v.]

THE POPULAR CONCEPTION.

133

reverence of the moral law. And a good will is a will self-determined by that law.

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control

These three alone lead life to sovereign power."

The truly educated man, be he peasant or prince, is he who has learned to know his duty, and whose whole powers have been disciplined and developed to the utmost for its accomplishment. That is the ideal of virile maturity. Doubtless, it is never entirely attained. The very nature of the ideal forbids that complete objective reality can ever be given to it by man. We must account of it as the type to which we can but approximate, more or less nearly. And just in proportion as anyone does approximate to this idea of virile maturity is he "man, and master of his fate." Just in that proportion is he educated.

But in the popular conception of Education this moral element, this discipline of the will has no place. I have described that conception as being "the instruction of the intellect, in greater or less degree"; an instruction, in many cases, wholly or chiefly directed to the attainment of what Mr. Goschen has called "saleable knowledge." And, what is most singular, from such instruction ethical results are confidently expected. Ignorance is

1

an

you

held to be the root of all evil. Knowledgeliterary, scientific, æsthetic-is exhibited as universal remedy or panacea, as a quickening, regenerating, organizing power, able to transform individual and national character. All which appears to me gross and irrational superstition. It passes my wit to understand how moral improvement is to be the outcome of merely intellectual culture, of knowledge, however wide and exact, of arts or literature or physics. How can such knowledge affect character? It cannot minister to a mind diseased. It cannot convert the will from bad to good. The utmost it can do is to minister to an enlightened selfishness. It leaves ethically where it found you. "Nec quidquam tibi prodest acrias tentasse domos animoque rotundum percurrisse polum." So far as your moral being is concerned, you return from the sublime expedition just what you were when you set out upon it. Unless, indeed, its effect has been to illustrate the Apostolic dictum, "Knowledge puffeth up." That such is the usual effect of instruction divorced from reverence cannot, indeed, be doubted. I remember Mr. Ruskin once saying that, in his judgment, what is commonly called Education is little better than a training in impudence. It ministers to the excessive individualism of an age when the man in the streets supposes himself qualified, by his modicum of elementary instruction, to give sentence on all things in heaven and earth, and resents it,

v.] INTELLECTUAL INSTRUCTION AND MORALITY. 135

as flat blasphemy, if the sufficiency of the purblind private prejudice which he calls his judgment is so much as questioned. More than fifty years ago Flaubert, in one of his letters to George Sand, prophesied "L'instruction gratuite et obligatoire ne fera rien qu'augmenter le nombre des imbéciles." The event, in France, has proved the correctness of his prediction. This by the way. My present point is, that instruction of the intellect has, in itself, no moralising tendency. It may turn crime into different channels, and render it less easy to detect, it may make a man more decent, but it does not change his natural propensities nor his proneness to gratify them at the expense of others. Physical science, literature, art, may refine the judgment and elevate the taste. But here their power ends. The utmost they can do is to minister to an enlightened selfishness. Knowledge of them is in fact power, and nothing else. Its practical effect is to make the good man more powerful for good, the bad man more powerful for evil. And that is all it does or can do.

If ever there was a safe truth, it is this. And I know of few things more curious than the blindness to it exhibited by many who are accounted, and in other respects justly, among our wisest. I remember, upon one occasion, hearing a very learned judge pass sentence upon two criminals, one a country doctor, the other an agricultural labourer, who had been equally concerned in an offence the

monstrous turpitude of which must be patent even to the simplest. In sentencing the doctor the judge said, "You are an educated man, and ought to have known better: I shall therefore award to you a longer term of penal servitude than to your fellow prisoner." As though the possessor of medical and surgical knowledge might equitably be punished for not attaining to a higher ethical standard than the peasant. It was a striking instance of the belief that moralizing effects may reasonably be expected from intellectual instruction: a belief which, as Mr. Herbert Spencer well points out in his Study of Sociology, while "absurd a priori is "flatly contradicted by facts." Criminal statistics exhibit more crime among skilled than among unskilled labourers. The less instructed peasants in the fields are, it would seem, better morally than the more instructed artisans in the streets. The schoolmaster, abroad for so many years, has not proved the moral regenerator that he was expected to be. Let us see how the expectation arose.

It appears to me to have directly arisen from the Utilitarian philosophy, which resolves morality into self-interest. "Honesty," the teachers of this school insist, "is the best policy; and a thing is honest because it is supremely politic." The practical conclusion is that virtue being enlightened selfishness, men will be virtuous out of regard for their own interests, if the eyes of their understanding are only sufficiently opened to discern what

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THE INFLUENCE OF UTILITARIANISM.

137

their true interests are. And so Mr. Mill apparently regards the end of Education as being, "to diffuse good sense among the people, with such knowledge as would qualify them to judge of the tendencies of their actions."* The conception of Education held by Utilitarians is essentially mechanical. How should it embrace the culture of the will if, as they one and all teach, from Bentham down to Mr. Spencer, the freedom of the will is an objective and subjective delusion? It looks without, to mechanism, for what can be effected only by dealing with the springs of action within. The Utilitarian philosophy de-ethicises Education, as it de-ethicises everything else, by banishing the moral idea. For Utilitarian morality, in all its shapes and forms, is not moral at all. From agreeable feeling, the laws of comfort, needs personal or racial, the interests, whether of the individual or of the community, it is impossible to extract an atom of morality. Right differs from expediency in its "I ought," never does and never can mean "it is pleasantest for thee, or for me, or

very essence.

for all of us."

pleasure is the

pleasures of all

The only morality derivable from

morality of money, for which kinds, intellectual and physical, may be purchased. The moral law is dethroned by Utilitarianism. The Almighty Dollar is exalted

*Principles of Political Economy, Book II. c. xiii., § 3.

† I have pursued this subject at some length in chap. ii. of my work On Right and Wrong.