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LECTURES ON MORAL SCIENCE.

LECTURE I.

MORAL SCIENCE AND ASTRONOMY.— REASONS FOR THE SLOWER PROGRESS OF THE FORMER.—PROGRESS MUST BE SLOW. TWO CLASSES OF SCIENCES. USE OF STUDYING THE SCIENCE.

AMONG the sciences which earliest drew the attention of man were those of Astronomy and Morals. Of these, one respects the sources of that light which is from without, the other of that which is within. Of the one, the objects and phenomena are not only without us, but are separated from us by inconceivable distances; of the other, the phenomena are not only within us, but belong to that part of our nature which is special to us, and whose circle lies nearest to its central point.

Connected with each are practical judgments common to all. Both the heavens and the moral nature of man yielded him guidance before there was a thought of the science of either. The unscientific man rejoices in the light that comes from Arcturus no less than if he could analyze its beams, and is guided by the polar star no less. surely than if he could measure its magnitude and distance. The day and the night, the changing moons and

the revolving seasons, are alike to all. In the same way men agree in their practical judgments on the great subjects of morals. By their original nature there is within them a guiding light by which the learned and unlearned alike may walk. But in either case, when science began its work, and asked for causes, and reasons, and classifications, there were conjectures and diversities of opinion without end. Of the apparent movement of the heavens, and of a virtuous or heroic act, men judged alike; of the cause of that movement, or of the nature of virtue itself, they did not judge alike. Practically, men could agree in both; but in everything pertaining to the science of either, nothing could be more discrepant than their opinions, or, for ages, more discouraging and apparently hopeless than the attempt to establish any one doctrine that should be generally accepted.

If, now, the inquiry had been made in the early period of these sciences which of them would soonest reach perfection, the unhesitating answer would doubtless have been, that of which the phenomena are within us, which are immediately testified to by our consciousness, and are always subject to our notice. Whether man would ever be able to perfect a science of the heavens, might well have been doubted; but that he should do this sooner than perfect the science of that which pertained to his own most intimate being, and which stood in the closest relation to his highest interests, could not have been believed. But so it has been. After ages of observation and conjecture, during which the phenomena seemed in hopeless confusion; after exhausting the efforts of some of the best minds in every age, the central truth of astronomy at length dawned, and the chaos of conjecture became the order of science. From a science of observation, astronomy has

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now become one of deduction, and if not altogether complete, is more nearly so than any other.

The success thus achieved in the field of astronomy was a great stimulus and encouragement to effort in other departments. From the vastness of its distances, the magnitude of its objects, the complexity of its phenomena, and from its inconceivable forces and velocities, there was connected with success here an excitement and sublimity which greatly heightened the purely scientific pleasure, and which inspired a confidence of future triumphs in whatever should be attempted. Nor was this confidence without a basis. In the advance of every form of physical science then known, no period of the world can be compared with that since the time of Kepler and of Newton. Meantime, forms of science then unknown, as chemistry and geology, have sprung into giant proportions; while the application of science to the arts, employing every substance, and harnessing every force in nature for the service of man, is revolutionizing not only society, but the face of nature herself.

In mental and moral science there has, too, been greater activity than ever before; but we are not, perhaps, in a position as yet to say how much there has been of progress. There are still discordant voices, and different schools, and those that say "Lo, here," and "Lo, there; and perhaps the variety of systems proposed, especially in morals, was never greater.

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Thus situated, it is an encouragement to think of the seas of doubt through which astronomy has waded. We remember that the perplexities of its votaries were once as great as ours can be now, and hope for a similar deliverance. The end of investigation is attained when we either comprehend all that is brought before us, or can draw the

line which shall fix the natural limits set by God to our knowledge; and we are not of that desponding, or rather indolent class, who distrust the powers of the human mind to do, in all cases, one or the other of these.

So far as our present subject is concerned, it may aid us in doing this if we inquire for a little how it has happened that physical science, and especially astronomy, has so far outstripped moral science. What are the causes of a result so impossible to have been anticipated?

And first, we may mention a difficulty much insisted on by Chalmers, as pertaining to the observation of all mental phenomena. This arises from the fact that the mind is both the observer and the thing observed, and that some of its states at least (they say all) are of such a character as to preclude examination at the moment they exist. Thus, when a man is thoroughly angry his whole thought is directed to the object of his anger, and nothing can be conceived more incompatible with the state of an angry man than that he should be engaged in taking psychological observations on himself. The moment he turns his attention from the object of his anger to himself for the purpose of observing it, the anger is gone. It cannot, therefore, be studied directly, as we study the objects of our senses, but only as it is remembered.

This holds in all cases of violent emotion and should have its just weight, but not in the ordinary states of thought and feeling. If the view of Chalmers and of Brown before him were adopted in its strictness, no man would ever know his own present state, but only the states he had been in, and so could never deal with his present, but only with his past self. The moment his attention should be so far called to himself as to inquire whether he was angry, his anger must cease; and the

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prophet of old who thought he was angry, and said he did well to be, was mistaken. In thinking, we know not only the object of our thought, but ourselves as thinking. The consciousness is so far complex as to embrace both. So in the feelings. There is no more difficulty in supposing such a complexity of the consciousness as to embrace both an act and a feeling caused by an act, than there is in supposing that the same consciousness can embrace the reme brance of an act and the feeling caused by that remembrance.

There is doubtless at this point a real difficulty, but we think it less formidable than it is made by Chalmers and others.

To a successful investigation the first requisite is a clear apprehension of the subject to be investigated as distinguished from everything with which it may be confounded, or to which it is related. This discrimination in regard to morals has often failed to be made. This is the second

reason.

Language accommodates itself, after a time, to the exigencies of thought; and when clear discriminations are generally or persistently made, there will be terms to express them. In the Latin language, the word for conscience and for consciousness was the same; it is so still in the French, Italian, and Spanish, and this was formerly true of the English. But if the moral consciousness were not now partitioned off, and its phenomena grouped by a word of its own, we may easily see how difficult it would be to disentangle those phenomena from the mass of other things covered by the same word; and while the language remained in that state it was scarcely possible that much progress should be made in the science. But as thought was concentrated and analysis progressed, that which was

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