Note 309.1 — UTILITARIANISM.

The extreme meagreness of the Utilitarian doctrine as thus produced from the propositions of its great progenitor, is something so remarkable that one is naturally driven to look about for some cause that may have given artificial importance to a matter in itself so insignificant; and this cause, so far as I can discover, lies nowhere so much as in the general reaction against Christianity which distinguished the age of which Voltaire in France was the great spokesman, Hume in Scotland, and Bentham in England. Reaction is the universal law of all mundane forces: and it was not to be expected that Christianity should escape it. Christian ethics being based purely, as we have seen, on a regard to the will of God, on purity of motive, and lofty self-sacrifice, even had they been left to work in all their natural integrity, would have demanded a doctrine of moral consequences to neutralize the necessary one-sidedness of their action. To have a good conscience was a most excellent thing, but to have a clean shirt was also a virtue. The Divine sanction given by Christian piety to Christian morals was naturally beneficial, but it was also possible, or rather from human weakness almost certain, that the science of human ethics might lose as much as it gained from alliance with Christian theologians, who are only too apt to “bend every branch of knowledge to their own purposes, without much regard to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiassed sentiments of the mind.”[309.1] Add to this the tawdry mummeries of ritualism, the insolence of haughty churchmen, the gross worldliness of fat beneficiaries, the morbid sanctitude of pietistical devotees, the unnatural austerities of monkish ascetics, and the grim severity of damnatory dogmatists, and we shall easily understand how a revulsion should have taken place, which would not be content till on the throne of morals it had supplanted Christ by Socrates, and Socrates by Epicurus. And this consideration opens up to us the second notable achievement of the subtle Scot in the important field of morals. Not content with withdrawing virtue as much as possible from the region of personal sentiment into the wider domain of social wellbeing, he determined to strike at the root of the whole evil, as it appeared to him, by not only attacking Christianity, but by undermining that primary idea of Causality on which the idea of religion and the very conception of a God reposes. This was a daring business no doubt; but Hume was not the man to take things of that nature overseriously; he would keep himself quite easy as to results; he would not make himself miserable by any unnecessary enthusiasm even for his own philosophy;[310.1] if he did not choke the Church-doctors, he would at least give them something to chew; and at all events he might effect a permanent divorce between human ethics and that sectarian theology to which it had been so unpropitiously yoked.