<< Previous | Contents | Next >>
Taine and Renan were influenced by the outlook adopted by Comte. It might well be said that Taine was more strictly positivist than Comte. In his view of ethics, Taine, as might be expected from the general character of his work and his philosophical attitude, adheres to a rigidly positivist and naturalist conception. He looks upon ethics as purely positive, since it merely states the scientific conditions of virtue and vice, and he despairs of altering human nature or conduct. This is due almost entirely to his doctrine of rigid determinism which reacts with disastrous consequences upon his ethical outlook. This only further confirms our contention that the problem of freedom is the central and vital one of the period. We have already pointed out the criticism which Fouillée brought against Taine's dogmatic belief in determinism, as an incomplete doctrine, a half-truth, which involves mischievous consequences and permits of no valuable discussion of the ethical problem.
More interesting and useful, if we are to follow at all closely the ethical thought of our period, is it to observe the attitude adopted to ethics by Taine's contemporary, Renan.
The extreme confidence which Renan professed to have in "science," and indeed in all intellectual pursuits, led him to accord to morality rather a secondary place. "There are three great things," he remarks in his Discours et Conférences,* "goodness, beauty and truth, and the greatest of these is truth." Neither virtue, he con-* tinues, nor art is able to exclude illusions. Truth is the representation of reality, and in this world the search for truth is the most serious occupation of all. One of his main charges against the Christian Church in general is that it has insisted upon moral good to such an extent as to undervalue and depreciate the other goods, expressed in beauty and in truth. It has looked upon life from one point of view only—namely, the moral—and has judged all action by ethical values alone, despising in this way philosophy, science, literature, poetry, painting and music. In its more ascetic moods it has claimed that these things are "of the devil." Thus Christianity has introduced a vicious distinction which has done much to mutilate human nature and to cramp the wholesome expression of the life of the human spirit. Whatever is an expression of spirit is, claims Renan, to be looked upon as sacred. If such a distinction as that of sacred and profane were to be drawn it should be between what appertains to the soul and what does not. The distinction, when made between the ethical and the beautiful or true, is disastrous.
[Footnote * : Discours, dated November 26th, 1885.]
Renan considers that of the two, the ethical and the beautiful, the latter may be the finer and grander distinction, the former merely a species of it. The moral, he thinks, will give place to the beautiful. "Before any action," he himself says in L'Avenir de la Science, "I prefer to ask myself, not whether it be good or bad, but whether it be beautiful or ugly, and I feel that I have in this an excellent criterion."
Morality, he further insists, has been conceived up to now in far too rigid a manner as obedience to a law, as a warfare and strife between opposing laws. But the really virtuous man is an artist who is creating beauty, the beauty of character, and is fashioning it out of his human nature, as the sculptor fashions a statue out of marble or a musician composes a melody from sounds. Neither the sculptor nor the musician feels that he is obeying a law. He is expressing and creating beauty.
Another criticism which Renan brings against the ethic of Christianity is its insistence upon humility as a virtue. He sees nothing virtuous in it as it is generally interpreted: quite rightly he suspects it of hypocritically covering a gross pride, after the manner of the Pharisees. He gives a place to honest asceticism which has its nobility, even although it be a narrow, misconceived ideal. Much nobler is it, he thinks, than the type of life which has only one object, getting a fortune.
This leads him to another remark on the moral hypocrisy of so many professedly religious folk. Having an easy substance and possessing already a decent share of this world's goods, they devote all their energies to the pursuit of pleasure or of further superfluous wealth. From this position they criticise the worker who endeavours to improve his lot, and have the audacity to tell him in pious fashion that he must not be materialistic, and must not set his heart on this world's goods. It would be laughable were it not so tragic. The whole question of the relativity of the two positions is overlooked, the whole ethic of the business ignored. Material welfare is good and valuable, says Renan, in so far as it frees man's spirit from mean and wretched dependence and a cramped life which injures development, physical and spiritual. These goods are a means to an end. When, therefore, a man, already comfortably endowed, amasses more and more for its own sake, he commits both a profane and immoral act. But when a worker endeavours to augment his recompense for his labour, he is but demanding "what is the condition of his redemption. He is performing a virtuous action."*
[Footnote * : L'Avenir de la Science, p. 83.]
Sound as many of these considerations undoubtedly are, they come from the Renan, who wrote in the years 1848-9 L'Avenir de la Science. He lived long enough to see that these truths had complements, that there might be, even ethically, another side. In speaking of Progress this has been noted: in his later years he forecasted the coming of an era of egoism, of national and industrial selfishness, working itself out in policies of military imperialism among the nations, and of economic greed and tyranny among the proletariat. His remarks about the virtuous action of the worker bettering his lot were inspired by the socialism of Saint-Simon. Renan did not at that time raise in his own mind the question of the workers themselves carrying their reaction so far, that it, although just at first, might reach a point where it became a dictatorship decreed by self-interest alone. It is in Renouvier that we find this danger more clearly indicated. In so far as Renan felt it, his solution was that which he suggested for the elimination of all social wickedness— namely, the increase of education. He looked upon wickedness as a symptom of a lack of culture, particularly the lack of any moral teaching.
It was precisely this point, the education of the democracy, morally no less than intellectually, which presented a certain difficulty to the French Republic when, after several unsuccessful attempts, the plan for state education of a compulsory, gratuitous and secular character was carried in 1882, largely through the efforts of Jules Ferry.*
[Footnote: In 1848 Hippolyle Carnot had this plan ready. The fall of the Ministry, in which he was Minister of Education, was due partly to the discussion raised by Renouvier's book (see p. 61 of the present work). With the fall of the Ministry, and in 1851, of the Republic, the scheme went too. France had to wait eleven years longer than England for free, compulsory education. Her educational problem has always been complicated by the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to religious education and its hostility to "lay" schools. Brilliant as France is intellectually, there are numbers of her people who do not read or write owing to the delay of compulsory state education. The latest census, that of 1921, asked the question, "Savez-vous à la fois lire et écrire?" in order to estimate this number.]