Thomas Welbank Fowle

“ Lastly, conscience is imperative, because the inwrought consciousness in human nature that man has a right to himself makes every other consideration whatsoever subordinate to itself. This is the right which must be at every cost pursued by myself and conceded to me by others, which dominates every action, lies at the root of all human progress, shapes every institution of our devising, and presides over the destiny of mankind to its remotest end. ”

“ He was a creature who had a vivid and intense conception of his own right to exist, and no conception whatever as to the rights of other creatures to the same existence. He was the inheritor of conditions and tendencies which wrought in him such thoughts as these: "You shall die before I will;" "I will use you to please myself;" "I am born to pursue my own happiness;" "The whole world is mine to occupy, plunder, and rule over, so far as I find a power within me to do it and to prevent others." ”

“ No one, least of all science, denies that men are responsible for the consequences of their belief, provided these consequences are limited to such as are capable of being recognized and foreseen, and are not extended to comprehend endless perdition in a future state—an idea which is supposed, rightly or wrongly, to lurk beneath the preacher's logical utterances, and which religion has done next to nothing to disavow. And so we come to this conclusion: to build up by precept and example a sound and sufficient morality; to share in all the hopes and aspirations of humanity ”

“ Religion may have been the first to set this pernicious example, but, judging from the tone of much modern writing, Rationalism has somewhat bettered her instructions. No doubt it is a tempting thing to mount a big pulpit, and then and there, with much intellectual pomp, to slay the absent infidel—absent no less from the preacher's argument than from his audience. Delightful it may be, but all the more dangerous, because it plunges men at once into that error, so hateful to modern thought, of affirming that intellectual mistakes are moral delinquencies. ”

“ To this, then, all the original intuitions of the human mind, all the glowing aspirations enshrined in Greek poetry, legend, and art, all the natural theology contained in the works of Socrates and Plato, had come at last. Will any reasonable man affirm that an age, which breathes the very air of materialism, and whose children suck in the notions of changeless law with their mother's milk, will arrive at any thing better if it has no facts upon which to rely as proofs that its hopes are not unfounded? ”

“ Having arrived at this point, let us as our next step remind ourselves that it is impossible to imagine a rational human being in whom there is not present the assurance that he has a right to himself, to be allowed to live in the first place, afterward (as the result maybe of long years of evolution) to be allowed to live happily. That no one has a right to take my life from me is a thought inseparable from myself, it is at any rate the first piece of knowledge of which I become possessed. ”

“ Occasionally we may suspect that the garb of human weakness does but conceal the workings of human pride, never perhaps so subtle and so sweet as when human nature meekly resolves to be contented with its own imperfections, and to bow down before its own frailty; but denunciations of moral turpitude only harden the hearts of men who ask for the bread of evidence and receive stones in the shape of insults. ”

“ We have in this a very impressive representation of the next stage in the history of conscience. At first the faint and shadowy idea of my neighbor's right to existence must have been a poor and frail defense indeed against the storms of innate passion, the cruel, selfish lusts, the reckless and savage assaults of men just emerged from the animals and beginning a social life, which, unlike theirs, involved a conscious sacrifice of the individual's will to the community. ”

“ The chief stress of practical exhortation is laid not upon finding out the right, but upon doing what we believe to be right, very often irrespective of advice, common-sense, and obvious consequences. Nay, men go so far as to assign to conscience a sort of lordship or supremacy over themselves, and so, by a roundabout way, only end at last in doing what they please. Like Arthur, they "reverence their conscience as their king," and, like that excellent but unprosperous monarch, they contrive, with the best intentions in the world, to make a bad business of life. ”

“ Sooner or later we shall have to face a disposition in the minds of men to accept nothing as fact, but what facts can prove, or the senses bear witness to. In vain will witness after witness be called to prove the inalienable prerogative, the intuitional convictions, the universal aspirations, the sentimental longings, the moral necessity, all which have existed in the heart of man since man was. Nor will the science of religion help us in the hour of need. There can be a science of religion exactly as there can be a science of alchemy. ”

“ Conscience is also instantaneous—that is, imperative—in its commands. It never stops to argue when once the right is, or is thought to be, ascertained. But if mankind had reached the lofty heights of duty by the ladder of utility or the gradually-growing influence of external sanctions, it might have been expected that some fragments of the ladder, some traces of the process, some memory of the time when "ought" was a word of dubious meaning and uncertain cogency, would have been preserved. ”

“ There is no intellectual short cut to the Christian faith; it must be built up in the minds of men by setting forth a morality that satisfies their nature, consecrates humanity, and establishes society. It is not because men love the truth, but because they hate their enemies, that in things religious they desire to have what they can call an overwhelming preponderance of argument on their side of the question, the possession of which enables them to treat their opponents as knaves or fools or both. ”

“ This personality may or may not exist forever; it may or may not be responsible for the past; it may or may not be capable of rest, joy, and love; it may or may not be joined to its old body or to a new body. These, and a hundred similar beliefs with which religion has clothed the mere fact of existence after death, form no essential part, I must again affirm, of the fact itself. And throughout the argument, this, and no other than this, will be the sense in which I use the word immortality; because it is the only one that I have a right to expect that the scientific mind will accept. ”

“ Making all allowance for the temptation and tendency to read our own thoughts into the minds of animals, and also for the effect upon the animals themselves of man's moral control, it yet remains certain that the materials out of which conscience has been constructed are everywhere discernible, like the rough unhewed stones of a quarry, in animal life and in Nature itself. ”

“ But then it is as clear as the day that, as science is getting a more and more practical hold upon men's minds by a thousand avenues, and mastering them by a series of brilliant successes, this temper is rapidly passing from the few into the popular mind; that it is becoming part of the furniture of the human intellect, and is powerfully influencing the very conditions of human nature. ”

“ It was from this deeply-rooted instinct that men first learned to transfer to the beings whom they loved, and whose helpless weakness appealed to them for protection, the same rights which they claimed for themselves. But however important and indeed enormous is the step thus made in the evolution of conscience, we must beware of making too much of it at this stage of its growth. ”

“ We may feel assured that at this time, by orderly development and natural process of causation, all that is most vital and precious to humanity, all the seeds of man's present and eternal future, came into existence; but none the less is the darkness so great that even the imagination refuses to move from its place. ”

“ There is, in short, a correlation between the conscience and an external rightness, which is just as natural, as rapid, as unaffected by later relationships, as is the correlation between the eye and light. In primeval man the conscience detects, however dimly and imperfectly, morality in actions just as the eye detects shape and color in objects. Social and civilized life may enable him to see more clearly and explain more completely, but it cannot give him either the eye or the conscience. ”

“ The time may come when Rationalism will have so far prevailed that a belief in the miraculous will have disappeared; the time may also come when the Christian Revelation, historically accepted, will everywhere be adopted as God's account to man of ultimate incomprehensibilities. Surely, no man who has ever fairly examined his own consciousness can deny that elements leading to either of these two conclusions exist within his own mind. ”

“ Utility prescribed in what right and wrong consisted, but did not give the idea of it; or, to speak more accurately, if we are willing to define utility as that which makes for the existence of anything, then just as utility or the needs of his own existence had suggested to man the idea of primitive rightness, so did it impress upon him the idea of rightness as inherent in the constitution of things, and especially of society, if it were to continue to exist. Men come to think that they have no business wantonly to destroy anything, not even an insect or an inanimate object. ”

“ Take the first and commonest action in the struggle for existence. The meanest creature that lives seeks instinctively to escape from its enemy by flight. But man alone can think, as t he flies from his pursuer, with an energy quickened by his knowledge of what death is and means: "All this is unutterably wrong. I have a right to save my life, this thing or creature has no right to take it from me." Such, or something like this, were the first thoughts of the first conscience, the first expression of the conviction that there was a Tightness in the world. ”

“ On the one hand, we have all the results of human experience, a severe standard of intellectual virtue, a morality which confines itself to its duties toward humanity, and the power of being able not to think about ultimate incomprehensibilities. On the other hand, we have intense longings after the infinite, which science, admitting, as it does, the existence of the Unknowable, cannot possibly deny to be legitimate in those who feel them sincerely ”

“ The mere fact that animals can be taught and made to feel what they ought to do (how can we avoid using the word "ought?") settles the question. But, without relying upon this, is it not evident that the contrast between the external force that would destroy and the internal power that will live existed long before it became an object of perception and reflection in the brain of a reasoning creature? And this contrast produced such actions as the following—flight, combination for defense, appealing looks, cries of remonstrance, self-defense to the last moment of existence. ”

“ Froude's words, no doctrine whatever, even of immortality, has a mere "mechanical effect" upon men's hearts and consciences, and that noble lives may be lived and exalted characters formed by those who are brave enough to disregard it. Nay, what is worse, immortality may be a powerful weapon for evil as for good, if it chime in with a perverted nature. The Pharaoh before whom Moses stood believed it, and we know with what results. Only that, once more will science retort, which can be proved to be true upon sufficient evidence, can be positively known to be useful. ”

“ Among savages, religion can hardly be called moral at all, although the gods might, on the whole, be believed to be on the side of what the tribe thought to be right—subject, however, to the very important qualification that the gods of another tribe held different views. Still, so far as primitive man believed that the gods would visit him with rewards and punishments by an exercise of superhuman power, to that extent there was added to the conscience a feeling of responsibility and solemnity together with an awful imperativeness which must have considerably modified his moral constitution. ”

“ In this stage of human life, before men entered into social relations, we can plainly discern that aspect of conscience which we have described by the word "instantaneous," and which has seemed to so many minds independent of, and prior to, any social experiences. We do but reproduce this ancient fashion of our race when, putting aside all opposing considerations, and refusing to listen to arguments based upon expediency or advantage, we say peremptorily and decisively, "I owe it to myself to do this at once." ”

“ Nay, they will resent rather than welcome the attempt to put a multitude of hopes and myriads of wishes in the place of one solid fact, and will soon confirm themselves in their opinions, by the obvious argument that these hopes and wishes are peculiar to the childhood of the race, and form only one out of many proofs, that man is liable to perpetual self deception until he confronts fact and law. Not indeed that they will indulge in the equally unscientific statement that there is no such thing as immortality. ”

“ And thus the ideal was formed of the sanctity of human life, and society was regarded only as a means for this end, all its arrangements and institutions being of necessity submitted to the moral judgment of the individual mind, and approved only so far as they came up to the ideal. It must, indeed, be confessed that there are survivals from earlier stages of moral growth which cast a strange and ironical reflection upon man's claim to wisdom and advancement, and cause his practice to fall lamentably short of even so early and obvious an ideal as the sanctity of life. ”

“ The phenomena of primeval family life are so obscure, so varied, and so complicated by institutions like polygamy and polyandry, that in making even the most general and apparently common-sense observations we are obliged to express ourselves with caution and reserve. One indubitable fact, however, stands out impressively amid all the chaos, and affords us a sufficient standpoint for indicating the precise growth of conscience at this stage of its existence. ”

“ We are now in a position to describe how man came by that social modus vivendi which we call utility, and define as all that makes for the continued existence and progressive welfare of the community. Utility is scientifically "the result of the conflict of individual rights, with survival of the fittest." ”

“ It needed but the touch of self-consciousness to make the instinctive feeling pass by a bound into an instinctive thought in the mind of a being that "could look before and after." And whatever difficulty there may be in accounting for the evolution of man lies not in his moral but in his mental growth. How he became conscious of himself we may possibly never be able even to imagine, but that being conscious of himself he was by mere force of circumstances possessed of the germ of conscience, is a statement that presents no difficulty at all. ”

“ In this we see how records, old in themselves, and pointing back to tendencies and traditions lost in the mists of antiquity, identify the primitive rightness with the will of God, by whom first Nature, then man, then the family, then the society, had been established. And thus the will of the Creator has been by degrees definitely set up as the standard of right and wrong to which men must conform, so that the supreme effort of human morality is breathed in the prayer, "Thy will be done." ”

“ The Resurrection would certainly never be believed if it did not fall like a spark upon a mass of wishes and aspirations which are immediately kindled into life. Granted a man (and this is no supposition, but a fact) , whose whole nature craves not to die, and whose mind is occupied by the standing miracle of its own immortality, and then the Resurrection, so far from being improbable, will be the very thing which gives life to his hopes. ”

“ There is a sense, indeed, in which it may be said that truth only becomes actual and vital by becoming subjective through receiving the assent of men. What, then, must the advocate for the fact of the immortality of the soul expect that science will require of him when he pleads before the tribunal of the world for that truth which, because it is dear to himself, he wishes to enforce on others? ”