MORAL ACTION. 461 selfish and imaginary aim. We should fix our attention on the advantages that must arise from the concentration of human efforts on an actual life, individual and collective, which Man is impelled to ameliorate as much as possible in its whole economy, according to the whole of the means within his power,-among which, moral rules certainly hold the very first place, because they especially admit of the universal concurrence in which our chief power resides. If we are thus brought back from an immoderate regard to the future by a sense of the value of the present, this will equalize life by discouraging excessive economical preparation; while a sound appreciation of our nature, in which vicious or unregulated propensities originally abound, will render common and unanimous the obligation to discipline, and regulate our various inclinations. Again, the scientific and moral conception. of Man as the chief of the economy of nature will be a steady stimulus to the cultivation of the noble qualities, affective as well as intellectual, which place him at the head of the living hierarchy. There can be no danger of apathy in a position like this, with the genuine and just pride of such pre-eminence stirring within us; and above us the type of perfection, below which we must remain, but which will ever be inviting us upwards. The result will be a noble boldness in developing the greatness of Man in all directions, free from the oppression of any fear, and limited only by the conditions of life itself. As for domestic morality, we have seen what is the subordination prescribed by nature in the cases of sex and of age. It is here, where sociology and biology meet, that we find how profoundly natural social relations are, as they are immediately connected with the mode of existence of all the higher animals, of which Man is only the more complete development and an application of the uniform positive principle of classification, abstract and concrete, will consolidate this elementary subordination, by connecting it with the whole of the speculative constitution. It will moreover be found that progression will develop more and more the natural differences on which such an economy is based, so that each element will tend towards the mode of existence most suitable to itself, and consonant with the general welfare. While the positive spirit will consolidate the great moral ideas which belong to this first stage of association, it will exhibit the increasing importance of domestic life for the vast majority of men, as modern sociality approaches its truest condition; and the natural order, by which domestic life becomes the proper introduction to social, will be established, past risk of change. Domestic. Social. The positive philosophy is the first that has ascertained the true point of view of social morality. The metaphysical philosophy sanctioned egotism; and the theological subordinated real life to an imaginary one; while the new philos ophy takes social morality for the basis of its whole system. The two former systems were so little favourable to the rise of the purely disinterested affections, that they often led to a dogmatic denial of their existence; the one being addicted to scholastic subtleties, and the other to considerations of personal safety. No set of feelings can be fully developed otherwise than by special and permanent exercise; and especially if they are not naturally very prominent; and the moral sense, the social degree of which is its completest manifestation,-could be only imperfectly instituted by the indirect and factitious culture of a preparatory stage. We have yet to witness the moral superiority of a philosophy which connects each of us with the whole of human existence, in all times and places. The restriction of our expectations to actual life must furnish new means of connecting our individual development with the universal progression, the growing regard to which will afford the only possible, and the utmost possible, satisfaction to our natural aspiration after eternity. For instance, the scrupulous respect for human life, which has always increased with our social progression, must strengthen more and more as the chimerical hope dies out which disparages the present life as merely accessory to the one in prospect. The philosophical spirit being only an extension of good sense, it is certain that it alone, in its spontaneous form, has for three centuries maintained any general agreement against the dogmatic disturbances occasioned or tolerated by the ancient philosophy, which would have overthrown the whole modern economy if popular wisdom had not restrained the social application of it. The effects are, at best, only too evident; the practical intervention of the old philosophy taking place only in cases of very marked disorder, such as must be always impending and ever renewed while the intellectual anarchy which generates it yet exists. By its various aptitudes, positive morality will tend more and more to exhibit the happiness of the individual as depending on the complete expansion of benevolent acts and sympathetic emotions towards the whole of our race; and even beyond our race, by a gradual extension to all sentient beings below us, in proportion to their animal rank and their social utility. The relative nature of the new philosophy will render it applicable, with equal facility and accuracy, to the exigencies of each case, individual or social, whereas we see how the absolute character of religious morality has deprived it of almost all force in cases which, arising after its institution, could not have been duly provided for. Till the full rational establishment of positive morality has taken place, it is the business of true philosophers, ever the precursors of their race, to confirm it in the estimation of the world by the sustained superiority of their own conduct, personal, domestic, and social; giving the strongest conceivable evidence of the possibility of developing, on human grounds alone, a sense of general morality POLITICAL ACTION. 463 Political action. complete enough to inspire an invincible repugnance to moral offence, and an irresistible impulse to steady practical devotedness. The political results of the positive philosophy have been so mixed up with the whole treatment of the future in this volume, and the near future has been so expressly exhibited in the twelfth chapter, that I need say little here under that head. I have only to glance at the growth and application of the division between the spiritual or theoretical organism and the temporal or practical, the beginning of which I have already sufficiently described. We have seen that Catholicism afforded the suggestion of a double government of this kind, and that the Catholic Double institution of it shared the discredit of the philosophy government. to which it was attached and again, that the Greek Utopia of a Reign of Mind (well called by Mr Mill a Pedantocracy), transmitted to the modern metaphysical philosophy, gained ground till its disturbing influence rendered it a fit subject for our judgment and sentence. The present state of things is that we have a deep and indestructible, though vague and imperfect, sense of the political requirements of existing civilization, which assigns a distinct province, in all affairs, to the material and the intellectual authority, the separation and co-ordination of which are reserved for the future. The Catholic division was instituted on the ground of a mystical opposition between heavenly and earthly interests, as is shown by the terms spiritual and temporal, and not at all from any sound intellectual and social appreciation, which was not then possible, nor is possible even yet; and when the terrestrial view prevailed over the celestial, the principle of separation was seriously endangered, from there being no longer any logical basis which could sustain it against the extravagances of the revolutionary spirit. The positive polity must therefore go back to the earliest period of the division, and re-establish it on evidence afforded by the whole human evolution; and, in its admission of the scientific and logical preponderance of the social point of view, it will not reject it in the case of morality, which must always allow its chief application, and in which everything must be referred, not to Man, but to Humanity. Moral laws, like the intellectual, are much more appreciable in the collective than in the individual case; and, though the individual nature is the type of the general, all human advancement is much more completely characterized in the general than in the individual case; and thus morality will always, on both grounds, be connected with polity. Their separation will arise from that distinction between theory and practice which is indispensable to the common destination of both. We may already sum up the ultimate conditions of positive polity by conceiving of its systematic wisdom as reconciling the opposing qualities of that spontaneous human wisdom successively manifested in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; for there was a social tendency involved in the ancient subordination of morality to policy, however carried to an extreme under polytheism; and the monotheistic system had the merit of asserting, though not very successfully, the legitimate independence, or rather the superior dignity, of morality. Antiquity alone offered a complete and homogeneous political system; and the Middle Ages exhibit an attempt to reconcile the opposite qualities of two heterogeneous systems, the one of which claimed. supreme authority for theory, and the other for practice. Such a reconciliation will take place hereafter, on the ground of the systematic distinction between the claims of education and of action. We find something like an example of how this may be done,theory originating practice, but never interfering with it except in a consultative way,-in the existing relations between art and science, the extension of which to the most important affairs, under the guidance of sound philosophy, contemplating the whole range of human relations. If the whole experience of modern progress has sanctioned the independence, amidst co-operation, of theory and practice, in the simplest cases, we must admit its imperative necessity, on analogous grounds, in the most complex. Thus far, in complex affairs, practical wisdom has shown itself far superior to theoretical; but this is because much of the proudest theory has been ill-established. However this evil may be diminished when social speculation becomes better founded, the general interest will always require the common preponderance of the practical or material authority, as long as it keeps within its proper limits, admitting the independence of the theoretical authority; and the necessity of including abstract indications among the elements of every concrete conclusion. No true statesman would think of disputing this, when once the philosophers had evinced the scientific character and the political aspect adapted to their social destination. It may be well however to present, in a summary way, the rational securities which will exist against any encroachment of moral upon political government, in order to meet the instinctive prejudices which still oppose the advent of what I have shown to be the first social condition of final regeneration. In treating of the training for such an organization, I insisted on limiting it to the five nations of Western Europe, in order to secure its distinctness and originality from the confusion of modern speculative habits. But such a restriction must give way when we contemplate the final extension of the positive organism, first to the whole of the white race, and at length to the whole of mankind, as their preparation becomes complete. It was the theological philosophy which divided Western Europe into independent nationalities for five centuries past; and their interconnection, determined by their positive progression, can be systematized only by the process of total renovation. The European case must be much fitter than ESTHETIC ACTION. 465 the national for manifesting the qualities of the spiritual constitution; and it will acquire new consistence and efficacy after each new extension of the positive organism, which will thus become more and more moral, and less and less political; the practical authority all the while preserving its active preponderance. By a necessary reaction, liberty will gain as much as order by this inevitable progression; for as intellectual and moral association becomes confirmed by extension, the temporal authority which is now necessary to keep the social system together will naturally relax as repression becomes less and less needed. As for the influence of human passions, which will arise under the new system as under every other, I have already spoken of them, so as to need only to say here that they will affect the early institution of the system more than its normal development. We have still to reap some of the bitter fruits of our intellectual and moral anarchy: and especially, in the quarrels between capitalists and labourers first, and afterwards in the unsettled rivalship between town and country. In short, whatever is now systematized must be destroyed; and whatever is not systematized, and therefore has vitality, must occasion collisions which we are not yet able accurately to foresee or adequately to restrain. This will be the test of the positive philosophy, and at the same time the stimulus to its social ascendency. With this troubled initiation, the worst will be over. The difficulties proper to the action of the new régime, the same in kind, will be far less in degree, and will disappear as the conditions of order and progress become more and more thoroughly reconciled. We have seen that the advent of the positive economy will have been owing to the affinity between philosophical tendencies and popular impulses and if so, it is easy to see how that affinity must become the most powerful permanent support of the system. The same philosophy which asserts the intellectual supremacy of the general reason cannot but admit, without any danger of anarchy. the social supremacy of genuine popular needs, by establishing ti universal sway of morality, governing at once scientific energies and political conclusions. And thus, after some passing troubles, occasioned by the unequal development of practical exigencies and theoretical satisfactions, the positive philosophy, in its political form, will necessarily lead up the human race to the social system which is most suitable to the nature of Man, and which will greatly surpass in unity, extension, and stability all that the past has ever produced. One of the least anticipated results of this working out of opinions, morals, and institutions under the guidance The aesthetic of positive philosophy, is the development which action. must take place in the modes of expressing them. For five centuries, society has been seeking an aesthetic constitution correspondent to its civilization. In the time to come,-apart from all consideration of the genius that will arise, which is wholly out of the reach VOL. II. 2 G |