Recent Tendencies in Ethics | Page 2

the
term obtained currency. It was used by him as the name of a "little
society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental
principles" which he formed in the winter of 1822-23. He "did not
invent the word, but found in one of Galt's novels, the 'Annals of the
Parish.'" "With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the
word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian
appellation" ('Autobiography,' pp. 79, 80; cf. 'Utilitarianism,' p. 9 n.) A

couple of sentences from Galt may be quoted: "As there was at the time
a bruit and a sound about universal benevolence, philanthropy, utility,
and all the other disguises with which an infidel philosophy
appropriated to itself the charity, brotherly love, and well-doing
inculcated by our holy religion, I set myself to task upon these heads....
With well-doing, however, I went more roundly to work. I told my
people that I thought they had more sense than to secede from
Christianity to become Utilitarians, for that it would be a confession of
ignorance of the faith they deserted, seeing that it was the main duty
inculcated by our religion to do all in morals and manners to which the
new-fangled doctrine of utility pretended." Mill is wrong in supposing
that his use of the term "was the first time that any one had taken the
title of Utilitarian"; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of
the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses
the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is
the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halévy
('L'évolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the
presence of the word in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility,' published
in 1811.]
The Intuitionists maintained--to put the matter briefly--that the moral
consciousness of man could not be entirely accounted for by
experiences of the kind laid stress on by the Utilitarians. They
maintained that moral ideas were in their origin spiritual, although they
might be called into definite consciousness by the experience of the
facts to which they could be applied. Experience might call them forth
into the light of day; but it was held that they belonged, in nature and
origin, to the constitution of man's mind. On this ground, therefore, the
school was properly called Intuitional: they held that moral ideas were
received by direct vision or intuition, as it were, not by a process of
induction from particular facts.
And, in the second place, with regard to the criterion of morality, that
also (they held) was not dependent on the consequences in the way of
happiness and misery which the Utilitarians emphasised. On the
contrary, moral ideas themselves had an independent validity; they had
a worth and authority for conduct which could not be accounted for by
any consequences in which action resulted: belonging as they did to the
essence of the human spirit, they also had authority over the conduct of

man's life.
Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely about
these two points and between these two opposed schools. No doubt the
two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the whole
matter. They pointed to the consideration of the question of man's place
in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it
was his to play in the world. They suggested, if they did not always
raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or
whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued. But
the larger issues suggested were not followed out. Common consent
seemed to limit the discussion to the two questions described; and this
limitation of the controversy tended to a precision and clearness in
method, which is often wanting in the ethical thought of the present day,
disturbed as it is by new and more far-reaching problems.
This limitation of scope, which I venture to select as the leading
characteristic of last century's ethical enquiries, may be further seen in
the large amount of agreement between the two schools regarding the
content of morality. The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists were
opponents of the traditional--as we may call it--the Christian morality
of modern civilisation. They both adopted and defended the
well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of temperance and
benevolence, which have been accepted by the common tradition of
ages as the expression of man's moral consciousness. The Intuitionists
no doubt were sometimes regarded--they may indeed have sometimes
regarded themselves--as in a peculiar way the guardians of the
traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents in
defending a view in harmony with man's spiritual essence and