Robert Chenault Givler

“ Now, undoubtedly, many claims are insufficiently recognized by law. When, however, in the pause before this recognition is secured, people begin to claim for such interests a “superior” moral right to be satisfied, and in comparison to that “superior” right assert that legal rights are merely unfounded prejudices, the charge of inconsistency can be leveled directly against them. Ignorance of the function and scope of the law is no excuse for holding it up to ridicule. ”

“ A sentimental compromise is never welcomed by the mature judgment of the brave man. And in this day when so many have willingly given their lives for the sake of a human ideal, is it just and right to flinch in the spiritual warfare which confronts our generation? We are seeking nothing less than a renaissance in which men’s energies will be wisely and loyally directed to what is greatly human and humanly great. In such a service we must will to be hard on ourselves and on others. ”

“ Little did Descartes dream that his attempt to find truth by the method of candid doubting was a sign that human evolution had “turned a corner,” or that the method he employed was to be the precursor of an ethical renaissance. Yet the introduction of this one form of psychological test as a philosophic instrument was an entering wedge of such power that where great darkness had been, much light was shed; and where the stolid inertia of many centuries had existed, movement and life and enlightenment began to appear. ”

“ And while we cannot yet say that “Science has laid her doomful hand” upon all of the intricate secrets of mind, nevertheless, it is becoming more and more certain that the stream of thought is just as much a bodily function as is the breath-stream and the blood-stream. Strangely enough, this conception is not brand-new. It was Aristotle who said, “If the eye were an organism, vision would be its soul.” Similar thinking is revealed in our modern view that mind is a function of the body, and that it depends upon the body for its existence. ”

“ Moreover, Hercules the valiant, the thoroughbred who never once shirked from his task, is here contrasted with Cinderella, the patron goddess of all those ineffectual dreamers, who, instead of balancing their ethical books day by day, whimper after the supernatural, and cultivate an inner life of subterfuge and disorder. We hold here that no man can have freedom given to him, but that he must earn it by positively constructive, honest efforts to adjust himself to and gain control of his environment. ”

“ And while we should see upon many of his pages portrayals of torpid conservatism, ruthless domineering, and magnificent cunning, we should also behold examples of that impersonal referee of whom we have already spoken, whose business it is to persuade and oblige the disturbers of the social equilibrium to employ the methods and standards of conduct which have always marked free men. He who would clearly comprehend such a panorama must needs give it more than a fugitive glance; for as it required time to be created, so does it require time in which to be appreciated. ”

“ Our freedom is not complete, it is in the making.... The process by which freedom is won is the process of enlightenment. It is the truth that sets men free, the clear perception of moral relations and moral laws, the understanding of human nature and its true needs. ”

“ That is to say, the realm of ethics is coincident with the realm of human behavior in so far as that behavior is judged to be good or bad, right or wrong, virtuous or vicious. Now the body of man performs many and various functions, some of which are called physical, some chemical, some mental, and some ethical; and any structure of man’s body, such as an arm or a leg, can be shown to perform all these four types of function at the same time. Such a statement will cause no surprise to those who have followed the trend of psychological and ethical theory in the last decade. ”

“ Indeed, one has but to learn to read the simplest literature in any language to realize how much of what is called thinking consists simply in devising contrasts and antitheses. It is the orator’s chief tour de force, the historian’s commonplace, the dramatist’s all-important method of producing a plot, and, in fact, without it, no literature would seem to give an adequate picture of the realities of human life. ”

“ Legal rights, therefore, are not equivalent to the capacity for revenge, but rather consist in the ability to get old quarrels looked at by new and unbiased eyes. Herein consists much of the prestige of the law, and since prestige has always been regarded as a kind of power, men are not slow to employ it in the establishment of their claims and the protection of their interests.
Law, however, is frequently misinterpreted when its function is thought to be preventative of discord, rather than judicial and equitable. Law is no guardian angel. ”

“ Nevertheless, he endeavors to maintain an equality of interest in all human affairs, knowing full well that as soon as he takes sides, he loses his sense of the proportions of the whole. Unlike the Stoic, he admits the reality and inevitableness of pain and anguish; yet while he studies these phenomena, he keeps a sharp lookout lest his personal equation obtrude itself in the shape of sympathetic sorrows,—these he steadfastly refuses to add to his report of the objective facts. ”

“ Thus, from the mechanistic point of view, the homage which we give to legal rights is after all simply equivalent to the expenditure of energy in our bodies for the purpose of maintaining particular habits of action. Indeed, in those who maintain the public peace, all the energy which goes into actions which promote the order of society is literally spent to uphold legal rights of one sort or another. It is this energy, this physical power, which we referred to recently when we said that “right” is partially equivalent to might. ”

“ Although at the present hour it does not seem clear just what the universe is doing, yet they who recognize even in seemingly disastrous tumults the struggles of man to enlarge his power to think, will see that even if nature’s way appears to be circuitous and even at times crude, it is nevertheless nature’s inevitable way. ”

“ And while without doubt some forms of fear are well-grounded, as, for example, the farmer’s fear lest the oncoming storm wash out his seedlings, yet when fear tends to limit prudence, or take the place of prevision, the organism in which that fear arises is sub-normal and unsound. Conscience, then, in so far as it is identical with this degrading emotion of fear, and in so far as it begins and ends in a withdrawing reaction, is nothing but a blight. ”

“ It is thus plain that there is no fundamental difference between ethics and any other science. Just as the business of physical science is to describe the conditions under which any phenomenon occurs, so the business of ethical science is to ascertain, by a study of the mechanisms of human behavior, the conditions which underlie all of our ethical values. ”

“ He who, like the mechanist, believes that virtue is a strictly natural phenomenon, must not carry a-priori standards into his work, but must believe that an accurate description of human nature will furnish all the necessary data for an applied science of human conduct. To be sure, since man is a creature who likes and dislikes, who prefers and rejects, this very fact precludes an ethics without any mention of ideals of one sort or another. ”

“ It would be an impertinence for an amateur in physiological science to assert that the significance of ethical values can be understood only through a study of the mechanics of the human body, were not the ethical implications of physiology so numerous, so compelling, and so plainly apparent. ”

“ For conscience, as it is usually experienced, is a painful, withdrawing reaction, implying negation rather than affirmation, incoordination rather than skilful prevision, and morbidity instead of frank, overt, constructive action. Accurate indeed is the phrase, “The pangs of conscience,” as a description of the organic turmoil incident to this condition of mal-adjustment. Can it not, then, be truthfully said, that in the cases just described conscience is a pathological phenomenon?
Thus to discover that the popular form of conscience implies a vice rather than a virtue is not, however, enough. ”

“ For when we say that the enforcement of the claims and interests comprised within the scope of moral rights depends upon the approval of the group, it must not be supposed that the actions of any group and the actions which it approves are necessarily one and the same. This is a sour paradox, but its appropriateness cannot be successfully denied. The standard of conduct which any group subscribes to under pressure, either in writing, or before an audience, is singularly different from the behavior of the group under easier circumstances. ”

“ For when duly examined, almost every so-called “standard of righteousness” becomes a totally unspecific category of behavior, while the term “moral law” is not law in any dependable sense of the term at all. Certainly it is not a law of nature,—of human nature,—for it does not adequately describe any typical behavior situations. Neither is it law to a jurist, since there is no organized force that can be brought to bear upon human beings to compel them to obey it in their actions, much less in their thinking. ”

“ This is the mechanist’s religion,—a consequence of, rather than an apology for, his ethics. For religion, though it be a word made base by those who claim to have an endless copyright on truth, and a retroactive monopoly on the deeper human emotions, means to a mechanist something more closely allied to its original signification. It means a reliance on that much of nature, and a support from that much of humanity, as contributes to the development of a man’s talents, to the freedom of his actions, and to his peace of mind. ”

“ The concept of conscience has played an important part in modern ethical theory, and it is supposed by many persons to be the foundation of all morality. What place it deserves to hold in a constructive, mechanistic ethics can be determined, however, only by careful analysis. So many extravagant claims have been advanced in its behalf as to make one suspect that none of them are true. Things which people have “always heard lauded and never discussed” are only with difficulty saved from oblivion when intellectual revolutions have altered the emphasis which man puts on the values of life. ”

“ Why is it, we ask, that so few of the innumerable human traits that are commended every day—not only by words of praise, but also by that subtler and more emphatic sign of unconscious imitation—have been chosen as virtues, while so many others have been left out of the list? The four cardinal [Pg 135] virtues,—courage, prudence, temperance, and justice,—exemplify this high degree of selectiveness, while this inventory omits all mention of human skill in any form, in spite of the fact that when the list was made by Plato, human skill in the fine arts had reached one of its limits of excellence. ”

“ Theft, murder, and libel, for example, are about the most potent stimuli to violent retaliation that can be provided. Nevertheless, it is sound psychology that most emotions quickly cool if the stimulus be withdrawn, that wrath has to be nursed if it is to be kept warm, and that absence does not make the heart grow fonder. Here is where the law performs its chief function. For the law is simply an ingenious device to get a [Pg 87] judgment on the conflict of human interests which shall not be tinged with the passions that provoked the conflict. ”

“ It may be that such a definition superficially fits a great many cases, but great danger lies in accepting it without scrutiny, since it tends to imply that ethics is merely a study of opinions about conduct, and not of conduct itself. Now, no other science is a study of opinions, not even the normative sciences of bridge-building or landscape gardening; and ethics is no exception to this general rule. Moreover, since we do not know of any absolutely wise observer to whose opinion we can appeal in every doubtful case, a true definition of vice has not yet been achieved. ”