As long as morality is regarded as a Divinely implanted principle, subject to no laws beyond the caprice and changing mood of a personal Deity, the essentials which underlie our conduct are lost sight of. Morality, that is to say those moral codes which are observed and recognized, consists of the imposition of values; but the meaning and the virtue of those values lie in the policy which will produce desired results. Moral values are subject to constant revision as world influences affect our outlook. Our endeavour should always be to probe the essentials. As long as morality is thought to depend on "Revelation" and religious superstition, the essentials are lost sight of. The connexion between Religion and Morality is arbitrary, and since Religions owe their power to the fear of the Unknown, and the virtue of Morality depends upon the necessity of conforming to that mode of conduct which will produce known results, Religions tend to mask the essentials in Morality and make it unreal.
Morality is held to include two distinct principles; moral obligation, or conduct towards[Pg 33] others, and conduct towards, or the debt we owe, ourselves. We are here concerned chiefly with the first; the second—those rules of conduct which concern only ourselves, are bound up with the purpose of existence, with the ultimate end. Moral obligation has arisen out of the necessity for co-ordination and system in our mutual relationships. Without a moral code, social life would become chaotic and impossible, comparable only to the state of Russia under mob rule in the year of grace 1918—a state immeasurably more degraded than that of Britain in the era B.C.; the early Briton like the modern Kafir, at any rate, gave vent to his predatory and murderous instincts, for the most part, outside his own little tribe. The imposition of some recognized rules of conduct, safeguarding the security of life and property, is as necessary to the community as the existence of a coinage for the negotiation of commercial bargains; in fact it is more so. The two are analogous: the moral code must give effect to that first and universal principle of ethics expressed thus, "Do unto others as you would they should do unto you," which is only another way of saying, "You may expect others to treat you as you intend to treat them in similar circumstances." Hence the standardization of rules of conduct becomes a principle of Utility. Altruism has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Even indignation at the spectacle of acute suffering needlessly inflicted on animals, where considerations of reciprocal treatment on[Pg 34] the part of the animal do not apply, is correctly based on the offence such a "discordance" causes to the ?sthetic sensibility of the cultivated, or the induced sympathetic discomfort of the many. In many natures the pain-suggesting spectacle, or even the mere thought of it, spontaneously evokes anger, which seeks satisfaction in the punishment of the author of its occurrence. The only rational or intellectual process involved in the resulting "moral judgment" is, as a rule, confined to a realization of the pain-suggesting idea, and the direction of vengeful impulses against the offender, while the consequences or ends of conduct in no way determine the judgment. The particular idiocy of the anti-vivisection agitation is obvious. We are here, of course, purposely considering, not actual and arbitrary morality, but the essentials upon which all moralities are based. We shall deal more fully as we proceed with those psychic and emotional factors which do, in fact, colour and distort all moral values. To return to our analogy—we may say then, that a conventional moral rule stands for the credit of national morality, much as a five-pound note stands for the credit of national wealth.
However wise a code of morality may be, it is necessarily artificial. It has grown up to suit the peculiar circumstances and demands of race, climate and time. The basic reason for its existence is too often encrusted and disguised by fears, superstitions and illusions, perpetual[Pg 35] creatures of the human mind; the essentials are often lost sight of or forgotten, and Truth is parodied as the principle that gave birth to the ecclesiastical chimera which forms the edifice of modern cults. Is it surprising, then, that morality is garbed in the changing coat of a chameleon? That what is held moral to-day is immoral to-morrow, and that what is held immoral here is moral elsewhere?
The second and deeper morality concerns ourselves only. It demands an answer to the eternal question: What is the Ultimate Good? One great imperative stands out pre-eminent: we must be true to ourselves. He who would seek the truth must himself be true. Without truth there is no creation, no progress. But before we can be true to ourselves, we must know ourselves; that is the problem we are considering—knowledge of the ego.
Some men are content to supply synonyms for the Ideal—for Perfection, the goal of endeavour—imagining they are thereby showing the way. Others realize the first task must be to cleanse the way of the inadequacies and perversions which masquerade as the whole Truth, as the "word of God."
The Ultimate Good cannot be translated into the petty codes of human convenience, neither can it be deduced from the wanton phantoms of man\'s wild fancy, called religion, which, by attempting to expound everything, explains nothing.
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What is religion? Is it the search for truth? Is it not an attempt to clothe our conception of the Infinite in terms finite?—the result being grotesque, bearing no relation to existence, a lawless chimera, born of man\'s dread of the unknown, an amorphous fantasy fashioned out of the distorted visions of man\'s hopes and fears, modelled, amended and shaped in course of time in accordance with the postulate of man\'s nature—man the religious animal!
Science cannot give us the whole truth and admits it! "Absolute beginnings or origins are beyond the pale of science."[34] But religion professes to know and is disproved at every step. It is when Religion refuses to learn that she is harmful; because her values are false and her thought retrospective that she is inadequate. It is not because the religions of the past and their legacies to-day cannot prove the Transcendent that they should be discarded, but because they attempt to prove it and turn the world into chaos in so doing. It is not only because, in the words of Huxley, "everywhere priests have broken the spirit of wisdom and tried to stop human progress by quotations from their Bibles or books of their Saints," that the old religion is outgrown, but because it is daily growing more and more impotent.
Whether for good or evil the influence of religion on the conduct of men daily grows less. Religious fanaticism is gradually giving place to[Pg 37] secular and political fanaticism, whose votaries shriek in the name of Democracy, Socialism or other watchword of Utopia, ever attempting to impose new moral values bearing as little correspondence to reality as the old values. Neither can recent attempts to express the old religion in terms of modern thought revive that which is perishing of inanition. Huxley wrote thus of the attempt: "If the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past, not because it has renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of books and traditions, and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man\'s emotions by worship, \'for the most part of the Silent Sort,\' at the altar of the unknown and unknowable...."
We have no desire to follow in the wake of an unprovoked attack on the churches, our concern is the defence of a rational, against the imposition of an irrational, code of morality.
But ethical systems are still built upon the fantastical dogmas of religious or political visionaries. "Ethics," say the former, "cannot be built securely upon............