that relationship. But mercy consists in the injured party, for it is not possible to the other, carrying up the kind of equity or of justice into the next higher kind, and treating the enemy as if he were an ally, the ally as if he were a friend. The highest and greatest mercy is the justice of Love; and mercy does not cease to be justice, nor is it opposed to justice simply, but to the justice of a lower relationship. It follows that there is no tribunal which can enforce or command mercy; but mercy is commanded and enforced solely by the moral and spiritual law, the law of conscience. The enforcement of supposed acts of mercy or of love would be to destroy the very character which gives them their validity. If a superior tribunal could enforce them, a superior tribunal could destroy them. Their supreme validity consists in their being themselves supreme, a free gift not enforced. The condemnation which we pass on those who are not merciful consists in this, that their hearts are not open to the charm of love under circumstances which are most powerful to call forth that feeling. Hence the guilt of the servant in the parable: "O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?" And the servant is not punished for refusing to show mercy, but is dealt with in that relationship of justice in which he himself had chosen to stand. § 36. Justice is combined with love in the manner which has been shown; but from its combination with anger there arises an emotion of a special kind, Indignation, the vos of Aristotle, Rhet. ii. 9. Indignation is the justice of anger, and arises when BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. $ 35. Equity and Mercy. $ 36. Indignation. Book I. CH. II. PART IV. § 36. Indignation. § 37. The Moral we see or experience injustice, or injury that is not merited; and again, in emotions of the comparison of having, when we see any one enjoying honour or goodfortune which is not deserved by him, or not suitable to his real nature or qualities, and also on the other hand when we see any one deprived, or are deprived ourselves, of the honour or fortune which we think is our just due. Aristotle distinguishes νέμεσις from φθόνος, and Plato had already declared of of God, in the Timæus, xxix. E, —άyalòs žv, àɣatã dè οὐδεὶς περὶ οὐδένος οὐδέποτε ἐγγίγνεται φθόνος, but among the Greeks Néueois was the constant attendant on the Gods. This side of justice, its combination with anger, was most constantly in their minds as a divine attribute. With Christianity, however, became more prevalent the representation of God by the other mode of combination of justice, namely with love, the result of which is mercy. The two attributes need not be conceived as equally essential to the nature of God, but indignation will last so long as injustice, mercy so long as love. If all injustice were abolished, so also would be indignation; and then, in an ideal state, we may conceive that only the highest kind of justice, that of love, will remain. § 37. 1. No part of ethical enquiry has received more attention, in modern times, than Conscience or the Moral Sense; it has been the pivot upon which everything turned, at once the starting point and the goal of investigation. It has seemed that, if this were known and analysed, the whole theory of the matter would be clear. It has been to modern ethic what the conception of End, réλos, the completion or goal of which was Happiness, sudasovía, the Summum Bonum, was to ancient ethic. The difference between the two central conceptions comprised several points; 1st, the new conception involved a change from an objective to a subjective point of view, from habits, s, characters, and circumstances gratifying them, to emotions and thoughts, thus making the agent himself the inappealable tribunal of action; 2nd, it involved a conception of Duty or obligation compelling or binding, instead of a Happiness attracting, the will; 3rd, it placed the criterion of goodness at the beginning instead of at the end of action, making the judgment intuitive instead of tentative; and 4th, it rested on an analysis which took account of newly discovered facts of consciousness, facts at any rate not attended to before as of so much importance, and so figuratively speaking deeper, as if evolved from a greater depth. The last point contained the cause of the passing from the one view to the other. Certain emotions had received a new intensity for some minds, and in their lower degrees of intensity had become sensible to a greater number of minds; the terms expressing them had become current, and questions connected with them had become more widely interesting. These emotions belonged to the domain of religion; and the relations of man to the unseen world of religious objects had become more clear and more complicated, coordinately and simultaneously with the intensifying the corresponding emotions. Hence an entire Theology arose, the nature and functions of the actors in which were conceived by analogy with, and described in terms drawn from, the temporal sovereignty and its ministers, in their administrative and judicial functions. The emotions of remorse and of self-approval, when supposed to be ratified by an all-seeing and all-powerful judge, of BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. § 37. The Moral Sense. BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. § 37. The Moral whose verdict these emotions themselves were but the echo in the human heart, became of an interest far greater than any state of happiness, not depending on these, that could be pictured, however reasonable or complete. That might be dispensed with; these were inevitable, and inevitable the misery or the blessedness which they involved. It seemed trifling to be occupied with the interests of a life even of virtue and of intellectual pleasures, and with questions as to what constituted or would secure them, when eternity with its infinities of bliss or of agony, and of physical as the consequence of mental suffering or delight, had commingled with time, and taken up the brief period of mortal life into its bosom, as a pool upon the shore is mingled with the waters of a measureless ocean. 2. Such is a very brief history of the course of thought which effected the change from the old conception to the new, abstracting, as it will be seen, from the various events, classes of men, and schools of thought, which were the organs or instruments of the change; the reconciliation of which conceptions, and their incorporation into a single system, is one of the chief problems of ethic at the present time. Let us see, therefore, what is the analysis of the Moral Sense. The means and materials are at hand in the analysis which has been conducted up to the present point. Justice is the emotion which depends upon the congruity of two moments or objects in comparison, as compared; it arises, then, from the formal element in consciousness; but all possible moments or objects of comparison have also qualities for feeling, a material element which in all its kinds has pleasure or pain of enjoyment. The emotions be longing to the four great groups examined previously to justice are named from and consist of this material element; but every one of these emotions is concrete, empirical, or complete; that is, it consists of qualities with pleasure or pain of enjoyment, and of congruities or incongruities which are always pleasures or pains of admiration, and mostly of that marked kind which is the pleasure of justice, the pain of injustice. Now it is of such concrete emotions that the moral sense is the perception; a perception of comparison, or a judgment, which perceives its object to be either morally right or morally wrong; if it perceives it to be indifferent, the reason is that to that extent it lacks perception, is blunt or blind, in comparison with the minuteness, subtilty, or complication, of the character of the object perceived. No object whatever is of a nature to escape the moral sense, for every object stands in some discovered or discoverable relation to reflective emotion, and every reflective emotion is a concrete object, containing emotion of matter and emotion of form, of matter so far as it belongs to one of the four first groups, and of form so far as it belongs to justice, or is capable of equation and measurement such as give justice its validity. But it is in justice alone that the formal element is sufficiently prominent to be at once perceived as having a validity of its own, or as being the ground of a rule of right. 3. Justice is the perception of congruities and incongruities in objects, the moral sense is the perception of the moral character of those objects as wholes, the perception of justice in the concrete. has no special kind of object which it perceives, but all objects alike. Like the perception of justice it is It BOOK I. CH. II. PART IV. $ 37. The Moral Sense. |