ly result in
harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink dow