Morality as a Religion | Page 9

morality than the
pair of old shrews, philosophy and theology," in whose keeping he
evidently thinks everybody, not a scientist, believes morality to rest.
The teaching of such men as Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain, and Mr. Leslie

Stephen, though they lack the vigour and picturesqueness of Mr.
Huxley's unique style, comes to much the same thing. Under the
extraordinary delusion that all the world, excepting a few enlightened
scientific men, believes morality to be under the tutelage of a "pair of
shrews," to wit, philosophy and theology, they at once proceed to fly to
the opposite extreme error, and to proclaim that it is under the
guardianship of physical science. We have already satisfied ourselves
that morality is not based on religion, but contrariwise that religion is
built on the sanctified emotions of the human heart, that is on the moral
ideal--"a new church founded on moral science"--and as to theology, I
should not waste my time in attempting to show that morality is not
based on that. But it will be worth our while to show that Mr. Huxley
and his brethren are under a serious misapprehension when they
suppose that having dispossessed theology of a property which no sane
man believes it ever possessed, they are at once entitled to appropriate
the same themselves in the name of physical science. We shall see that
there is a third claimant in the field of whom the extremists on either
side appear to have lost sight, and that when the case is fully set forth a
verdict in its favour will be inevitable. Meanwhile, let us look at the
scientific claim. Is the criterion of conduct in the custody of the
scientific experimenter? If a man wanted to know whether a certain act
was good, bad or indifferent, such a course of conduct permissible or
not, is he to consult the biologist or the chemist?
I venture to affirm, in language of the most explicitness, that physical
science can know absolutely nothing about morality; that ethics are a
matter of profound indifference to it, that, as Diderot, the
encyclopaedist--certainly not suspect in such matters--says, "To science
there can be no question of the unclean or the unchaste". You might as
well ask a physician for an opinion about law as to put a case of
conscience before an astronomer.
There has been, as a matter of fact, an extraordinary amount of loose
thinking concerning the precise relations between science, ethics and
religion. The churches, having become irretrievably discredited in their
doctrinal teaching (their very ministers, in the persons of Stanley and
Jowett, openly avowing disbelief in their articles and creeds), religion

has come to be looked upon as a sort of no man's land, and therefore
the legitimate property of the first occupier. Science, as the enterprising
agency par excellence of the century, has stepped in, and in claiming to
exhaustively explain religion, virtually claims to have simultaneously
annexed morality, erroneously looked upon as a department of religion.
But a little more careful thinking ought to convince the most eager of
the advance-agents of physical science that the discipline they serve so
loyally is altogether unconcerned with the moral life, and wholly
incompetent to deal with its problems. Mr. Frederic Harrison once
asked, and with extreme pertinence, what the mere dissector of frogs
could claim to know of the facts of morality and religion? Positively
nothing, as such, and in their more sober moments "the beaters of the
drum" scientific would appear to be well aware of the fact. For instance,
Mr. Huxley himself, oblivious of all he had claimed in the name of
physical science, asked with surprise, in what laboratory questions of
aesthetics and historical truth could be tested? In what, indeed? we may
well ask. And yet the physical science which is avowedly incapable of
deciding the comparatively insignificant matters of taste and history is
prepared to take over with the lightest of hearts the immense burden of
morality and to become the conscience-keeper, I had almost said the
Father Confessor, of humanity! I imagine Mr. Huxley himself would
have shrunk before the assumption of such responsibility.
But let us approach the matter more closely. To physical science, one
act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular
movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy
and profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same
thing--a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction,
and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain. A burglar shoots a
policeman dead and the public headsman decapitates a criminal. To
physical science, those two acts differ in no respect. They are exercises
of muscular energy, expenditure of nervous power, the effecting of
molecular change, and there the matter