The World in Chains | Page 2

morality; and to
formulate some law of the process whereby political man has been
differentiated from the savage.
Morality being a relation between two or more contracting parties, he
will notice that the history of mankind is marked by a consistent
tendency to extend this relation, to include in the system of
relationships more numerous and more distant objects, so that the
moral agent is surrounded by a continually widening sphere of
obligations.
This system of relationship, which may be called 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