The World in Chains | Page 2

the moral sphere, has grown up under a variety of influences, expediency, custom, religious emotion and political action; but the moral agents included in it at any given time are always bound to each other by a theoretical contract involving both rights and duties, and leading each to expect and to apply in all his dealings with the others a certain standard of conduct which is approximately fixed by the enlightened opinion of the majority for the benefit of the totality.
The moral sphere then is a contractual unit of two or more persons who agree to moderate their individual conduct for their common good: and the State itself is only a stage in the growth of this moral unit from its emergence out of primitive savagery to its superannuation in ultimate anarchy, commonly called the Millennium. The State indeed is a moral sphere, a moral unit, which has long been outgrown by enlightened opinion; and the trouble is that we are now in a transition stage in which the boundaries of the State survive as a limitation instead of setting an ideal of moral conduct.[1]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This conception of the gradually extending and still to be extended sphere of morality, or from another aspect of law, was implied, I think, by Lord Haldane in his Address on Higher Nationality. (The Conduct of Life, and Other Addresses, p. 99.)
In this address Lord Haldane distinguished in the State three sanctions of conduct.
1. Law.
2. The Moral Sanction, Kant's Categorical Imperative "that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone."
3. The force of social habit or sittlichkeit, "less than legal and more than merely moral, and sufficient in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any question of resort to force." The Lord Chancellor adds, "If this is so within a nation, can it be so as between nations?"
But although Lord Haldane distinguishes three sanctions of conduct, the resultant line of conduct is one. And it seems to me unimportant to analyse the sanctions if we can only estimate the sum of their obligations. It is this totality of obligations, the whole systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated analysis I call the moral sphere.
Curiously enough Lord Haldane was hounded from the Government on the paradoxical ground that he knew too much about the enemy against whom we are fighting. It is certainly true that he has a better understanding than any other statesman of the Prussian perversion of aristocracy and of the true function of science in the State. But it is too much to hope that philosophers should remain Ministers of a State in which journalists are become dictators.]
§3
The Receding God
I don't know that it is necessary to drag God into the argument. But if you like to regard God as the sanction and source of morality, or if you like to call the moral drift in human affairs God, it is possible to consider this "Sphere of Morality" from His point of view. His "point of view" is precisely what, in an instructive fable, we may present as the determining factor in morality. When He walked in the garden or lurked hardly distinguishable among the sticks and stones of the forest, morality was just an understanding between a man and his neighbour, a temporary agreement entered on by any two hunting savages whom He might happen to espy between the tree-trunks. When He dwelt among the peaks of Sinai or Olympus, the sphere of morality had extended to the whole tribe that occupied the subjacent valley. It came to include the nation, all the subjects of each sovereign state, by the time He had receded to some heavenly throne above the dark blue sky. And it is to be hoped that He may yet take a broader view, so that His survey will embrace the whole of mankind, if only we can banish Him to a remoter altitude in the frozen depths of space, whence He can contemplate human affairs without being near enough to interfere.
The moral of this little myth of the Receding God may be that the Sphere of Morality is extended in inverse proportion to the intensity of theological interference. Not that theology necessarily or always deliberately limits the domain of morality: but because the extension of moral relations and the relegation of anthropomorphic theology are co-ordinate steps in human advancement.
§ 4
The Philosopher looks at Society
The philosopher is apt to explain the growth and interrelation of ideas by tabulating them in an historical form, which may not be narrowly, chronologically, or "historically" true. The notion of the Social Contract may be philosophically true, though we are not to imagine the citizens of Rousseau's State coming together on a certain day to vote by