William Thomas Thornton

“ Demonstrably, therefore, God is good and just in the very highest degree in which those qualities can be conceived by man. Demonstrably, too, since the universe is the work of His hands, He must be possessed of power which, if not necessarily unbounded, is at least as boundless as the universe. Thus, rigidly arguing from effects to causes, and scrupulously proportioning the one to the other, man sees imaged on the face of creation a creator, both realising his highest conception of goodness, and wielding measureless might. ”

“ Justice is nothing more than abstinence from injustice, and no commendation can be due for not doing that the doing of which would deserve censure. Justice, if entitled to be ranked among the virtues at all, is at best only a negative virtue, as being the reverse of a vice. It is distinguished from all other moral qualities, as being the single and solitary one, compliance with whose behests is a duty which we owe to others. Of meekness, patience, temperance, fortitude, courtesy, whatever display it may for any reason be our duty to make, precisely that display justice requires us to make. ”

“ No keenest scrutiny of any portion of matter, no study of its external configuration or internal structure could, previously to experience, enable us to conjecture that it could produce any effect whatever, still less any particular effect: could enable us to guess, for instance, that flame would burn, or ice would chill, if touched. Nor even though on once touching flame we get our fingers burnt, are mature philosophers like us to conclude, as if we had no more intelligence than so many babies, that if we touch again we shall be burnt again. ”

“ But how can we pretend to know for how long a season such may continue to be the divine pleasure? How do we know that the present season may not be the first of an alternating series, and that it may not at any moment terminate, and be succeeded by one of an opposite character? What though we have some shadow of historical evidence that most physical phenomena have been going on in much the same order for some six thousand years, is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day? ”

“ But though admitting that there can be no virtue without utility, I do not admit either that virtue must be absent unless utility preponderate, or that if utility preponderate virtue must be present. I deny that any amount of utility can of itself constitute virtue. I deny that whatever adds to the general happiness must be right. Equally do I deny that whatever diminishes the general happiness or prevents its increasing must be wrong. An action, be it observed, may be right in three different senses. ”

“ Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe? Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other provisions the force of these isolated clauses may, in novel combinations of circumstances, be counteracted by some latent and hitherto unsuspected force? ”

“ Neither am I prepared to deny, although scarcely either prepared to admit, that even of abstract qualities all our general or class notions are equally ideas of particular specimens of those qualities; that, when we speak, for instance, of virtue or vice in general, we are thinking of some particular exhibition of some particular kind of virtue or vice. Nay, I am not even concerned to deny that our idea of idea in general may possibly be a copy of some particular one of our previous ideas which, for the nonce, serves to represent all our other previous ideas. ”

“ If there be certain determinate lines of conduct which men will infallibly pursue throughout all succeeding generations, how can men be free agents? How—for it is merely the old puzzle over again—how can foreknowledge be reconciled with freewill? The difficulty is not to be got rid of by discrediting the reality of freewill, and treating it as a thing for which there is no evidence. ”

“ They never stop to calculate how much good may perhaps ensue if evil be done. Simple arithmetic, apart from faith, satisfies them that to add wrong to wrong cannot possibly augment the sum total of right. The prime article of their creed is the absolute obligation of paying debts—a piece of unworldly wisdom more than ever now to Jews a stumbling-block, and to Greeks foolishness, but not the less to all, whether Jews or Gentiles, who will accept it, a light to show through the mazes of life, a path so plainly marked that the foolishest of wayfaring men cannot greatly err therein. ”

“ Abstinence from murder would not absolve him from the guilt of perjury. If, unless a loaf were stolen, a life would be lost, Anti-utilitarianism might pardon, but would scarcely applaud the theft. At all events it would not, like the rival doctrine in a similar strait, be reduced to double on itself, declaring that wrong had become right and black white, that the Ethiopian had changed his skin and the leopard his spots. It would still insist as positively as ever that to steal another man's bread cannot be just, however benevolent the purpose for which it is stolen. ”

“ But the most flagrant breach of generosity, neither keeping nor taking away anything to which any one has a right, does nothing for which reparation can be due. It consists simply in a man's making an exclusively selfish use of what is exclusively his, and to make such use is one of the rights of property. Whoever exercises that odious right is justly punished by being shown how hateful we think him, but we must not, on pretence of justice, commit the injustice of depriving him of a right which is confessedly his. ”

“ Wretched as he is, infinitely more wretched than he was before there was any call upon him to act as he has done, he is less wretched than he would be if, recognising the obligation so to act, he had not so acted. He has escaped the stings of conscience, the sense of having wronged his neighbour and offended his God; he has escaped, in short, self-condemnation—a torment so intolerable to those so constituted as to be susceptible of it, that hell itself has been known to be, in imagination at least, preferred to it. ”

“ I hope to be pardoned for declining to accept these illusive distinctions as the boundaries which separate justice from the other components of morality. I neither understand how any obligation can be otherwise than perfect, nor do I recognise any duties whatever except those of justice. The main distinction between justice and all positive virtues I take to be that, whereas compliance with its behests is always imperative, compliance with theirs never is, but is always optional and discretionary. ”

“ Again, what discordance is there not as to the most equitable repartition of taxation! That all should be taxed in equal proportion to their pecuniary means; that taxation should be a graduated percentage on income, rising as income rose; that all, whether rich or poor, should be taxed alike; that all should pay equal capitation, but unequal property-tax—these are some out of many divergencies of opinion, and 'from these confusions' there is, Mr. Mill considers, 'no other mode of extrication than the utilitarian.' [19] But if there were really no other, there would, in fact, be none at all. ”

“ Clearly, that the just should suffer for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, is diametrically opposed to the welfare of society; wherefore, according to utilitarian principles, by consenting so to suffer, the just becomes unjust, the innocent renders himself guilty. But can there be a better proof that utilitarian principles are unsound than that this should be a legitimate deduction from them? Can there be better proof that utility and morality are not identical, but two absolutely distinct things? ”

“ As surely as thought is, so surely must there be a thinker. This is, in substance, affirmed even by many who deny it in terms, and Hume, in particular, when saying, as he somewhere does, that 'all we are conscious of is a series of perceptions,' denies and affirms it at one and the same time. For how can there be perception without a percipient? or how consciousness without a conscious entity? ”

“ By what law? By that of Utilitarianism, set forth in its full amplitude. Honesty and generosity, faith, truth, charity, patient endurance, and chivalrous self-devotion, all are mingled together under the name of justice, and justice itself only remains just as long as it remains identical with the largest expediency.
At this rate we cannot possibly have any virtue to plume ourselves upon. The best we can do being no more than our duly, the only reward we can claim is exemption from the punishment we should have deserved if we had not done it. ”

“ In no department of science is it possible for an enquirer to advance considerably beyond all his predecessors without serving as a light by whose aid his successors may advance somewhat beyond him. This is the only apology that I feel disposed to offer for the freedom with which I am about to criticize one who, having been, by judges so competent as Adam Smith and Professor Huxley, pronounced to be 'by far the greatest philosopher' and 'acutest thinker' of his own age, would, doubtless, be at least on a level with the greatest philosophers of the present age if he were living now. ”

“ But society had had none of its rights infringed. By society no injury had been sustained. To society, therefore, no reparation was due; and society, it seems to me, would have no right to insist on exacting reparation not due to itself from one whom it had forcibly extruded from its communion, and who, therefore, was no longer amenable to its jurisdiction. Society might, indeed, dissolve itself, proclaiming that 'every man for himself, and God for all,' should thenceforward be the rule. ”

“ Even when on one occasion, distinguishing between duty and virtue, he says that there are innumerable acts and forbearances of human beings which, though either causes or hindrances of good to their fellow-creatures, lie beyond the domain of duty, and within that of virtue or merit, he goes on to assign as the sole reason for placing them in the domain of the latter that, in respect to them, it is, on the whole, for the general interest that people should be left free, thereby plainly intimating that society would be equitably entitled to insist on them if it thought proper. ”

“ Yet there can be no doubt that the happiness of society would be vastly promoted if everyone felt himself under an irresistible obligation to assist his neighbour whenever he could do so with little or no inconvenience to himself, or, consequently, if external force were always at hand to constrain anyone so to assist who was unwilling to do so of his own accord.
So much in proof that among things of the highest and most extensive utility there are several which it would be decidedly the reverse of right to do, and several others which it would be perfectly right to leave undone. ”

“ An action is generous only in the proportion in which it involves self-sacrifice, voluntarily undergone for the benefit of others, without any view on the agent's part to further compensation than that derivable from the consciousness of making other people happy. In such voluntary and disinterested self-sacrifice consists the merit which is one chief characteristic of generosity as of most positive virtue, distinguishing it from justice, in which there is never a surrender of anything which one would be warranted in keeping, but merely a rendering of what belongs or is due to others. ”