 Preface to Three Essays on Religion. The three following essays on religion were written at considerable intervals of time without any intention of forming a consecutive series, and must not, therefore, be regarded as a connected body of thought, accepting insofar as they exhibit the author's deliberate and exhaustive treatment of the topics under consideration. The two first of these three essays were written between the years 1850 and 1858, during the period which intervened between the publication of The Principles of Political Economy and that of the work On Liberty, during which interval three other essays, On Justice, On Utility, and On Liberty, were also composed. Of the five essays written at that time, three have already been given to the public by the author. That On Liberty was expanded into the now well-known work bearing the same title. Those on justice and utility were afterwards incorporated with some alterations and additions into one, and published under the name of utilitarianism. The remaining two, On Nature and On the Utility of Religion, are now given to the public, with the addition of a third, On Theism, which was produced at a much later period. In these two first essays, indications may easily be found of the date at which they were composed, among which indications may be noted the absence of any mention of the works of Mr. Darwin and Sir Henry Main, in passages where there is coincidence of thought with those writers, or where subjects are treated which they have since discussed, in a manner to which the author of these essays would certainly have referred had their works been published before these were written. The last essay in the present volume belongs to a different epoch. It was written between the years 1868 and 1870, but it was not designed as a sequel to the two essays which now appear along with it, nor were they intended to appear altogether. On the other hand it is certain that the author considered the opinions expressed in these different essays as fundamentally consistent. The evidence of this lies in the fact that in the year 1873, after he had completed his essay on Theism, it was his intention to have published the essay on nature at once, with only such slight revision as might be judged necessary in preparing it for the press, but substantially in its present form. From this it is apparent that his manner of thinking had undergone no substantial change. Whatever discrepancies, therefore, may seem to remain after a really careful comparison between different passages, may be set down either to the fact that the last essay had not undergone the many revisions which it was the author's habit to make peculiarly searching and thorough, or to that difference of tone and of apparent estimate of the relative weight of different considerations, which results from taking a wider view and including a larger number of considerations in the estimate of the subject as a whole, then in dealing with parts of it only. The fact that the author intended to publish the essay on nature in 1873 is sufficient evidence, if any is needed, that the volume now given to the public was not withheld by him on account of reluctance to encounter whatever odium might result from the free expression of his opinions on religion. That he did not purpose to publish the other two essays at the same time was in accord with the author's habit in regard to the public utterance of his religious opinions. For at the same time that he was peculiarly deliberate and slow in forming opinions, he had a special dislike to the utterance of half-formed opinions. He declined altogether to be hurried into premature decision, on any point to which he did not think he had given sufficient time and labor to have exhausted it to the utmost limit of his own thinking powers. And in the same way, even after he had arrived at definite conclusions, he refused to allow the curiosity of others to force him to the expression of them before he had bestowed all the elaboration in his power upon their adequate expression. And before, therefore, he had subjected to the test of time not only the conclusions themselves, but also the form into which he had thrown them. The same reasons, therefore, that made him cautious in the spoken utterance of his opinion, in proportion as it was necessary to be at once precise and comprehensive in order to be properly understood, which in his judgment was preeminently the case in religious speculation, were the reasons that made him abstain from publishing his essay on nature for upwards of fifteen years, and might have led him still to withhold the others which now appear in the same volume. From this point of view it will be seen that the essay on theism has both greater value and less than any other of the author's works. The last considerable work which he completed it shows the latest state of the author's mind, the carefully balanced result of the deliberations of a lifetime. On the other hand there had not been time for it to undergo the revision to which from time to time he subjected most of his writings before making them public. Not only, therefore, is the style less polished than that of any of his other published works, but even the matter itself, at least in the exact shape it here assumes, has never undergone the repeated examination which it certainly would have passed through before he would himself have given it to the world. Nature, natural, and the group of words derived from them, or allied to them in etymology, have at all times filled a great place in the thoughts and taken a strong hold on the feelings of mankind. That they should have done so is not surprising, when we consider what the words, in their primitive and most obvious signification, represent. But it is unfortunate that a set of terms which play so great a part in moral and metaphysical speculation should have acquired many meanings different from the primary one, yet sufficiently allied to it to admit of confusion. The words have thus been entangled in so many foreign associations, mostly of a very powerful and tenacious character, that they have come to excite and to be the symbols of, feelings which their original meaning will by no means justify, and which have made them one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law. The most important application of the Socratic Alancas, as exhibited and improved by Plato, consists in dissecting large abstractions of this description, fixing down to a precise definition the meaning which as popularly used they merely shadow forth, and questioning and testing the common maxims and opinions in which they bear a part. It is to be regretted that among the instructive specimens of this kind of investigation which Plato has left, and to which subsequent times have been so much indebted for whatever intellectual clearness they have attained, he has not enriched posterity with such a dialogue. If the idea denoted by the word had been subjected to a searching analysis, and the popular common places in which it figures had been submitted to the ordeal of his powerful dialectics, his successors probably would not have rushed, as they speedily did, into modes of thinking and reasoning of which the fallacious use of that word formed the cornerstone, a kind of fallacy from which he was himself singularly free. According to the Platonic method, which is still the best type of such investigations, the first thing to be done with so vague a term is to ascertain precisely what it means. It is also a rule of the same method that the meaning of an abstraction is best sought for in the concrete, of the universal and the particular. Adopting this course with the word nature, the first question must be what is meant by the nature of a particular object, as of fire, of water, or of some individual plant or animal? Evidently the ensemble or aggregate of its powers or properties, the modes in which it acts on other things, counting among those things the senses of the observer, and the modes in which other things act upon it, to which, in the case of a sentient being, must be added its own capacities of feeling or being conscious. The nature of the thing means all this, means its entire capacity of exhibiting phenomena. And since the phenomena which a thing exhibits, however much they vary in different circumstances, are always the same and same circumstances, they admit of being described in general forms of words, which are called the laws of the thing's nature. Thus it is the law of the nature of water that, under the mean pressure of the atmosphere at the level of the sea, it boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. As the nature of any given thing is the aggregate of its powers and properties, so nature in the abstract is the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes which produce them, including not only all that happens, but all that is capable of happening, the unused capabilities of causes being as much a part of the idea of nature as those which take effect. Since all phenomena which have been sufficiently examined are found to take place with regularity, each having certain fixed conditions, positive and negative, on the occurrence of which it invariably happens, mankind have been able to ascertain, either by direct observation or by reasoning processes grounded on it, the conditions of the occurrence of many phenomena, and the progress of science mainly consists in ascertaining those conditions. When discovered they can be expressed in general propositions, which are called laws of the particular phenomenon, and also more generally laws of nature. Thus the truth that all material objects tend towards one another with a force directly as their masses and inversely as the square of their distance is a law of nature. The proposition that air and food are necessary to animal life, if it be as we have good reason to believe, true without exception, is also a law of nature, though the phenomenon of which it is the law is special and not like gravitation, universal. Nature, then, in this its simplest acceptation, is a collective name for all facts, actual and possible, or to speak more accurately, a name for the mode partly known to us and partly unknown in which all things take place. For the word suggests, not so much the multitudinous detail the phenomenon as the conception which might be formed of their manner of existence as a mental whole, by a mind possessing a complete knowledge of them, to which conception it is the aim of science to raise itself by successive steps of generalization from experience. Such then is a correct definition of the word nature, but this definition corresponds only to one of the senses of that ambiguous term. It is evidently inapplicable to some of the modes in which the word is familiarly employed. For example, it entirely conflicts with the common form of speech by which nature is opposed to art, and natural to artificial. For in the sense of the word nature, which has just been defined, and which is the true scientific sense, art is as much nature as anything else, and everything which is artificial is natural. Art has no independent powers of its own. Art is but the employment of the powers of nature for an end. Phenomena produced by human agency, no less than those which, as far as we are concerned, are spontaneous, depend on the properties of the elementary forces, or of the elementary substances and their compounds. The united powers of the whole human race could not create a new property of matter in general, or of any one of its species. We can only take advantage, for our purposes, of the properties which we find. A ship floats by the same laws of specific gravity and equilibrium as a tree uprooted by the wind and blown into the water. The corn which men raise for food grows and produces its grain by the same laws of vegetation by which the wild rose and the mountain strawberry bring forth their flowers and fruit. A house stands and holds together by the natural properties, the weight and cohesion of the materials which compose it. A steam engine works by the natural expansive force of steam, exerting a pressure upon one part of a system of arrangements, which pressure by the mechanical properties of the lever is transferred from that to another part where it raises the weight or removes the obstacle brought into connection with it. In these and all other artificial operations, the office of man is, as has often been remarked, a very limited one. It consists of moving things into certain places. We move objects, and by doing this bring some things into contact which are separate, or separate others which are in contact. And by this simple change of place, natural forces previously dormant are called into action and produce the desired effect. Even the volition which designs, the intelligence which contrives, and the muscular force which executes these movements are themselves powers of nature. It thus appears that we must recognize at least two principle meanings in the word nature. In one sense, it means all the powers existing in either the outer or the inner world, and everything which takes place by means of those powers. In another sense, it means not everything which happens, but only what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency of man. This distinction is far from exhausting the ambiguities of the word, but it is the key to most of those on which important consequences depend. Such then, being the two principle senses of the word nature, in which of these is it taken, or is it taken in either, when the word and its derivatives are used to convey ideas of commendation, approval, and even moral obligation. It is conveyed such ideas in all ages, that Thulam Sekoui was the fundamental principle of morals in many of the most admired schools of philosophy. Among the ancients, especially in the declining period of the ancient intellect and thought, it was the test to which all ethical doctrines were brought. The Stoics and the Epicureans, however irreconcilable in the rest of their systems, agreed in holding themselves bound to prove that their respective maxims of conduct were the dictates of nature. Under their influence the Roman jurists, when attempting to systematize jurisprudence, placed in the front of their exposition a certain use-naturale, ku'anatura, as Justinian declares in the Institutes, omnia animalia docuat. And as the modern systematic writers, not only on law but on moral philosophy, have generally taken the Roman jurists for their models, treatises on the so-called law of nature have abounded, and references to this law as a supreme rule in ultimate standard have pervaded literature. The writers on international law have done more than any others to give currency to this style of ethical speculation, in as much as having no positive law to write about, and yet being anxious to invest the most approved opinions respecting international morality with as much as they could of the authority of law, they endeavored to find such an authority in nature's imaginary code. The Christian theology, during the period of its greatest ascendancy, opposed some, though not a complete, hindrance to the modes of thought which erected nature into the criterion of morals, in as much as, according to the creed of most denominations of Christians, though assuredly not of Christ, man is by nature wicked. But this very doctrine, by the reaction which it provoked, has made the deistical moralists almost unanimous in proclaiming the divinity of nature, and setting up its fancy dictates as an authoritative rule of action. A reference to that supposed standard is the predominant ingredient in the vein of thought and feeling which was opened by Rousseau, and which has infiltrated itself most widely into the modern mind, not accepting that portion of it which calls itself Christian. The doctrines of Christianity have, in every age, been largely accommodated to the philosophy which happened to be prevalent, and the Christianity of our day has borrowed a considerable part of its color and flavor from sentimental deism. At the present time it cannot be said that nature or any other standard is applied as it was want to be to deduce rules of action with juridical precision, and with an attempt to make its application coextensive with all human agency. The people of this generation do not commonly apply principles with any such studious exactness, nor own such binding allegiance to any standard, but live in a kind of confusion of many standards, a condition not propitious to the formation of steady moral convictions, but convenient enough to those whose moral opinions sit lightly on them, since it gives them a much wider range of arguments for defending the doctrine at the moment. But though perhaps no one could now be found who, like the institutional writers of former times, adopts the so-called law of nature as a foundation of ethics, and endeavors consistently to reason from it, the word and its cognates must still be counted among those which carry great weight in moral argumentation. That any mode of thinking, feeling, or acting is, according to nature, is usually accepted as a strong argument for its goodness. If it can be said with any plausibility that nature enjoins anything, the propriety of obeying the injunction is by most people considered to be made out, and conversely, the imputation of being contrary to nature is thought to bar the door against any pretension on the part of the thing so designated to be tolerated or excused. And the word unnatural has not ceased to be one of the most phytuperative epithets in the language. Those who deal in these expressions may avoid making themselves responsible for any fundamental theorem respecting the standard of moral obligation, but they do not the less imply such a theorem, and one which must be the same in substance with that on which the more logical thinkers of a more laborious age grounded their systematic treatises on natural law. Is it necessary to recognize in these forms of speech another distinct meaning of the word nature, or can they be connected by any rational bond of union with either of the two meanings already treated of? At first it may seem that we have no option but to admit another ambiguity in the term. All inquiries are either into what is or into what ought to be, science and history belonging to the First Division, art, morals, and politics to the second. But the two senses of the word nature, first pointed out, agree in referring only to what is. In the first meaning, nature is a collective name for everything which is. In the second, it is a name for everything which is of itself without voluntary human intervention. But the employment of the word nature as a term of ethics seems to disclose a third meaning, in which nature does not stand for what is, but for what ought to be, or for the rule of standard of what ought to be. A little consideration, however, will show that this is not a case of ambiguity. There is not here a third sense of the word. Those who set up nature as a standard of action do not intend a merely verbal proposition. They do not mean that the standard, whatever it be, should be called nature. They think that they are giving some information as to what the standard of action really is. Those who say that we ought to act according to nature do not mean the mere identical proposition that we ought to do what we ought to do. They think that the word nature affords some external criterion of what we should do. And if they lay down as a rule for what ought to be, a word which in its proper signification denotes what is, they do so because they have a notion, either clearly or confusedly, that what is constitutes the rule and standard of what ought to be. The examination of this notion is the object of the present essay. It is proposed to inquire into the truth of the doctrines which make nature a test of right and wrong, good and evil, or which in any mode or degree attach merit or approval to following, imitating, or obeying nature. To this inquiry the foregoing discussion respecting the meaning of terms was an indispensable introduction. Language is, as it were, the atmosphere of philosophical investigation, which must be made transparent before anything can be seen through it in the true figure and position. In the present case it is necessary to guard against a further ambiguity, which though abundantly obvious, sometimes misled even sagacious minds, and of which it is well to take distinct note before proceeding further. No word is more commonly associated with nature than law, and this last word has distinctly two meanings, in one of which it denotes some definite portion of what is, in the other of what ought to be. We speak of the law of gravitation, the three laws of notion, the law of definite proportions and chemical combination, the vital law of organized beings. All these are portions of what is. We also speak of the criminal law, the civil law, the law of honor, the law of veracity, the law of justice, all of which are portions of what ought to be, or of somebody's suppositions, feelings, or commands respecting what ought to be. The first kind of laws, such as the laws of motion and of gravitation are neither more nor less than the observed uniformities in the occurrence of phenomena, partly uniformities of antecedents and sequence, partly of concomitance. These are what, in science and even in ordinary parlance, are meant by laws of nature. Laws in the other sense are the laws of the land, the laws of nation, or moral laws, among which, as already noticed, is dragged in by jurists and publicists, something which they think proper to call the law of nature. Of the liability of these two meanings of the word to be confounded, there can be no better example than the first chapter of Montesquieu, where he remarks that the material world has its laws, the inferior animals have their laws, and man has his laws, and cause attention to the much greater strictness with which the first two sets of laws are observed than the last, as if it were an inconsistency and a paradox that things always are what they are, but men not always what they ought to be. A similar confusion of ideas pervades the writings of Mr. George Coombe from whence it is overflowed into a large region of popular literature, and we are now continually reading injunctions to obey the physical laws of the universe as being obligatory in the same sense and manner as the moral. The conception which the ethical use of the word nature implies of a close relation, if not absolute identity between what is and what ought to be, certainly derives part of its hold on the mind from the custom of designating what is by the expression laws of nature, while the same word law is also used and even more familiarly and emphatically to express what ought to be. End of nature, part one. Section two of three essays on religion. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Three essays on religion by John Stuart Mill. Nature, part two. When it is asserted or implied that nature or the laws of nature should be conformed to, is the nature which is meant, nature in the first sense of the term, meaning all which is the powers and properties of all things? But in this signification, there is no need of a recommendation to act according to nature, since it is what nobody can possibly help doing and equally whether he acts well or ill. There is no mode of acting which is not conformable to nature in the sense of the term and all modes of acting are so and exactly the same degree. Every action is the exertion of some natural power and its effects of all sorts are so many phenomena of nature, produced by the powers and properties of some of the objects of nature and exact obedience to some law or laws of nature. When I voluntarily use my organs to take in food, the act and its consequences take place according to laws of nature. If instead of food I swallow poison, the case is exactly the same. To bid people conform to the laws of nature when they have no power but what the laws of nature gives them, when it is a physical impossibility for them to do the smallest thing otherwise than through some law of nature, is an absurdity. The thing they need to be told is what particular law of nature they should make use of in a particular case. When for example, a person is crossing a river by a narrow bridge to which there is no parapet, he will do well to regulate his proceedings by the laws of equilibrium and moving bodies instead of conforming on to the law of gravitation and falling into the river. Yet idle as it is to exhort people to do what they cannot avoid doing, and absurd as it is to prescribe as a rule of right conduct what agrees exactly as well was wrong. Nevertheless, a rational rule of conduct may be constructed out of the relation which it ought to bear to the laws of nature and the slightest acceptation of the term. Man necessarily obeys the laws of nature or in other words the properties of things but he does not necessarily guide himself by them. So all conduct is in conformity to laws of nature. All conduct is not grounded on knowledge of them and intelligently directed to the attainment of purposes by means of them. Though we cannot emancipate ourselves from the laws of nature as a whole we can escape from any particular law of nature if we are able to withdraw ourselves from the circumstances in which it acts. Though we can do nothing except through laws of nature we can use one law to counteract another. According to Bacon's maxim we can obey nature in such a manner as to command it. Every alteration of circumstances alters more or less the laws of nature under which we act and by every choice we make either of ends or of means we place ourselves to a greater or less extent under one set of laws of nature instead of another. If therefore the useless precept to follow nature were changed into a precept to study nature to know and take heed of the properties of the things we have to deal with so far as the properties are capable of forwarding or obstructing any given purpose we should have arrived at the first principle of all intelligent action or rather at the definition of intelligent action itself. And a confused notion of this true principle is I doubt not in the minds of many of those who set up the unmeaning doctrine which superficially resembles it. They perceive that the essential difference between wise and foolish conduct consists in attending or not attending to the particular laws of nature on which some important result depends. And they think that a person who attends to a law of nature in order to shape his conduct by it may be said to obey it. While a person who practically disregards it and acts as if no such law existed may be said to disobey it. The circumstance being overlooked that what is thus called disobedience to a law of nature, disobedience to some other or perhaps to the very law itself. For example, a person who goes into a powder magazine either not knowing or carelessly emitting to think of the explosive force of gunpowder is likely to do some act which will cause him to be blown to atoms in obedience to the very law which he has disregarded. But however much of its authority the Naturum sequae doctrine may owe to its being confounded with the rational precept Naturum observare its favourers and promoters unquestionably intend much more by it than that precept. To acquire knowledge of the properties of things and make use of the knowledge for guidance is a rule of prudence for the adaptation of means to ends for giving effect to our wishes and intentions whatever they may be. But the maxim of obedience to nature or conformity to nature is held up not as a simply prudential but as an ethical maxim by those who talk of ducinatory even as a law fit to be administered by tribunals and enforced by sanctions. Right action must mean something more and other than merely intelligent action. Yet no precept beyond this last can be connected with the word nature in the wider and more philosophical of its acceptations. We must try it therefore in the other sense that in which nature stands distinguished from art and denotes not the whole course of the phenomena which come under our observation but only their spontaneous course. Let us then consider whether we can attach any meaning to the supposed practical maxim of following nature and the second sense of the word in which nature stands for that which takes place without human intervention. And nature is thus understood is the spontaneous course of things when left to themselves the rule to be followed in endeavoring to adapt things to our use. But it is evident at once that the maximum taken in the sense is not merely as it is in the other sense superfluous and unmeaning but palpably absurd and self-contradictory for while human action cannot help conforming to nature in the one meaning of the term the very aim and object of action is to alter and improve nature in the other meaning. If the natural course of things were perfectly right in satisfactory to act at all would be a gratuitous meddling which as it could not make things better must make them worse. Or if an action at all could be justified it would only be in direct obedience to instincts since these might perhaps be a counted part of the spontaneous order of nature. But to do anything with forethought and purpose would be a violation of that perfect order. If the artificial is not better than the natural to what end are all the arts of life? To dig, to plough, to build, to wear clothes are direct infringements of the injunction to follow nature. Accordingly it would be said by everyone even of those most under the influence of the feelings which prompt the injunction that to apply it to such cases as those to spoken of would be to push it too far. Everybody professes to approve and admire many great triumphs of art over nature. The junction by bridges of shores which nature has made separate. The draining of nature's marshes, the excavation of her wells, the dragging to light of what she has buried at immense depths in the earth. The turning away of her thunderbolts by lightning rods, of her inundations by embankments, of her ocean by breakwaters. But to command these and similar feats is to acknowledge that the ways of nature are to be conquered, not obeyed. That her powers are often towards man and the position of enemies from whom he must rest by force and ingenuity what little he can for his own use and deserves to be applauded when that little is rather more than might be expected from his physical weakness in comparison to those gigantic powers. All praise of civilisations or art or contrivance is so much dispraise of nature and admission of imperfection which it is man's business and merit to be always endearing to correct or mitigate. The consciousness that whatever man does to improve his condition is in so much a censure and a thwarting of the spontaneous order of nature has in all ages caused new and unprecedented attempts at improvement to be generally at first under a shade of religious suspicion, as being in any case uncomplementary and very probably offensive to the powerful beings or when polytheism gave place to monotheism to the all-powerful being supposed to govern the various phenomena of the universe and of whose will the course of nature was conceived to be the expression. Any attempt to mould natural phenomena to the convenience of mankind might easily appear an interference with the government of those superior beings and their life could not have been maintained much less made pleasant without perpetual interference of the kind. Each new one was doubtless made with fear and trembling until experience had shown that it could be ventured on without drawing down the vengeance of the gods. The sagacity of priests showed them a way to reconcile the impunity of particular infringements with the maintenance of the general dread of encroaching on the divine administration. This was effected by representing each of the principal human inventions as the gift and favour of some god. The old religions also afforded many resources for consulting the gods and obtaining their express permission for what would otherwise have appeared a breach of their prerogative. When oracles had ceased, any religion which recognised a revelation afforded expedience for the same purpose. The Catholic religion had the resource of an infallible church, authorised to declare what exertions of human spontaneity were permitted or forbidden. And in default of this, the case was always open to argument from the Bible whether any particular practice had expressly or by implication been sanctioned. The notion remained that this liberty to control nature was conceded to man only by special indulgence in as far as required by his necessities, and there was always a tendency, though a diminishing one, to regard any attempt to exercise power over nature beyond a certain degree and a certain admitted range as an impious effort to assert divine power and dare more than was permitted to man. The lines of horrors in which the familiar acts of shipbuilding and navigation are reprobated as in fititum neface indicate even in that sceptical age is still an exhausted vein of the old sentiment. The intensity of the corresponding feeling in the Middle Ages is not a precise parallel on account of the superstition about dealing with evil spirits with which it was complicated. But the imputation of prying into the secrets of the Almighty long remained a powerful weapon of attacking against unpopular inquiries into nature. And the charge of presumptuously attempting to defeat the designs of providence still retains enough of its original force to be thrown in as a make-weight along with other objections where there is a desire to find fault with any new exertion of human forethought and contrivance. No one, indeed, asserts it to be the intention of the Creator that the spontaneous order of the creation should not be altered or even that it should not be altered in any new way. But there still exists a vague notion that though it is very proper to control this or the other natural phenomenon, the general scheme of nature is a model for us to imitate that with more or less liberty and details we should on the whole be guided by the spirit and general conception of nature's own ways. But they are God's work, and as such, perfect. That man cannot rival their unapproachable excellence and can best show his skill and piety by attempting, in however imperfect a way, to reproduce their likeness. And that if not the whole, yet some particular parts of the spontaneous order of nature selected according to the speaker's predilections, are in a peculiar sense manifestations of the Creator's will. A sort of finger post pointing out the direction which things in general and therefore our voluntary actions are intended to take. Feelings of this sort, though repressed on ordinary occasions by the contrary current of life, are ready to break out whenever customers silent and the native promptings of the mind have nothing opposed to them but reason. And appeals are continually made to them by retricions with the effect, if not of convincing opponents, at least of making those who already hold the opinion which the retrician desires to recommend better satisfied with it. For in the present day it probably seldom happens that anyone is persuaded to approve any course of action because it appears to him to bear an analogy to the divine government of the world. Though the argument tells on him with great force and is felt by him to be a great support on behalf of anything which he has already inclined to approve. If this notion of imitating the ways of providence as manifested in nature is seldom expressed plainly and downrightly as a maximum of general application, it is also seldom directly contradicted. Those who find it on their path prefer to turn the obstacle rather than to attack it, being often themselves not free from the feeling and in any case afraid of incurring the charge of impiety by saying anything which might be held to disparage the works of the Creator's power. They therefore, for the most part, rather endeavour to show that they have as much right to the religious argument as their opponents and that if the course they recommend seems to conflict with some part of the ways of providence there is some other part with which it agrees better than what is contended for on the other side. In this mode of dealing with the great priori fallacies the progress of improvement clears away particular errors while the causes of errors are still left standing and very little weakened by each conflict. Yet by a long series of such partial victories precedents are accumulated to which an appeal may be made against these powerful prepositions and which afford a growing hope that the misplaced feeling after having so often learnt to recede may someday be compelled to an unconditional surrender. For however offensive the prepositions may appear to many religious persons they should be willing to look in the face of the undeniable fact that the order of nature insofar as unmodified by man and such as no being whose attributes of justice and benevolence would have made without the intention that his rational creatures should follow it as an example. If made wholly by such a being and not partly by beings of very different qualities it could only be as a designedly imperfect work which man in his limited sphere is to exercise justice and benevolence in amending. The best pertains have always held it to be the essence of religion that the paramount duty of man upon earth is to amend himself. But all except monkish quietists have annexed to this in their in most minds though seldom willing to enunciate the obligation with the same clearness the additional religious duty of amending the world and not solely the human part of it but the material, the order of physical nature. In considering this subject it is necessary to divest ourselves of certain preconceptions which may justly be called natural prejudices being grounded on feelings which in themselves natural uninvitable intrude into matters with which they ought to have no concern. One of these feelings is the astonishment rising into awe which has inspired even independently of all religious sentiment by any of the great of natural phenomena a hurricane, a mountain precipice, the desert the ocean either agitated or at rest the solar system and the great cosmic forces which hold it together the boundless ferment and to an educated mind any single star excite feelings which make all human enterprises and powers appear so insignificant that to a mind thus occupied it seems insufferable presumption and so puny a creature is man to look critically on things so far above him or dare to measure himself against the grandeur of the universe. But a little interrogation of our own consciousness will suffice to convince us that what makes these phenomena so impressive is simply their vastness. The enormous extension in space and time or the enormous power they exemplify constitutes their sublimity a feeling in all cases more allied to terror than to any moral emotion. And though the vast scale of these phenomena may well excite wonder and sets at defiance all idea of rivalry the feeling it inspires is of a totally different character from admiration of excellence those in whom all produces admiration may be aesthetically developed but they are morally uncultivated. It is one of the endowments of the imaginative part of our mental nature that conceptions of greatness and power vividly realized produce a feeling which though in its higher degrees closely bordering on pain we prefer to most of what are accounted pleasures. But we are quite equally capable of experiencing this feeling towards maleficent powers and we never experience it so strongly towards most of the powers of the universe as when we have most present to our consciousness a vivid sense of their capacity of inflicting evil. Because these natural powers have what we cannot imitate enormous might and overawar us by that one attribute it would be a great error to infer that their other attributes are such as we ought to emulate or that we should be justified in using our small power after the example which nature sets us in her vast forces. For how stands the fact that next to the greatness of these cosmic forces the quality which most forcibly strikes everyone who does not avert his eyes from it is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists in their attempts to prove that whatever is is right are obliged to maintain not that nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction but that it would be very unreasonable in us to expect that she should. Popes shall gravitation cease when you go by may be a just rebuke to anyone who shall be so silly as to expect common human morality from nature. But if a question were between two men instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon that triumph from apostrophe would be thought a rare piece of impudence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man goes by and having killed him should urge a similar plea and escalation would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. In sober truth nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are natures everyday performances. Killing the most criminal act recognized by human law nature does once every being that lives and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters who we read of ever purposefully inflicting on their living fellow creatures. If by an arbitrary reservation we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be a lot of the human life nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives and does it in all the modes violent or insidious in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyrs, stabs them with hunger, freezes them with coal, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve such as the ingenious cruelty of a neighbour or a demission never surpassed. All this, nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst. Upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises and often in the direct consequence of the noblest acts and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hang the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose deaths are relieved to themselves or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such a nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures and apparent mountainous, and the clumsy provision in which she is made for that perpetual renewal of animal life rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it. In every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world, but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing a death. Next to taking life, equal to taking it according to a high authority, is the taking means by which we live. A nature does this too on the larger scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season, a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates the district. A trifling chemical change in an edible root stabs a million of people. The waves of the sea, like Banditti, sieves and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little of all the poor with the same accompanence of stripping, wounding and killing as their human antitypes. Everything, in short, which the worst men commit, either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has niolides more fatal than those of carrier. Her explosions of the fire damper is destructive as human artillery. Her plague and cholera are faster past the poison cups with the gorgeous. Even the love of order, which is thought to be a following of the ways of nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as disorder and its consequences is precisely a counterpart of nature's ways. Anarchy and the reign of terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin and death by a hurricane and a pestilence. End of Nature Part 2. Recording by Sunny Shields. Doha, State of Qatar. Section 3 of Three Essays on Religion. This is a Librebox recording. All Librebox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librebox.org. Three Essays on Religion by John Stuart Mill. Nature Part 3. But, it is said, all these things are for wise and good ends. On this, I must first remark that whether they are so or not is altogether beside the point. Supposing it true that contrary to appearances, these horrors when perpetrated by nature promote good ends, still as no one believes that good ends would be promoted by our following the example, the course of nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills, torture because nature tortures, ruin and devastate because nature does the like, or we ought not to consider at all what nature does, but what it is good to do. If there is such a thing as reductioid absurdum, this surely amounts to one. If it is a sufficient reason for doing one thing that nature does it, why not another thing? If not all things, why anything? The physical government of the world, being full of things, which when done by men, are deemed the greatest enormities, it cannot be religious or moral in us to guide our actions by the analogy of the course of nature. This proposition remains true, whatever occult quality of producing good may reside in those facts of nature which to our perceptions are most noctious, and which no one considers it other than a crime to produce artificially. But in reality no one consistently believes in any such occult quality. The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them. If we believed that those agencies were appointed by a benevolent providence as the means of accomplishing wise purposes, which could not be compassed if they did not exist, then everything done by mankind, which tends to chain up these natural agencies, will to restrict their mischievous operation. From draining a pestilential marsh down to curing the toothache or putting up an umbrella, or to be accounted in pious, which assuredly nobody does account them, notwithstanding an undercurrent of sentiment setting in that direction, which is occasionally perceptible. On the contrary, the improvements on which the civilised part of mankind most pride themselves consist of more successfully warding off those natural calamities, which, if we really believe what most people profess to believe, we should cherish as medicines provided for our earthly state of infinite wisdom. And as much too as each generation greatly surpasses its predecessors in the amount of natural evil which it succeeds in averting, our condition, if the theory were true, ought by this time to have become a terrible manifestation of some tremendous calamity against which the physical evils we have learnt to overmaster have previously operated as a preservative. Anyone, however, who acted as if he supposed to be the case, will be more likely, I think, to be confined as a lunatic than reverenced as a saint. It is undoubtedly a very common fact that good comes out of evil, and when it does occur, it is far too agreeable not to find people eager to delay on it. But in the first place, it is quite as often true of human crimes as of natural calamities. The fire of London, which is believed to have had so salutary an effect on the healthiness of the city, would have produced that effect just as much if it had been really the work of the furah-pipisticus so long commemorated on the monument. The deaths of those whom tyrants or persecutors have made matters in any noble cause have done a service to mankind which would not have been obtained if they had died by accident or disease. Yet whatever incidental and unexpected benefits may result from crimes, they are crimes nevertheless. In the second place, if good frequently comes out of evil, the converse fact, evil coming out of good, is equally common. Every event, public or private, which regretted on its occurrence, was declared providentially at a later period, on account of some unforeseen good consequences, might be matched by some other event, den-fortunate at the time, but which prove calamitous or fatal to those whom it appeared to benefit. Such conflicts between the beginning and the end, or between the event and the expectation, are not only as frequent, but is often held up to notice in the painful cases, as in the agreeable. But there is not the same inclination to generalise on them, or at all events they are not regarded by the moderns, though they were by the ancients, as similarly an indication of the divine purposes. Men satisfy themselves with moralising on the imperfect nature of our foresight, the uncertainty of events, and the vanity of human expectations. The simple fact is, human interests are so complicated, and the effects of any incident, whatever, so multitudinous, that if it touches mankind at all, its influence on them is, in the great majority of cases, both good and bad. If the greater number of personal misfortunes have their good side, hardly any good fortune ever befell anyone, which should not give either to the same or to some other person something to regret. And unhappily, there are many misfortunes so overwhelming that their favourable side, if it exists, is entirely overshadowed and made insignificant, while a corresponding statement can seldom be made concerning blessings. The effects, too, of every cause, depend so much on the circumstances which accidentally accompany it, that many cases are sure to occur in which even the total result is markedly opposed to the predominant tenancy, and thus not only evil has its good and good its evil side, but good often produces an overbalance of evil and evil and overbalance of good. This, however, this by no means the general tenancy of either phenomenon. On the contrary, both good and evil naturally tend to fructify, each in its own kind, good producing good and evil evil. It is one of nature's general rules and part of her habitual injustice that to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken, even that which he hath. The ordinary and predominant tenancy of good is towards more good. Health, strength, wealth, knowledge, virtue are not only good in themselves, but facilitate and promote the acquisition of good, both of the same and of other kinds. The person who can learn easily is he who already knows much. It is the strong and not the sickly person who can do everything which most conduces to health. Those who find it easy to gain money are not the poor, but the rich, while health, strength, knowledge, talents are all means of acquiring riches, and riches are often an indispensable means of acquiring these. Again, he can bear so. Whatever may be said of evil turning into good, the general tenancy of evil is towards further evil. Bodily illness renders the body more susceptible of disease. It produces incapacity of exertion, sometimes stability of the mind, and often the loss of means of subsistence. All severe pain, either bodily or mental, tends to increase the susceptibilities of pain for ever after. Poverty is the parent of a thousand mental and moral evils. What is still worth to be injured or oppressed when habitual lowers the whole tone of the character? One bad action leads to others, both in the agent himself, in the bystanders, and in the sufferers. All bad qualities are strengthened by habit, and all vices and follies tend to spread. Intellectual defects generate moral and moral intellectual, and every intellectual or moral defect generates others, and so on without end. That much-applauded glass of authors, the writers on natural theology, have, I venture to think, entirely lost their way and missed the sole line of argument which could have made their speculations acceptable to anyone who can perceive when two propositions contradict one another. They have exhausted the sources of surface-tree to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater. That misery exists for fear lest there should be misery. A thesis which, if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will, but can have no application to a creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to. If the maker of the world can or that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion. The more consistent of those who have deemed themselves qualified to vindicate the ways of God to man have endeavoured to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts and denying that misery is an evil. The goodness of God, they say, does not consist in willing the happiness of his creatures, but their virtue, and the universe, if not a happy, is a just universe. But waving the objections to this scheme of ethics, it does not at all get rid of the difficulty. If the creator of mankind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely baffled as if he had willed that they should all be happy, and the order of nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of justice than to those of benevolence. If the law of all creation were justice and the creator omnipotent, then in whatever amount suffering and happiness might be dispensed in the world, each person's share of them would be exactly proportional to that person's good or evil deeds. No human being would have a worse lot than another without worse desserts. Accident or favouritism would have no part in such a world, but every human life would be playing out a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this. And so much that the necessity of redressing the balance has been deemed one of the strongest arguments for another life after death, which amounts to an admission that the order of things in this life is often an example of injustice, not justice. If it be said that God does not take sufficient account of pleasure and pain to make them the reward or punishment of the good or the wicked, but the virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil, then these at least ought to be dispensed to all according to what they have done to deserve them, instead of which every kind of moral depravity is entailed upon multitudes by the fatality of their birth through the fault of their parents, of society or of uncontrollable circumstances, certainly through no fault of their own. Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good, which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanatism, can the government of nature can be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent. The only admissible moral theory of creation is that the principle of good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or moral, could not place mankind in a world free from the necessity of an incessant struggle with the magnificent powers or make them always victorious in that struggle, but could and did make them capable of carrying on the fight with vigor and with progressively increasing success. Of all the religious explanations of the order of nature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself nor to the facts for which it attempts to account. According to it, man's duty would consist not in simply taking care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power, but in standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a being of perfect beneficence, a faith which seems much better adapted for nerving him to exertion than a vague and inconsistent reliance on an author of good, who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that such has really been, though often unconsciously, the faith of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a superintending providence. There is no subject on which man's practical belief is more incorrectly indicated by the words they use to express it than religion. Many have derived a base confidence from imagining themselves to be favourites and omnipotent, but capricious and despotic deity. But those who have been strengthened in goodness by relying on the sympathising support of a powerful and good governor of the world have, I am satisfied, never really believed that governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always served his goodness at the expense of his power. They have believed, perhaps, that he could, if he willed, remove all the thorns from their individual path, but not without causing greater harm to someone else or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do any one thing, but not any combination of things that his government, like human government, was a system of adjustments and compromises that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention. Footnote. This irresistible conviction comes out in the writings of religious philosophers, an exact proportion to the general clearness of their understanding. It nowhere shines forth so distinctly as in Lebnitz's famous theodicy, so strangely mistaken for a system of optimism and, as such, satirised by Voltaire on grounds which do not even touch the author's argument. Lebnitz does not maintain that this world is the best of all imaginable, but only of all possible worlds, which he argues it cannot but be and as much as God, who is absolute goodness, has chosen it and not another. In every page of the work, he tacitly assumes an abstract possibility and impossibility independent of the divine power. And though his biased feelings may continue to designate that power by the word omnipotence, he so explains that term as to make it mean power extending to all that is within the limits of that abstract possibility. End footnote. And since the exertion of all power to make it as little imperfect as possible leaves it no better than it is. They cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human estimate, yet, as in itself, not merely finite but extremely limited. They are bound, for example, to suppose that the best he could do for his human creatures was to make an immense majority of all who have yet existed be born without any fault of their own, Patagonians or Eskimo, or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give them capabilities which, by being cultivated for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best specimens of the race have sacrificed their lives for the purpose, have at last enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of being improved in centuries more into something really good, of which, hitherto, there are only to be found individual instances. It may be possible to believe, with Plato, that perfect goodness limited and thwarted in every direction by the infactableness of the material has done this because it could do no better, but that the same perfectly wise and good being had absolute power over the material and made it, by voluntary choice, what it is. To admit this might have been supposed impossible to anyone who had the simplest notion of moral good and evil, nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may use, fail to believe that if nature and man are both the works of a being of perfect goodness, that being intended nature as a scheme to be amended, is not imitated by man. But even though unable to believe that nature as a whole is a realisation of the designs of perfect wisdom and benevolence, men do not willingly renounce the idea that some part of nature, at least, must be intended as an exemplar or type, that on some portion or other of the creator's works, the image of the moral qualities which they are accustomed to ascribe to him must be impressed, that if not all which is, yet something which is, must not only be a faultless model of what ought to be, but must be intended to be our guide and standard in rectifying the rest. It does not suffice them to believe that what tends to good is to be imitated and perfected and what tends to evil is to be corrected. They are anxious for some more definite indication of their creator's designs, and being persuaded that this must somewhere be met with in his works, undertake the dangerous responsibility of picking and choosing among them in quest of it. A choice which, except so far, is directed by the general maxim that he intends all the good and none of the evil must of necessity be perfectly arbitrary, and if it leads to any conclusions other than such as can be deduced from that maxim, must be exactly in that proportion pernicious. It has never been settled by any accredited doctrine what particular department of the order of nature shall be reputed to be designed for our moral instruction and guidance, and according to each person's individual predilections or momentary convenience, have decided to what part of the divine government, the practical conclusions that he was desirous of establishing, should be recommended to approval as being analogous. One such recommendation must be as fallacious as another, for it is impossible to decide that certain of the creator's works are more truly expressions of his character than the rest, and the only selection which does not lead to a moral result is a selection of those which most conduce to the general good, in other words, of those which point to an end, which if the entire scheme is the expression of a single omnipotent and consistent will, is evidently not the end intended by it. There is, however, one particular element in the construction of the world, which to mine's on the lookout for special indication of the creator's wills, has appeared, not without plausibility, peculiarly fitted to afford them. It is the act of impulses of humans and other animated beings. One can imagine such persons arguing that when the author of nature only made circumstances, he may not have meant to indicate the manner in which his rational creatures were to adjust themselves to those circumstances, but that when he implanted positive stimuli in the creatures themselves, stirring them up to a particular kind of action, it is impossible to doubt that he intended that sort of action to be practiced by them. This reasoning followed out consistently, would lead to the conclusion that the deity intended and approves whatever human beings do, since all that they do being the consequences of some of the impulses with which their creator must have endowed them, all must equally be considered as done in obedience to his will. As this practical conclusion was shrunken from, it was necessary to draw a distinction and to pronounce that not the whole, but only parts of the act of nature of mankind point to a special intention of the creator and respect to their conduct. These parts, it seemed natural to suppose, must be those in which the creator's hand is manifested, rather than man's own, and hence the frequent antithesis between man as God made him and man as he has made himself. Since what is done with deliberation seems more the man's own act, and he is held more completely responsible for it than for what he does from sudden impulse, the considerate part of human conduct is apt to be set down as man's share in the business and the inconsiderate as God's. The result is the vein of sentiment so common in the modern world, though unknown to the philosophic ancients, which exalts instinct at the expense of reason and aberration rendered still more mischievous by the opinion commonly held in conjunction with it that every, or most every, feeling or impulse which acts promptly without wanting to ask questions is an instinct. Thus almost every variety of unreflecting and uncalculating impulse receives a kind of consecration, except those which, though unreflecting at the moment, owe their origin to previous habit of reflection. These, being evidently not instinctive, do not meet with the favor accorded to the rest so that all unreflecting impulses are invested with authority over reason, except the only ones which are most probably right. I do not mean, of course, but this mode of judgment is even pretended to be consistently carried out. Life could not go on if it were not admitted that impulses must be controlled and that reason ought to govern our actions. The pretension is not to drive reason from the helm. Instinct is not to govern, but reason is to practice some vague and unassignable amount of deference to instinct. Though the impression and favor of instinct as being a peculiar manifestation of divine providence has not been cast into the form of a consistent general theory that remains a standing prejudice capable of being stirred up into hostility to reason in any case in which the dictate of rational faculty has not acquired the authority of prescription. I shall not here enter into the difficult psychological question what are or are not instincts. The subject will require volume to itself without touching upon any disputed theoretical points. It is possible to judge how little worthy is the instinctive part of human nature to be held up as its chief excellence as the part in which the hand of infinite goodness and wisdom is peculiarly visible. Allowing everything to be an instinct which anybody has ever asserted to be one, it remains true that nearly every respectable attribute of humanity is the result not of instinct but of a victory over instinct and that there is hardly anything valuable in the natural man except capacities, a whole world of possibilities, all of them being dependent upon eminently artificial discipline for being realized. It is only in a highly artificialized condition of human nature that the notion grew up, or I believe, ever could have grown up that goodness was natural because only after a long course of artificial education did good sentiments become so habitual and so predominant over bad as to arise unprompted when occasion called for them. In the times when mankind was nearer to the natural state, cultivated observers regarded the natural man as a sort of wild animal, distinguished chiefly by being craftier than the other beasts of the field and all worth of character was deemed the result of a sort of taming, a phrase often applied by the ancient philosophers to the appropriate discipline of human beings. The truth is that there is hardly a single point of excellence belonging to human character which is not decidedly repugnant to the untreated feelings of human nature. If there be a virtue which more than any other we expect to find, and really do find, in an uncivilized state, it is the virtue of courage. Yet this is from first to last a victory achieved over one of the most powerful emotions of human nature. If there is any one feeling or attribute more natural than all others to human beings, it is fear. And if no greater proof can be given of the power of artificial discipline than the conquest which it has at all times and places shown itself capable of achieving over so mighty and so universal a sentiment. The widest difference, no doubt, exists between one human being and another and the facility or difficulty with which they acquire this virtue. There is hardly any department of human excellence in which difference of original temperament goes so far. But it may fairly be questioned if any human being is naturally courageous. Many are naturally impagnacious or rascable or enthusiastic and these passions when strongly excited may render them insensible to fear, but take away the conflicting emotion and fear reasserts its dominion. Consistent courage is always the effect of cultivation. The courage which is occasionally, although by no means generally, found among tribes of savages is as much the result of education as that of the Spartans or Romans. In all such tribes, there is a most emphatic direction of the public sentiment into every channel of expression through which honour can be paid to courage and cowardice held up to content and derision. It will perhaps be said that as the expression of a sentiment implies the sentiment itself, the training of the young to courage presupposes in an originally courageous people. Presupposes only what all good customs presuppose, but there must have been individuals better than the rest who set the customs going. Some individuals, who like other people, had fears to conquer, must have had strength of mind and will to conquer them for themselves. These would obtain the influence belonging to heroes, for that which is at once astonishing and obviously useful never fails to be admired. And partly through this admiration and partly through the fear they themselves excite, they would obtain the power of legislators and could establish whatever customs they pleased. End of Nature, Part 3. Recording by Sunny Shields, Doha, State of Qatar, April 2012. Section 4 of Three Essays on Religion. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Three Essays on Religion by John Stuart Mill. Nature, Part 4. Let us next consider a quality which forms the most visible and one of the most radical of the moral distinctions between human beings and most of the lower animals, that of which the absence, more than of anything else, renders men bestial. The Quality of Cleanliness. Can anything be more entirely artificial? Children in the lower classes of most countries seem to be actually fond of dirt. The vast majority of the human race are indifferent to it. Whole nations of otherwise civilized and cultivated human beings tolerated in some of its worst forms, and only a very small minority are consistently offended by it. Indeed, the universal law of the subject appears to be that uncleanness offends only those to whom it is unfamiliar. So that those who have lived in so artificial a state as to be unused to it in any form are the sole persons whom it disgusts in all forms. Of all virtues, this is the most evidently not instinctive, but a triumph over instinct. Assuredly, neither cleanliness nor the love of cleanliness is natural to man, but only the capacity of acquiring a love of cleanliness. Our examples have thus far been taken from the personal, or as they are called by Bentham, the self-regarding virtues, because these, if any, might be supposed to be congenial even to the uncultivated mind. Of the social virtues, it is almost superfluous to speak, so completely is it the verdict of all experience that selfishness is natural. By this I do not in any wise mean to deny that sympathy is natural also. I believe, on the contrary, that on that important fact rests the possibility of any cultivation of goodness and nobleness, and the hope of their ultimate entire sentencing. But sympathetic characters left uncultivated and given up to their sympathetic instincts are as selfish as others. The difference is in the kind of selfishness. There's is not solitary, but sympathetic selfishness. They are goesme adu, atwa, or akat, and they may be very amiable and delightful to those with whom they sympathize and grossly unjust and unfeeling to the rest of the world. Indeed, the finer nervous organisms, which are most capable of and most require sympathy, have, from their fineness, so much stronger impulses of all sorts that they often finish the most striking examples of selfishness, though of a lesser repulsive kind than that of colder natures. Whether there ever was a person in whom, apart from all teaching of instructors, friends or books, and from all intentional self-modeling according to an ideal natural benevolence, was a more powerful attribute than selfishness in any of its forms may remain undecided. That such cases are extremely rare, everyone must admit. And this is enough for the argument. But, to speak no further of self-control for the benefit of others, the commonest self-control for one's own benefit, that power of sacrificing a present desire to a distant object or a general purpose which is indispensable for making the actions of the individual accord with his own notions of his individual good. Even this is most unnatural to the undisciplined human being, as may be seen by the long apprenticeships which children serve to it. The very imperfect manner in which it is acquired by persons born to power, whose will is seldom resisted and by all who have been early and much indulged, and the market absence of the quality in savages and soldiers and sailors and in a somewhat less degree in nearly the whole of the poorer classes and this in many other countries. The principal difference on the point under consideration between this virtue and others is that although, like them, nature requires a course of teaching, it is more susceptible than most of them of being self-taught. The axiom is trite that self-control is only learnt by experience and this endowment is only thus much nearer to being natural than the others we have spoken of and as much as personal experience without external inculcation has a certain tendency to degenerate. Nature does not of herself bestow this any more than other virtues but nature often administers the rewards and punishments which cultivate it and which in other cases have to be created artificially for the express purpose. Veracity might seem, of all virtues, to have the most plausible claim to being natural since in the absence of motives to the contrary speech usually conforms to or at least does not intentionally deviate from fact. Accordingly, this is the virtue with which writers like Rousseau delight in decorating savage life and setting it in an advantageous contrast with the treachery and trickery of civilisation. Unfortunately, this is a mere fancy picture contradicted by all the realities of savage life. Savages are always liars. They have not the faintest notion of truth as a virtue. They have a notion of not betraying to their hurt as of not hurting in any other way persons to whom they are bound by some special type of obligation their chief, their guest, perhaps, or their friend. These feelings of obligation being the taut morality of the savage state growing out of its characteristic circumstances. But of any point of honour respecting truth for truth's sake they have not the remotest idea. No more than the whole east and the greater part of Europe and in the few countries which has sufficiently improved to have such a point of honour. It is confined to a small minority who alone under any circumstances of real temptation practice it. From the general use of the expression natural justice it must be presumed that justice is a virtue generally thought to be directly implanted by nature. I believe, however, that the sentiment of justice is entirely of artificial origin. The idea of natural justice not proceeding but following that of conventional justice. The farther we look back into the early modes of thinking of the human race which we consider ancient times including those of the Old Testament or the portions of mankind who are still in no more advanced a condition than that of ancient times. The more completely do we find men's notion of justice defined and bounded by the express appointment of law. A man's just rights meant the rights which the law gave him. A just man was he who never infringed nor sought to infringe the legal property or other legal rights of others. The notion of a higher justice to which laws themselves are amenable and by which the conscience is bound without a positive prescription of law is a later extension of the idea suggested by and following the analogy of legal justice. To which it maintains a parallel direction through all the shades and varieties of the sentiment and from which it borrows nearly the whole of its physiology. The very words justice and justicia are derived from used law. Courts of justice, administration of justice always mean the tribunals. If it be said that there must be the germs of all these virtues in human nature, otherwise mankind would be incapable of acquiring them, I am ready with a certain amount of explanation to admit the fact. But the weeds that dispute the ground with these beneficent germs are themselves, not germs, but rankly luxuriant growths and would in all but someone case in a thousand entirely stifle and destroy the former were it not so strongly the interest of mankind to cherish the good germs among another that they always do so in as far as their degree of intelligence in this as another respects still very imperfect allows. It is through such fostering commenced early and not counteracted by unfavorable influences that in some happily circumstance specimens of the human race the most elevated sentiments of which humanity is capable become a second nature. It is stronger than the first and not so much subduing the original nature as merging it into itself. Even those gifted organizations which have attained the like excellently by self-culture are essentially to the same cause. For what self-culture would be possible without aid from the general sentiment of mankind delivered through books and from the contemplation of exalted characters real or ideal. This artificially created or at least artificially perfected nature of the best and noblest human beings is the only nature which is ever commendable to follow. It is almost superfluous to say that even this cannot be erected into a standard of conduct since it is itself the fruit of a training and culture the choice of which, if rational and not accidental must have been determined by a standard already chosen. This brief survey is amply sufficient to prove that the duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely, not to follow but to amend it. Some people, however, do not attempt to deny that instinct ought to be subordinate to reason, pay deference to nature so far as to maintain that every natural inclination must have some sphere of action granted to it, some opening left for its gratification. All natural wishes, they say, must have been implanted for a purpose and this argument is carried so far that we often hear it maintained that every wish, which it is supposed to be natural to entertain, must have a corresponding provision in the order of the universe for its gratification. In so much, for instance, that the desire of an indefinite prolongation of existence is believed by many to be itself a sufficient proof of the reality of a future life. I conceive that there is a radical absurdity in all these attempts to discover, in detail, what are the designs of Providence in order when they are discovered to help Providence in bringing them about? Those who argue, from particular indications, that Providence intends this or that, either believe that the Creator can do all that He will or that He cannot. If the first supposition is adopted, if Providence is omnipotent, Providence intends whatever happens and the fact of its happening proves that Providence intended it. If so, everything which a human being can do is predestined by Providence and is a fulfillment of its designs. But if, as is the more religious theory, Providence intends not all which happens, but only what is good, then indeed man has it in his power by his voluntary action to aid the intentions of Providence. But he can only learn those intentions by considering what tends to promote the general good and not what man has a natural inclination to. Four, limited as on this showing, the divine power must be by inscrutable but insurmountable obstacles. Who knows that man could have been created without desires which never are to be and even which never ought to be fulfilled. The inclinations with which man has been endowed as well as any of the other contrivances which we observe in nature may be the expression not of the divine will but of the fetters which impede its reaction. And to take hints from these for the guidance of our own conduct may be falling into a trap laid by the enemy. The assumption that everything which infinite goodness can desire actually comes to pass in this universe or at least that we must never say or suppose that it does not is worthy only of those whose slavish fears make them offer the homage of lies to a being who they profess to think is incapable of being deceived and holds all falsehood in abomination. With regard to this particular hypothesis that all natural impulses are propensity sufficiently universal and sufficiently spontaneous to be capable of passing for instincts must exist for good ends and ought to be only regulated, not repressed. This is of course true of the majority of them for the species could not have continued to exist unless most of its inclinations had been directed to things needful or useful for its preservation. But unless the instincts can be reduced to a very small number indeed they must be allowed that we have also bad instincts which it should be the aim of education not simply to regulate but to extirpate or rather what can be done even to an instinct to starve them by disuse. Those who are inclined to multiply the number of instincts usually include among them one which they call destructiveness an instinct to destroy for destruction's sake. I can conceive no good reason for preserving this no more than another property which if not an instinct is a very like one. What has been called the instinct of domination a delight in exercising despotism and holding other beings in subjection to our will. The man who takes pleasure in the mere exertion of authority apart from the purpose for which it is to be employed is the last person in whose hands one would willingly entrust it. Again there are persons who are cruel by character or as the phrase is naturally cruel who have a real pleasure in inflicting or seeing the inflection of pain. This kind of cruelty is not mere hard-hearted absence of pity or remorse it is a positive thing, a particular kind of voluptuous excitement. The East and Southern Europe have afforded and probably still afford abundant examples of this hateful propensity. I suppose it will be granted that this is not one of the natural inclinations that it will be wrong to suppress. The only question would be whether it is not a duty to suppress the man himself along with it. But even if it were true that every one of the elementary impulses of human nature has its good side and made by a sufficient amount of artificial training be made more useful than hurtful how little would this amount to when it must in any case be admitted that without such training all of them even those which are necessary to our preservation would fill the world with misery making human life an exaggerated likeness of the odious scene of violence and tyranny which is exhibited by the rest of the animal kingdom except in so far as tamed and disciplined by man. There indeed those who flatter themselves with the notion of reading the purposes of the Creator in His works ought inconsistency to His seen grounds for inferences in which they have shrunk. If there are any marks at all of special design in creation one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose. Their strongest instincts impel them to it and many of them seem to have been constructed and capable of supporting themselves by any other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature have been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals divided with scarcely an exception into devourers and devoured and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves. If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon it is because we need not suppose it to have been made by a being of infinite power. But if imitation of the Creator's will as revealed in nature were applied as a rule of action in this case the most atrocious enormities of the worst men would be more than justified by the apparent intention of the Providence that throughout all animated nature the strong should pray upon the weak. The preceding observations are far from having exhausted the almost infinite variety of modes and occasions in which the idea of conformity to nature is introduced as an element into the ethical appreciation of actions and dispositions. The same favorable prejudgment follows the word nature through the numerous acceptations in which it is employed as a distinctive term for certain parts of the Constitution of Humanity as contrasted with other parts. We have hitherto confined ourselves to one of these acceptations in which it stands as a general designation for those parts of our mental and moral constitution which are supposed to be innate and contradistinction to those which are acquired as when nature is contrasted with education or when a savage state without laws, arts or knowledge is called a state of nature or when the question is asked whether benevolence or the moral sentiment is natural or acquired or whether some persons are poets or orators by nature and others not. But in another and more lack sense any manifestations by human beings are often termed natural when it is merely intended to say that they are not studied or designedly assumed in the particular case and when a person is said to move or speak with natural grace or when it is said that a person's natural manner or character is so-and-so meaning that it is so when he does not attempt to control or disguise it and a still-loser acceptation a person is said to be naturally that which he was until some special cause had acted upon him or which it is supposed he would be if some such cause were withdrawn. Thus a person is said to be naturally dull but to have made himself intelligent by study and perseverance to be naturally cheerful but soured by misfortune naturally ambitious but kept down by want of opportunity. Finally the word natural applied to feelings or conduct often seems to me no more than that they are such as are ordinarily found in human beings as when it is said that a person acted on some particular occasion as it was natural to do or that to be affected in a particular way by some sight or sound or thought or incident in life is perfectly natural. In all these senses of the term the quality called natural is very often confessedly a worse quality than the one contrasted with it but whenever it's being so is not too obvious to be questioned the idea seems to be entertained by describing it as natural something has been said amounting to a considerable presumption in its favour. For my part I can perceive only one sense in which nature or naturalness and a human being are really terms of praise and then the praise is only negative namely when used to denote the absence of affectation. Affectation may be defined the effort to appear what one is not when the most of all the occasion is not such as either to excuse the attempt or to stamp it with a more deist name of hypocrisy. It must be added that the deception is often attempted to be practiced on the deceiver himself as well as on others. He imitates the external signs of qualities which he would like to have and hopes to persuade himself that he has them. Whether in the form of deception or of self-deception or of something hovering between the two affectation is very rightly accounted a reproach and naturalness understood as the reverse of affectation a merit. But a more proper term by which to express this estimable quality would be sincerity, a term which is fallen from its original elevated meaning and popularly denotes only a subordinate branch of the cardinal virtue at once designated as a whole. Sometimes also in cases where the term affectation will be inappropriate since the conduct of demeanour spoken of is really praiseworthy people say in disparagement of the person concerned that such conduct of demeanour is not natural to him and make uncomplimentary comparisons between him and some other person to whom it is natural meaning that what in the one seemed excellent was the effect of temporary excitement or of a great victory over himself while in the other it is the result to be expected for the habitual character. This motorist speech is not open to censure since nature is here simply a term for the person's ordinary disposition and if he is praised it is not for being natural but for being naturally good. The conformity to nature has no connection whatever was right and wrong the idea can never be fitly introduced into ethical discussions at all except occasionally and partially into the question of degrees of culpability. To illustrate this point let us consider the phrase by which the greatest intensity of condemnatory feeling is conveyed in connection with the idea of nature the word unnatural that a thing is unnatural in any precise meaning which can be attached to the word there is no argument for it being blameable since the most criminal actions are to a being like man not more unnatural than most of the virtues the acquisition of virtue has in all ages been accounted to work of labour and difficulty while the dissensus of verny on the contrary is a proverbial facility and it assuredly requires in most persons a greater conquest over a greater number of natural inclinations to become eminently virtuous than transcendently vicious but if an action or inclination has been decided on other grounds to be blameable it may be a circumstance in aggravation that it is unnatural that is repugnant to some strong feeling usually found in human beings since the bad propensity whatever it be has afforded evidence of being both strong and deeply rooted by having overcome that repugnance this presumption of course fails if the individual has never had the repugnance and the argument therefore is not fit to be urged unless the feeling which is violated by the act is not only justifiable and reasonable but is one which it is blameable to be without the corresponding plea in extenuation of a culpable act because it was natural or because it was prompted by a natural feeling never, I think, ought to be admitted there is hardly a bad action ever perpetrated which is not perfectly natural and the motives to which are not perfectly natural feelings in the eye of reason therefore this is no excuse but it is quite natural that it should be so in the eyes of the multitude because the meaning of the expression is that they have a fellow feeling with the offender when they say that something which they cannot help admitting to be blameable is nevertheless natural they mean that they can imagine the possibility of their being themselves tempted to commit it most people have a considerable amount of indulgence towards all acts of which they feel a possible source within themselves reserving their rigor and for those which though perhaps really less bad they cannot in any way understand how it is possible to commit if an action convinces them which it often does on very inadequate grounds that the person who does it must be a being totally unlike themselves they are seldom particular in examining the precise degree of blame due to it or even if the blame is properly due to it at all they measure the degree of guilt by the strength of their antipathy and hence differences of opinion and even differences of taste have been objects of as intense moral abhorrence as the most atrocious crimes it will be useful to sum up in a few words the leading conclusions of this essay the word nature has two principal meanings it either denotes the entire system of things with the aggregate of all their properties or it denotes things as they would be apart from human intervention in the first of these senses the doctrine that man ought to follow nature is unmeaning since man has no power to do anything else than follow nature all his actions are done through an obedience to someone or many of nature's physical or mental laws in the other sense of the term the doctrine that man ought to follow nature or in other words ought to make the spontaneous course of things the model of his voluntary actions is equally irrational and immoral irrational because all human action whatever consistent altering and all useful action and improving the spontaneous course of nature immoral because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence anyone who indebted his actions to imitate the natural course of things will be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men the scheme of nature regarded in its whole extent cannot have had for its soul or even principal object the good of human or other sentient beings what good it brings to them is mostly the result of their own exertions whatsoever in nature gives indication of beneficent design proves this beneficence to be armed only with limited power and the duty of man is to cooperate with the beneficent powers not be imitating but by perpetually striving to amend the course of nature and bringing that part of it over which he can exercise control more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness end of nature part four recording by Sonny Shields Doha, state of Qatar Christmas Day, 2011 section five of three essays on religion this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Ted Garvin three essays on religion by John Stuart Mill the utility of religion part one it has sometimes been remarked how much has been written both by friends and enemies concerning the truth of religion and how little, at least in the way of discussion or controversy concerning its usefulness this however might have been expected for the truth in matters which so deeply affect us is our first concern if religion or any particular form of it is true its usefulness follows without other proof if to know authentically in what order of things under what government of the universe it is our destiny to live were not useful it is difficult to imagine what could be considered so whether a person is in a pleasant or an unpleasant place a palace or a prison it cannot be otherwise then useful to him to know where he is so long therefore as men accepted the teachings of their religion as positive facts no more a matter of doubt than their own existence or the existence of the objects around them to ask the use of believing it could not possibly occur to them the utility of religion did not need to be asserted until the arguments for its truth had in a great measure ceased to convince people must either have ceased to believe or have ceased to rely on the belief of others before they could take that inferior ground of defense without a consciousness of lowering what they were endeavoring to raise an argument for the utility of religion is an appeal to unbelievers to induce them to practice a well-made hypocrisy or to semi-believers to make them avert their eyes from what might possibly shake their unstable belief or finally to persons in general to abstain from expressing any doubts they may feel since the fabric of immense importance to mankind is so insecure at its foundations that men must hold their breath in its neighborhood for fear of blowing it down in the present period of history however we seem to have arrived at a time when among the arguments for and against religion those which relate to its usefulness assume an important place we are in an age of weak beliefs and in which such belief as men have is much more determined by their wish to believe than by any mental appreciation of evidence the wish to believe does not arise only from selfish but often from the most disinterested feelings and though it cannot produce the unwavering and perfect reliance which once existed it fences around all that remains of the impressing of early education it often causes direct misgivings to fade away by disuse and above all it induces people to continue laying out their lives according to doctrines which have lost part of their whole on the mind and to maintain towards the world the same or a rather more demonstrative attitude of believe than they thought it necessary to exhibit when their personal conviction was more complete if religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind as we are continually assured that it is there is great reason to lament that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subordination of the understanding such a state of things is most comfortable even for those who may without actual insincereity describe themselves as believers and still worse as regards to those who having consciously ceased to find the evidences of religion convincing are withheld from saying so lest they should aid in doing an irreparable injury to mankind it is the most painful position to the conscientious and cultivated mind to be drawn in contrary directions by the two noblest of all objects of pursuit truth and the general good such a conflict must inevitably produce a growing indifference to one or other of these objects most probably to both many who could render giants service both truth and to mankind if they believe that they could serve the one without lost to the other are either totally paralyzed or led to confine their exertions to matters of minor detail by the apprehension that any real freedom of speculation or any considerable strengthening or enlargement of the thinking faculties of mankind at large might by making them a believers be the surest way to render them vicious and miserable many again having observed others are experiencing themselves elevated feelings which they imagine capable of emanating from any other source than religion have an honest aversion to anything attending as they think to dry up the fountain of such feelings they therefore either dislike and disparage off philosophy or a dick themselves with intolerance ill to those forms of it in which intuition usurps the place of evidence an internal feeling is made the test of objective truth the whole of the prevalent medicine physics of the present century is one tissue of subordinate evidence in favor of religion often of deism only but in any case involving a misapplication of noble impulses and speculative capacities among the most deplorable of those wretched waste of human faculties which make us wonder that enough is left to keep mankind progressive at however slow pace it is time to consider more partially and therefore more deliberately than is usually done whether all this serenity to prop up beliefs which require so great an expense of intellectual toil and ingenuity to keep them standing yields any sufficient return in human well-being and whether that in would not be better served by a frank recognition that certain subjects are inaccessible to our faculties and by the application of the same mental powers to the strengthening enlargement of those other sources of virtue and happiness which stand in no need of the support or sanction of supernatural beliefs and inducements neither on the other hand can the difficulties of the question be so promptly disposed of as skeptical philosophers are sometimes inclined to believe it is not enough to ever in general terms that there never can be any conflict between truth and utility that if religion be false nothing but good can be the consequence of rejecting it for though the knowledge of every positive truth is a useful acquisition this doctrine cannot without reservation be applied to negative truth when the only truth is certainable is that nothing can be known we do not by this knowledge gaining a new fact by which to guide ourselves we are at best only disabused of our trust in some former guide mark which though itself fallacious may have pointed in the same direction with the best indications we have and if it happens to be more conspicuous and legible may have kept us right when they might have been overlooked it is in short perfectly conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable and it would be a proof of great prejudice in any unbeliever to deny that there have been ages and that there are still both nations and individuals with regard to whom this is actually a case whether it is the case generally and with reference to the future is the object of this paper to examine we propose to inquire whether the belief in religion considered as a mere persuasion apart from the question of its truth is really indispensable to the temporal welfare of mankind whether the usefulness of the belief is intrinsic and universal or local, temporary, and in some sense accidental and whether the benefits which it yields might not be obtained otherwise without the very large alloy of evil by which, even in the best form of the belief those benefits are qualified with the arguments on one side of the question we all are familiar religious writers have not neglected to celebrate to the utmost the advantages both of religion in general and of their own religious faith in particular but those who have held the contrary opinion have generally contended themselves with insisting on the more obvious and flagrant of the positive evils which have been engendered by past and present forms of religious belief and in truth mankind have been so unremittingly occupied in doing evil to one another in the name of religion from the sacrifice of Ephesians and Ia to the dragon aids of Louis XIV not to descend lower that for any immediate purpose there was a little need to seek arguments further off these odious consequences however do not belong to religion itself but to particular forms of it and afford no argument against the usefulness of any religions except those by which such enormities are encouraged moreover the worst of these evils are already in a great measure extirpated from the more improved forms of religion and as mankind advance in ideas and feelings this process of extirpation continually goes on the immoral or otherwise mischievous consequences which have been drawn from religion are one by one abandoned and having been long fought for as of its very essence are discovered to be easily separable from it these mischiefs indeed after they are passed though no longer arguments against religion remain valid as large abatements from its beneficial influence by showing that some of the greatest improvements ever made in the moral sentiments of mankind have been taken place without it in the spite of it and that what we are taught to regard as the chief of all improving influences has in practice fallen so far short of such a character that one of the hardest burdens laid upon the other good influences of human nature has been that of improving religion itself the improvement however has taken place is still proceeding and for the sake of fairness it should be assumed to be complete we ought to suppose religion to have accepted the best human morality which reason and goodness can work out from philosophical christian or any other elements when it has thus freed itself from the pernicious consequences which result from its identification with any bad moral doctrine the ground is clear for considering whether its useful properties are exclusively inherent in it or their benefits can be obtained without it this essential portion of the inquiry into the temporal usefulness of religion is the subject of the present essay it is a part which has been little treated of by skeptical writers the only direct discussion of it with which I'm acquainted is in a short treatise understood to have been partly compiled from manuscripts of Mr. Bentham analysis of the influence of natural religion on the temporal happiness of mankind by Philip Beauchamp and abounding in just and profound views but which as it appears to me presses many parts of the argument too hard this treatise and the incidental remarks scattered through the writings of Mr. Compt are the only sources known to me from which anything very pertinent to the subject can be made available for the skeptical side of the argument I shall use both of them freely in the sequel of the present discourse the inquiry divides itself into two parts corresponding to the double aspect of the subject its social and its individual aspect what does religion do for society and what for the individual what amount of benefit to social interest in the ordinary sense of the phrase arises from religious belief and what influence has it in improving and ennobling individual human nature the first question is interesting to everybody the latter only to the best but to them it is if there be any difference the more important of the two we shall begin with the former as being that which best admits of being easily brought to a precise issue speak first then of religious belief as an instrument of social good we miscommence by drawing the distinction most commonly overlooked it is usual to credit religion as such with the whole of the power inherent in any system of moral duties inculcated by education and enforced by opinion undoubtedly mankind would be in a deplorable state if no principles or precepts of justice, veracity, beneficence were taught publicly or privately and if these virtues were not encouraged and the opposite vices were pressed by the praise and blame the favorable and unfavorable sentiments of mankind and since nearly everything of the sort which does take place takes place in the name of religion since almost all who are taught any morality whatever have it taught to them as religion and inculcated on them through life principally in that character the effect which the teaching produces as teaching it is supposed to produce as religious teaching and religion receives the credit of all the influence in human affairs which belongs to any generally accepted system of rules for the guidance and government of human life few persons have sufficiently considered how great an influence this is what vast efficacy belongs naturally to any doctrine received with tolerable unanimity as true and impressed on the mind from the earliest childhood as duty a low reflection will, I think, lead us to the conclusion that it is this which is the great moral power in human affairs and that religion only seems so powerful because this mighty power has been under its command consider first the enormous influence of authority on the human mind I am now speaking of involuntary influence effect on men's conviction on their persuasion on their involuntary sentiments authority is the evidence on which the mass of mankind believe everything which they are said to know except facts of which their own senses have taken cognizance it is the evidence on which even the wisest perceived all those truths of science or facts in history or in life of which they have not personally examined the proofs over the immense majority of human beings the general concurrence of mankind in any manner of opinion is all powerful whatever is thus certified to them they believe with a fullness of assurance which they do not accord even to the evidence of their senses when the general opinion of mankind stands in opposition to it when, therefore, any rule of life and duty whether grounded or not on religion has conspicuously received the general assent it obtains a hold on the belief of every individual stronger than it would have even if he had arrived at it by the inherent force of his own understanding if Novalis could say without a real meaning my belief has gained infinitely to me from the moment when one other human being has begun to believe the same how much more when it is not one other person but all the human beings whom one knows of some may urge it as an objection that no scheme of morality has this universal assent and that none, therefore, can be indebted to the source for whatever power it possesses over the mind so far as it relates to the present age the assertion is true and strengthens the argument which it might at first seem to convert for exactly proportion as the received systems of belief have been contested and it has become known that they have many dissentience their hold on the general belief has been loosened and their practical influence on conduct has declined and since this has happened to them notwithstanding the religious sanction which attached to them there can be no stronger evidence that they were powerful not as religion but as beliefs generally accepted by mankind to find people who believe their religion as a person believes that fire will burn his hand when thrust into it we must seek them in those oriental countries where Europeans do not yet predominate or in the European world when it was still universally Catholic men often disobey their religion on those times because their human passions and appetites were too strong for it or because the religion itself afforded means of indulgence to breaches of its obligations but though they disobeyed they, for the most part, did not doubt that there was in those days an absolute unquestioning completeness of belief never since general in Europe such being the empire exercised over mankind by simple authority the mere belief and testimony of their fellow creatures consider next how tremendous is the power of education how inspeakable is the effect of bringing people up from infancy in a belief and habits founded on it consider also that in all countries and from the earliest ages down to the present not merely those who are called in a restricted sense of the term the educated but all or nearly all who have been brought up by parents or by anyone interested in them have been taught from the earliest years some kind of religious belief and some precepts as the commands of the heavenly powers to them into mankind and as it cannot be imagined that the commands of God are to young children anything more than the commands of their parents it is reasonable to think that any system of social duty which mankind might adopt even though divorce from religion would have the same advantage of being inculcated from childhood and would have it hereafter much more perfectly than any doctrine has it at present society being far more disposed informally to take pains for the moral tuition of those numerous classes whose education has hitherto left very much a chance now it is especially characteristic of the impressions of early education that they possess what it is so much more difficult for later convictions to obtain command over the feelings we see daily how powerful hold these first impressions retain over the feelings even of those who have given up the opinions which they were early taught while on the other hand it is only persons of a much higher degree of natural sensibility and intellect combined than it is at all common to meet with whose feelings entwine themselves with anything like the same force around opinions which they have adopted from their own investigations later in life and even when they do we may say with truth that it is because the strong sense of moral duty the sincerity courage and self devotion which enabled them to do so were themselves the fruits of early impressions end of the utility religion part one