Скачать книгу
consequences, which had led men to describe the first class as good and the second as evil, one might reply that herein we have stated a truth but not the whole truth. To us the fact that good living and well-being are so intimately associated, and that "the way of the transgressor is hard," is only one more evidence of the main contention of our school. Surely, if man awakes to the discovery that the laws, neither of nature, health, nor of private or public life, can be violated with impunity, more than ever is he convinced that the universe is, in Emerson's singularly expressive phrase, "so magically woven" that man must come to ruin if he sets himself to systematically disregard them. The word "woven" is an illumination in itself, showing how the warp of constant nature and life and the woof of man's conduct are meant to work and must work harmoniously together. And if this be indeed so, if we adopt Bentham's language and call "pleasure and pain our sovereign masters," what have we but a further indication that things are so ordained, that the universe is so constructed, so to speak, that you cannot get the good out of it unless you conform to moral law—in other words, that in the long run wrong, virtue and happiness are reconciled? Well, but the ordering of things, the ordaining of a course of things, what is this but the work of intelligence? And therefore Bentham, no less than Kant, contributes his quota to the universal conclusion that the moral law implies theism in the sense explained. Wherefore, it may be added, there is no reason whatsoever why a rational ethic such as has been sketched should not avail itself of the unquestionable services of experience in determining what is and what is not in conformity with morality. If a man sees the world as one, and all intelligence as one, he will be assured beforehand that things are so constituted that mischief cannot permanently or ultimately befall him if he lives what he knows to be
the life. And, therefore, the considerations of pain and pleasure, utility and mischievousness, are extremely serviceable criteria whereby we are assisted in that codification of morality, in that determining of what is good and what is evil, only it must ever be pointed out that they are not the ultimate explanation or basis of morality, which is built, not on any hedonistic or utilitarian foundation, but on the reason in us, in the universe, which commands us to live as offspring of that reason, or as Paul puts it from his point of view, as "children of the light".
