II.] WHAT IS MORAL LAW? 59 from Mr. Mill's "utility," Mr. Herbert Spencer's "agreeable feeling," or Professor Huxley's "laws of comfort," can yield that word "ought." According to his This command of duty, this inner voice in man, Kant has well called "the categorical imperative," because of the unconditioned constraining force which it exercises over us. admirable teaching, the one only worthy motive of action for man, as a moral being, is the moral law speaking to us from within, through conscience. And ethical freedom consists in this, that a man emancipate himself from the world of sense and its influences; that he renounce every outer material spring of action, and simply obey the heavenly calling. For the moral law is a divine order throughout the universe, "a just and acceptable and perfect Will," ruling over all, either by its mandates or by its penalties. To apprehend it, and to bring his own volition into harmony with it, is the only means by which man can tend without obstruction to his true end, which is to live according to reason. Our willing subjection to it is the condition of ethical Liberty. To resist it is to fall into the base captivity of "the sensual and the dull," "slaves by their own compulsion." This ethical contest of volition is the sphere of freedom. The imperative dictate of the moral law implies the power to obey it. meaningless word without "can." "Ought" is a Freedom and necessity are closely interwoven. Will any one ever succeed in tracing the line of demarcation ? Probably not, for the roots of freedom are in the domain of necessity. But I must not here occupy myself with that profound question. It is enough, for our present purpose, to insist upon this primary verity, that, in the moral order, Liberty is not independence of law; that, on the contrary, only in obedience to law is Liberty realised. And the reason is because man is not, as Rousseau fabled, naturally good. The same instincts which lead him to respect the laws of the material order prompt him to infringe the laws of the moral order. Atavism is unques tionable truth. There is, Plato taught, a wild beast within us, always ready to overpower us. The wild beast, he added, must be chained. In all of us there are evil instincts, vile passions, inordinate desires, importunate impulses of physical nature; "the law in our members," to use St. Paul's phrase, "warring against the law of our mind." We may choose which law we will obey, and in the choice lies our probation. But in obedience to the higher law alone is moral Liberty. Universally true is the doctrine of Leibnitz, that God, in creating beings, placed within them the law of their development. The law of man's development is ethical. In proportion as he learns it and follows it is he "man and master of his fate." According to the saying of another deep thinker, "Summa Deo servitus, summa 11.] THE LAWS OF HUMAN SOCIETY. 61 libertas." "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." This is the freedom which is our real summum bonum, the veritable end of life. Rightly does a poet of our own day make it the burden of the mystic chant of Orpheus. "Nor sang he of unfading bowers, Where they a tearless painless age fulfil "But of pure goodness found in temperance high, in lawlessness. right reason. And so, in the public order, Liberty is not found Here, too, it dwells only with The very words "political order" imply as much. Human society is an organism with its proper laws, not a fortuitous congeries of individuals mechanically combined. Man comes into the world under the law of solidarity. His country is to him what the soil is to the plant. One of the notes of modern thought, at least in this country and in France, is the well-nigh complete obliteration of that truth from the public mind. This is due to two causes. The advance from status to contract, as Sir Henry Maine has told us, is a distinctive characteristic of the progressive societies of the West. And one consequence of it is, to use his excellent phrase, "the trituration of the groups which once lived with an independent life." Again, one of the most potent factors in modern politics is unquestionably the doctrine formulated by Rousseau, and first translated into the concrete by his Jacobin disciples. And that doctrine is essentially mechanical and devoid of any true notion of the organic nature of human society, and of the laws proper to it as an organism. We have already seen his receipt for making the constitution. "Making the constitution!" As though any real constitution could be made! You might as well talk of making a tree. But his disciples, with no qualm of misgiving, applied his doctrine, and in one brief night of verbose intoxication swept away well nigh all the historical institutions of their country, in order to make room for their brand new constitutional machine a State constructed as a kind of combination of inquisition and police upon the basis of unrelated human units, inorganic atoms, impalpable sterile dust, mocked with the title and attributes of sovereignty. "Every individual is free to think what he likes; his freedom to say and do what he likes shall be infringed as little as possible by law; and after all, this is no real infringement, for he is his own lawgiver; he is one of the sovereign people, free to vote as he likes, pand so, in obeying the law, he must be taken to andey only himself, and to be as free as he was anothee":—such is the political Liberty wherewith II.] RIGHT AND WILFULNESS. 63 the new Liberalism of the age makes free "the citizen," as its cant phrase is. Now, I venture to say that this is a very spurious kind of political Liberty. Its cardinal doctrine that man, as man, is sovereign, that he has a right to do what he likes, is wholly untenable. In the first place this "man" is an individuum vagum. We cannot, in practical politics, abstract the individual from the society in which he lives, moves, and has his being. We cannot unclothe him of race, traditions, institutions, and predicate of him actual rights which have validity only in the political organism. Nor can we say that any man has a right to do what he likes; a proposition which really means the sovereignty of the passions. Right (Recht) and wilfulness or caprice (Willkür) are irreconcileable. A man has a right to do only what the moral law enjoins or permits. Again, supposing the fiction. that a man obeys no power external to himself were true, this would not make him free. As a matter of fact no such form of association as that of which Rousseau dreamed, ever has been found, or ever can be: his volonté générale is as purely chimerical as his social contract. But, apart from that, Liberty does not consist in thinking, or in saying, or in doing what we like: nor does it consist in voting ever so often. Even thought, where freedom may seem completest, does not possess unbounded independ |