Oscillation Between Two Principles

These cycles of action and reaction are disastrous to the establishment of a stable humanism. A theocratic culture depends upon an assured view of the way in which God governs the universe, and as long as that view suits the typical needs of a society made stable by custom, the theocratic culture is stable. But humanism arises in complex and changing societies, and if it is to have any power to make life coherent and orderly, it must hold an assured view of how man can govern himself. If he oscillates aimlessly between the belief that he must distrust his impulses and the belief that he may naively obey them, it is impossible for him to fix any point of reference for the development of his moral code, his educational plans, his human relationships, his politics, and his personal ideals.

It is not hard to see, I think, why he oscillates in this fashion between trust and distrust. He cannot obey every impulse, for he has conflicting impulses within himself. There are also his neighbors with their impulses. They cannot all be satisfied, for the very simple reason that the sum of their demands far outruns the available supply of satisfactions. There is not room enough, there are not objects enough in the world to fulfill all human desires. Desires are, for all practical purposes, unlimited and insatiable, and therefore any ethics which does not recognize the necessity of putting restraint upon naive desire is inherently absurd. On the other hand, it is impossible to distrust every impulse, for the only conclusion then is to commit suicide. Buddha did, to be sure, teach that craving was the source of all misery, and that it must be wholly extinguished. But it is evident from an examination of what he actually advised his disciples to renounce, that while they were to be poor, chaste, unworldly, and incurious about the nature of things, they were to be rewarded with the highest of all satisfactions, and were to be "like the broad earth, unvexed; like the pillar of the city gate, unmoved; like a pellucid lake, unruffled." For Nirvana meant, as Rhys Davids says, the extinction of a sinful, grasping condition of mind.

Confronted by two opposed views of human nature, neither of which can be taken unreservedly, moralists have had to pick and choose, deciding how much or how little they would trust the different impulses. But there is no measure by which they could decide how much of an impulse is virtuous, how much more is intemperate, and how much more than that is utterly sinful. The attempts to regulate the sexual impulse illustrate the difficulty. Shall the moralist call the complete absence of all conscious sexual desire virtue? Then he disobeys the commandment to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Shall he then limit virtuous desire to that which is felt for a lawful mate? That implies that man and woman must mate with the first person for whom they feel any sexual desire. But this cannot always be arranged. The first person may be otherwise engaged. It becomes necessary then to permit a certain amount of promiscuous, though unfulfilled, sexual desire in the process of sexual selection. And then having somehow gotten past that difficulty, and with two persons safely mated, a whole new series of problems arise out of the question of how far sexual satisfaction depends for its virtue upon its being the successful means to, or more subtly still, the intended means to, procreation. I shall not pursue the matter further. The attempt to measure the degree in which impulse is to be permitted to express itself is obviously full of difficulties.

The moral problem remains utterly insoluble as long as men regard it as an attempt to separate their good impulses from their bad ones, and to decide how much their good impulses are to be encouraged. Morality, if it is not fixed by custom and authority, becomes a mere matter of taste determined by the idiosyncrasies of the moralist.