“TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY.
A SUMMARY OF DR. J. MARTINEAU’S WELL-KNOWN WORK.
S U P P L E M E N T T O “ T H E L I T E R A R Y G U I D E , " J A N U A R Y , 1900.
I n a luminous introduction Dr. Martineau sets forth the principles on which the moralists whom he has chosen as typical exponents o f the main theories of ethics have been selected and differentiated. The work commences frankly with fundamental postulates. These must be considered in a subsequent volume (E ssa y s on Relig ion), since the ethical treatise has not been preceded by ontological work, to which the first principles may be referred.
soul, simple and uncompounded, is the uniting term between the rational and phenomenal worlds. Its essence unites the two ideas, to th ink and to live, and can never admit the opposite of either. Hence it is essentially and inherently immortal. But there are lower souls, or lower parts of the soul, in man, which are mortal. The immortal mind lodges majestically in the uplifted head; in the heart and lungs is the thumos, the impulse or will energy ; while the appetite, the epithumetikon, dwells below the diaphragm.
GROUPING OF TYPES.
The first principle of selection and grouping is taken from the starting point o f the thinker. I f the moralist starts within his own consciousness and proceeds to investigate the objective order in the light of the knowledge he has thus obtained, his theory of ethics will be psychological; if he proceeds in the inverse order, passing from cosmic speculation to the study o f the ethical microcosm o f conscience, his system may be termed unpsychological. The author claims that Christianity is the accidental parent of psychological systems, since it withdrew human attention from the general cosmic order, and concentrated it on the human soul. A ll the older systems are unpsychological. Plato is selected to represent the transcendental type o f unpsychological theory ; Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza stand for the immanental school— that is, the Pantheistic school, which holds that “ Nature is in every way co-extensive with God.” Opposed to these metaphysical theories, yet of the same general unpsychological category, is the physical theory of Comte. Of psychological types the author exposes his own under the title of idiopsychological; utilitarian hedonism, evolutionary hedonism, and the theories o f Cudworth, Clarke, Price, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson arc treated (with subdistinctions) as heteropsychological. Kant and Hegel are not selected for distinct treatment. With the former, Dr. Martineau thinks that he is in too close an agreement to render that necessary ; and the latter he frankly protests his incompetency to interpret.
PLATO.
This threefold division leads from the physics of Plato to his ethics. The three component parts of the soul are differently mixed in different men and nations. The trading nations are distinguished by the predominance of desire; the barbarians, of thumos, force of character; the Greeks, of intellect. In the Platonic notion of virtue no distinction is observed between voluntary and involuntary qualities, natural propensities and acquired tendencies. Virtue is that action of the soul by which it tends towards the highest good, and realizes so much of it as its faculties allow. It is the healthy acting of the soul, whether this harmony be the result of native aptitude or of self-imposed discipline. Each elementary endowment has its corresponding perfection or virtue; Wisdom is the highest expression of the Nous ; Courage is the perfection of the Thumos ; Moderation, or Self-restraint, is the excellence that gives an ethical character to Appetite. On the other hand, in the famous myth of the charioteer in the Phccdrus reason is set above the other parts of the soul on a different level. Finally, Dr. Martineau finds evidence of the admission of a fourth faculty, conscience, with its corresponding perfection, right or justice. Since the unity of all the virtues is found in justice, the definition o f justice involves the whole theory of morals ; and so, in order to investigate it thoroughly, Plato instituted his inquiry into the nature and proper constitution of a State, in his celebrated Republic. This State, like the Catholic Church, fails, says Dr. Martineau, because, “ though they acknowledged each person to constitute an end in himself as well as to be the member of a whole, they fulfilled this end for him by social institutions, instead of making it contingent on a subjective condition limited to his own consciousness.”
The starting point of Plato’s speculations was an objective problem— viz., the logical distinction between the invariable attribute of a class and the variable accidents o f its individual members. In all men, all horses, all concrete things, there is a permanent element which serves to classify individuals, in spite of their accidental peculiarities. This, the essence of the Schoolmen, is for Plato an “ Idea,” an invisible, incorporeal, eternal entity, in virtue of whose immanence the thing is what it is, and reveals itself to the mind. There is a regular series or graduated organism of these hypostatized ideas from the confines of transient phenomena to the highest unity of being. Though embedded in individual things as their living essences, they yet live apart in an invisible heaven above the heavens, in “ a thought-sphere, where at last are found the formless, colourless, impalpable essences of beauty, temperance, righteousness, and truth.” They do not even, as Christian philosophers have conceived them, dwell in the divine mind. The apex, or supreme term of this hierarchy of separate ideas, is the idea o f the good, which, taking on in Plato’s writings the predicates of “ subjective unity, eternal reality, discriminative thought, affinity with beauty, symmetry, and right, and power to realize them in the growth of things,” ultimately assumes the character of God. From this theory o f ideas flows his distinction of the visible (material) world, related to the senses, and the cogitable world related to the nous.
THE SOUL AND CHARACTER.
God persuades “ the blind waste of Necessity,” the primordial chaos, to receive the ideas, and so allow the essence of things to embody themselves and arise. When the general structure of the world is completed God, the Demiurgus, creates the immortal part of man. The
ETHICAL FEATURES.
Some of the more salient moral features of Plato’s system are then summarized in a series of propositions. Pleasure is not the proper aim of man, but a good which may run counter to it, and which must be sought on its own account. This good is properly called insight or wisdom, because it controls the rational powers as well as the active principles of conduct. It has a separate transcendent existence ; it is superhuman, eternal, absolute, divine; it is God. Whatever is good is merely evolved from our memories— the human soul had an anterior existence to this. The relation of the human to the divine is likeness, hence the aspiration for communion with God ; though, as Plato does not attribute volition to the Supreme, it is generally regarded as impersonal. From the philosophy of Plato no belief in freedom and responsibility can be evolved ; hut the author deduces it, as part of his fa i t h , from the mythical legend that closes the Republic. He was intensely aristocratic, though rather with pity than scorn, because he felt that his highest insight or wisdom was bound to remain the property of the few.
IMMANENTAL SCHEMES.
Plato’s theory is the best type of those metaphysical systems which, unlike Comte’s, assume as the proper objects of intellect a certain store of real, eternal existences. There are, however, other metaphysical theories which do not grant to these eternal realities “ a range beyond the sphere of all extant phenomena,” which make Nature and God co-extensive, and only differentiate them by qualitative predicates. Historically, Aristotle was the first to rise against the transcendentalism of Plato ; but the divergence
