-time to seek the Real
behind the apparent: we are allowed to turn our eyes either away from the
temporary and transient or through the temporal itself to the eternal; we can
draw back from the limitations of the immediately practical and re-create our
souls by the touch of the ideal and the universal. We begin to shake off our
chains, we get rid of life in its aspect of a prison-house with Necessity for
our jailer and utility for our constant taskmaster; we are admitted to the
liberties of the soul; we enter God's infinite kingdom of beauty and delight or
we lay hands on the keys of our absolute self-finding and open ourselves to the
possession or the adoration of the Eternal. There lies the immense value of
Religion, the immense value of Art and Poetry to the human spirit; it lies in
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their immediate power for inner truth, for
self-enlargement, for liberation
But in other spheres of life, in the
spheres of what by an irony of our ignorance we call especially practical life,
- although, if
the Divine be our true object
of search and realisation, our normal conduct in them and our current idea of
them is the very opposite of practical, - we are less ready to recognise the
universal truth. We take a long time to admit it even partially in theory, we
are seldom ready at all to follow it in practice. And we find this difficulty
because there especially, in all our practical life, we are content to be the
slaves of an outward Necessity and think our- selves always excused when we
admit as the law of our thought, will and action the yoke of immediate and
temporary utilities. Yet even there we must arrive eventually at the highest
truth. We shall find out in the end that our daily life and our social
existence are not things apart, are not another field of existence with another
law than the inner and ideal. On the contrary, we shall never find out their
true meaning or resolve their harsh and often agonising problems until we learn
to see in them a means towards the discovery and the individual and collective
expression of our highest and, because our highest, therefore our truest and
fullest self, our largest most imperative principle and power of existence. All
life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise,
express the Divine
It is in our
ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real and highest
practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the rational man
has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a matter of reason,
to determine its nature, its law, its practical action by some principle of
reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can
really succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences of the intellect
building elegant and empty constructions with words and ideas, mere conventions
of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious failures which break down
at the first strenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system of
utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth century
-
the great century of science and reason and utility -
by one of its most positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discre-
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dited. Happily we
need now only smile at its shallow pretentious errors, its substitution of a
practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and absolute
motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific
and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough to the
reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole instinct and
intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and impracticable are other
attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,
- the hedonistic theory which
refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the
sociological which supposes ethics to be no more than a system of formulas, of
conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social
impulses and would regulate its action by that insufficient standard. The
ethialcal being escapes from all these
formulas; it is a law to itself and .finds its principle in its own eternal
nature which is not in its 'essential character a growth of evolving mind, even
though It
may
seem to be that in its
earthly history, but a light from the
ideal, a reflection
in man of the Divine
Not that all these
errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all
errors of the human reason are false representations, a wrong building,
effective misconstructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth.
Utility is a fundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles
of
existence are in the end one; therefore it is true that the highest good is
also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest
good of the greatest number, but simply the
good of others and most widely
the good of all is the one ideal
aim of our outgoing ethical
practice; it is that which the ethical man would like to effect, if he could
only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this
does not help to regulate our ethical
practice, nor does it supply us' with its inner principle whether of being or
of action, but only produces one of the many considerations by which we can
feel our way along
the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into the
hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to
the ethical. Moreover, the "
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standard of utility, the judgment of utility,
its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the
habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general
law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as it
is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or
ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one safe rule for the ethical
man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of
good, his intuition of good and to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but
he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be
faithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true:
better is the law of one's own nature though ill performed, dangerous is an
alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of
nature of the ethical being is the pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit
of utility.
Neither is its law the pursuit of
pleasure high or base, nor self-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or
even spiritual. It is true, here too, that the highest good is both in its
nature and inner effect the highest bliss. Ananda, delight of being, is the
spring of all existence and that to which it tends and for which it seeks
openly or covertly in all its activities. It is true too that in virtue
growing, in good accomplished there is a great pleasure and" that the seeking
for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of
virtue. But for practical purposes this is a side aspect of the matter; it does
not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary,
virtue comes to the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature
and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of strength by
suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the
pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that higher strenuous delight,
though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first
conscious in the conscient normal part of our being which is the field of the
struggle. The action of the ethical man is not motived by even an inner plea- sure,
but by a call of his being, the necessity of an ideal, the figure of an
absolute standard, a law of the Divine.
In the outward history of
our ascent this does not at first
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appear
clearly,
does not appear perhaps at all; there the evolution
of man in society may seem to be the determining cause of his ethical
evolution. For ethics only begins by the demand upon him of something other
than his personal preference, vital pleasure or material self-interest; and
this demand seems at first to work on him through the necessity of his
relations with others, -by the exigencies of his social existence. But that
this is not the core of the matter is shown by the fact that the ethical demand
does not always square with the social demand, nor the ethical standard always
coincide with the social standard. On the contrary, the ethical man is often
called upon to reject and do battle with the social demand, to break, to move
away from, to reverse the social standard. His relations with others and his
relations with himself are both of them the occasions of his ethical growth;
but that which determines his ethical being is his relations with God, the urge
of the Divine upon him whether concealed in his nature or conscious in his
higher self or inner genius. He obeys an inner ideal, not an outer standard; he
answers to a divine law in his being, not to a social claim or a collective
necessity. The ethical imperative comes not from around, but from within him
and above him.
It has been felt and
said from of old that the laws of right, the laws of perfect conduct are the
laws of the gods, eternal beyond, laws that man is conscious of and summoned
to
obey. The age of reason has scouted this summary
account of the matter as a superstition or a poetical imagination which
the nature and history of the world contradict. But still there is a truth in
this ancient superstition or imagination which the rational denial of it misses
and the rational confirmations of it, whether Kant's categorical imperative or
another, do not altogether restore. If man's conscience is a creation of his
evolving nature, if his conceptions of ethical law are mutable and depend on
his stage of evolution, yet at the root of them there is something constant in
all their mutations which lies at the very roots of his own nature and of
world-nature. And if Nature in man and the world is in its beginnings
infra-ethical as well as infrarational, as it is at its summit supra-ethical as
well as suprarational, yet in that infra-ethical there is some-
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thing which becomes in the human plane of being
the ethical, and that supra-ethical is itself a consummation of the ethical and
cannot be reached by any who have not trod the long ethical road. Below hides that
secret of good in all things which the human being approaches and tries to
deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden
the eternal Good which exceeds our partial and fragmentary ethical conceptions.
Our ethical impulses and
activities begin like all the rest in the infrarational and take their rise
from the subconscient. They arise as an instinct of right, an instinct of
obedience to an ununderstood law, an instinct of self-giving in labour, an
instinct of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, an instinct of love, of
self-subordination and of solidarity with others. Man obeys the law at first
without any inquiry into the why and the wherefore; he does not seek for it a
sanction in the reason. His first thought is that it is a law created by higher
powers than himself and his race and he says with the ancient poet that he
knows not whence these laws sprang, but only that they are and endure and
cannot with impunity be violated. What the instincts and impulses seek after,
the reason labours to make us understand, so that the will may come to use the
ethical impulses intelligently and turn the instincts into ethical ideas. It
corrects man's crude and often erring misprisions of the ethical instinct,
separates and purifies his confused associations, shows as best it can the
relations of his often clashing moral ideals, tries to arbitrate and compromise
between their conflicting claims, arranges a system and many-sided rule of
ethical action. And all this is well, a necessary stage of our advance; but in
the end these ethical ideas and this intelligent ethical will which it has
tried to train to its control, escape from its hold and soar up beyond its
province. Always, even when enduring its rein and curb, they have that inborn
tendency.
For the ethical being like the rest is a growth and a seeking towards the
absolute, the divine, which can only be attained securely in the supra
rational. It seeks after an absolute purity, an absolute right, an absolute
truth, an absolute strength, an absolute love and self-giving, and it is most
satisfied when it can
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get them in absolute measure, without limit,
curb or compromise, divinely, infinitely, in a sort of godhead and
transfiguration
of the ethical being. The reason
is chiefly concerned with what
it best understands, the apparent process, the
machinery, the outward act, its result and effect, its circumstance, occasion
and motive; by these it judges the morality of the action and the morality of
the doer. But the developed ethical being knows instinctively that it is an
inner something which it seeks and the outward act is only a means of bringing
out and manifesting within ourselves by its psychological effects that inner
absoluteld eternal entity. The value of our actions lies not so much in their
apparent nature and outward result as in their help towards the growth of the
Divine within us. It is difficult, even
impossible to justify upon outward grounds the absolute justice,
absolute right, absolute purity, love or selflessness of an action or course of
action; for action is always relative, it is mixed and uncertain in its
results, perplexed in its occasions. But it is possible to relate the inner being to the eternal and absolute
good,
make
our sense and will full of it so as to act out of its
impulsion
or
its intuitions and inspirations. That is what the ethical
being labours
towards and the higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner efforts
In fact ethics is not in
its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort
to be blameless according the standards of the world,
-
those are only crude appearances, it is an attempt to
grow into the divine nature. Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the
inalienable purity of God's being; its parts of truth and right are a seeking
after conscious unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts
of sympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and universality of
the divine love; its parts of strength and manhood are an edification of the
divine strength and
power. That is the heart of its meaning. Its high
fulfilment comes
when the being of the man undergoes this
transfiguration; then it is not his actions that standardise his nature but his
nature that gives value to his actions; then he is no longer laboriously
virtuous, artificially moral, but naturally divine. Actively, too, he is
fulfilled and consummated when he is not led or
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moved either by the infrarational impulses or
the rational intelligence and will, but inspired and piloted by the divine
knowledge and will made conscious in his nature. And that can only be done,
first by communication of the truth .of these things through the intuitive mind
as it purifies itself progressively from the invasion of egoism, self-interest,
desire, passion and all kinds of self- will, finally through the suprarational
light and power, no longer communicated but present and in possession of his
being. Such was the supreme aim of the ancient sages who had the wisdom which
rational man and rational society have rejected because it was too high a truth
for the comprehension of the reason and for the powers of the normal limited
human will too bold and immense, too infinite an effort
Therefore it is with the cult of Good, as
with the cult of Beauty and the cult of the spiritual. Even in its first
instincts it is already an obscure seeking after the divine and absolute; it
aims at an absolute satisfaction, it finds its highest light and means in
something beyond the reason, it is fulfilled only when it finds God, when it
creates in man some image of the divine Reality. Rising from the infrarational
beginnings through its intermediate dependence on the reason to a suprarational
consummation, the ethical is like the aesthetic and the religious being of man
a seeking after the Eternal.
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