There is, however, a serious, and most embarrassing difficulty in the way of discussing the phases and vicissitudes4 of one’s ethical5 development. Self-appraisement is necessarily involved in the narration6. The outstanding subject of ethics8 is the self and its relations. The physicist9, the chemist, the biologist, however the methods they use may differ in other respects, agree in the endeavor to eliminate the personal equation. The psychologist likewise does his best to see the procession that moves across the inner stage like an interested but detached spectator. In the case of ethics, however, the personal factor cannot be eliminated, because the per4sonal factor is just the Alpha and the Omega of the whole matter; and if this be left out of account, the very object to be studied disappears.
Ethical standards are exacting10, separated often from performance by the widest interval11. To set up a standard, therefore, is to reflect upon oneself, to expose oneself to the backstroke of one’s own deliverances, to be plunged12 perhaps into deep pits of self-humiliation. How shall anyone have the courage to face so searching a test, or the hardihood to discuss with a lofty air, and to recommend to others ideals of conduct against which he knows that he daily offends? How can anyone teach ethics or write about it? The words of the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” seem to apply very closely. Do not judge others, do not lay down the law for others, because in so doing you will be judged in the inner forum13, becoming a repulsive14 object in your own eyes, or standing7 forth15 a whited sepulcher16. In brief, to touch the subject of ethics is to handle a knife that cuts both ways, to cast a weapon which returns upon him who sends it.
The difficulty then which confronts the ethical writer is that the attitude of detachment possible in other branches of investigation17 is found to be impossible when one attempts to sound the profundities18 of that kind of inner experience which is called ethical. The self obtrudes19 itself at every point, and it instinctively21 refuses to be humbled22. What may be denominated the struggle for self-esteem has indeed played a leading r?le both in the outer and inner history of mankind. This struggle, whose immense importance is often overlooked,5 accounts for even more interesting facts than the biological struggle for existence. The desire to exercise power over others, often ruthless in the means adopted, is frequently nothing more than a miserable23 attempt to save self-esteem by covering up the inner sense of the weakness of the self. But the same struggle penetrates24 also into the realm of theoretical ethics with which we are concerned. Here it tampers25 with the standards which mortify26 self-esteem, by inventing such ethical theories as seem to make the problems of personality easy of solution, and by blinking the tragic27 facts of guilt28, remorse29, etc. Various ethical systems that are in vogue30 at the present time are, at least in part, exemplars of this process—the theory for instance that ethics is nothing more than a calculus31 of self-interest, or a matter of sympathetic feeling, or a balancing of the more refined against the grosser pleasures. The instinct of self-preservation32, in the shape of the preservation of self-esteem, is quite incorrigible33, and against its insidious34 suggestion we have reason to be particularly on our guard in the discussion which we are entering.
Are we then to refrain, out of sheer regard for decency35, from touching36 on this subject at all? Is everyone who writes on ethics, or attempts to teach it, either a pedant37 or a hypocrite? But we cannot avoid discussing it, nor resist the impulse to teach and write about it, for it is the subject on which more than any other we and others sorely need help and enlightenment. And we shall get help in the endeavor to afford it to others. This, then, is my position: I do not presume to lay down the law for anyone. I find that I can set6 forth the better standards which in the course of trial and error I have come to recognize. I would not shamelessly expose mere38 private failures and failings after the manner of Rousseau in the “Confessions”; for there is a tract39 of the inner life which ought to be kept from publicity40 and prying41 intrusion. I shall then deal with deflections only in so far as they can be traced to false standards or principles, and as they tend to illustrate42 the flaw in those standards and principles.
What I state as certain is certain for me. It has approved itself as such in my experience. Let others consult their experience, and see how far it tallies43 with that which is here set forth. A distinction, however, I wish to call attention to between the theory as expounded44 in the second part of this volume, and the practical applications to be found in the third and fourth parts. Persons who are not trained in metaphysical thinking or interested in it, may do well to omit the reading of the second part. To those who are competent in philosophical46 thinking, and who disagree with the positions there taken, I may perhaps be permitted to suggest that one can dissent47 from a philosophy and yet find help in the applications to which it leads. And, after all, it is the practice that counts.
With these preliminaries, I now proceed to delineate briefly48 the stages of inner development which have led me slowly and with much labor49 to the system of thought described in the following pages.
One of the leading principles to which I early gave assent50, and to which I have ever since adhered as a correct fundamental insight, is expressed in the state7ment that every human being is an end per se, worth while on his own account.2
Every human personality is to be safe against infringement51 and is, in this sense, sacred. There is a certain precinct which may not be invaded. The experience which served me especially as the matrix of this idea was the adolescent experience of sex-life,—the necessity felt of inhibiting52, out of reverence53 for the personality of women, the powerful instincts then awakened54.3
The fact that I had lived abroad for three years in frequent contact with young men, especially students, who derided55 my scruples56, and in the impure57 atmosphere8 of three capital cities of Europe, Berlin, Paris and Vienna, where the “primrose path” is easy, tended to make the retention58 of my point of view more difficult, and at the same time to give it greater fixity, also to drive me into a kind of inward solitude59. I felt myself in opposition60 to my surroundings, and acquired a confidence, perhaps exaggerated, to persevere61 along my own lines against prevailing62 tendencies.
I ought next to mention the decay of theism which took place in my mind in consequence of philosophic45 reading. Already at an early age I had stumbled over the doctrine63 of Creation. I remember asking my Sunday School teacher—How is creation possible? How can something originate out of nothing? The answer I received was evasive, and left me uneasy and unsatisfied. On another occasion I ventured to suggest to the same authority—a revered64 and beloved authority—that the conception of God seemed to me too much like that of a man, too much fashioned on the human model; and he amazed me beyond words by replying that he himself sympathized more or less with the ideas of Spinoza. This chance remark set me thinking, and seemed to open wide spaces in which my mind felt free to travel—though I never tended in the direction of Spinoza.4
9
My thoughts were driven still further by reaction against the narrow theology of the lectures on Christian65 Evidences as taught at that time in Columbia College, where I was a student. And all these influences came to a head in the atmosphere of the German university at Berlin. There I heard Zeller, Duhring, Steinthal, Bonitz. Above all I came into contact with Herman Cohen, subsequently and for many years professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg, and undertook to grapple in grim earnest with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The net outcome was not atheism66 in the moral sense,—I have never been what is called an atheist,—but the definite and permanent disappearance67 of the individualistic conception of Deity68. I was attracted by the rigor69, the sublimity70, of Kant’s system, and especially by his transcendental derivation of the moral law. The individualistic basis of his ethics, which is quite uncongenial to me, I ignored, and for a time simply accounted myself a follower71 of Kant. Very often since then I have discovered that men, unbeknown to themselves, are apt to sail under false flags, ranking themselves Kantians, Socialists73, or what not, because the system to which they give their adherence74 attracts them at some one outstanding point, the point namely, where it sharply conflicts with views which they themselves strongly reprobate75; and they are thus led to overlook other features no less important in which the system is really uncongenial to them. Thus a person who recognizes the evils of the present wage system may label himself a Socialist72, simply because Socialism is most in evidence as an10 adversary76 of the wage system, while he may by no means agree with the positive principles that underlie77 Socialism, when he comes to examine them dispassionately.
I thought at that time of the Moral Law as that which answers to or should replace the individualistic God-idea. I believed in an unknown principle or power in things of which the Moral Law is the manifestation78, and I found the evidence of the moral law in man’s consciousness. Matthew Arnold’s “the power that makes for righteousness” is a phrase which at that time would have suited me,—though perhaps not entirely79 even at that time. I have since come to see that “making for righteousness” is a conception inapplicable to the ultimate reality, and is properly applied80 only to human effort; since purpose implies that the end sought has not as yet been realized, and non-realization and ultimate reality are contradictory81 ideas. The power that only makes for righteousness cannot be the ultimate truth in things. The utmost we can say is that the ultimate reality expresses itself in the human world as the power that inspires in men moral purpose.
To return to my personal experiences, there fell into my hands, while still a student abroad, a book by Friedrich Albert Lange entitled Die Arbeiterfrage (The Labor Question), which proved epoch-making in my life. Bacon says in his essay Of Studies: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” He might have added that there are books that make a man over, changing the cur11rent of his existence, or at least opening channels which previously82 had been blocked.5
Die Arbeiterfrage is not a great book. In the literature of the subject it has long since been superseded83. Yet it opened for me a wide and tragic prospect84, an outlook of which I had been until then in great measure oblivious85, an outlook on all the moral as well as economic issues involved in what is called the Labor Question. My teacher in philosophy, Cohen, once said to me sharply, that if there is to be anything like religion in the world hereafter, Socialism must be the expression of it. I did not agree with his statement that Socialism spells religion, and have not seen my way to this day toward identifying the two. But I realized that there was a measure of truth in what he said,—and that I must square myself with the issues that Socialism raises. Lange helped me to do this.
He aided me in other respects as well. His History of Materialism86 dispelled87 some of the fictitious88 glamor89 that still hung about the materialistic90 hypothesis at that time,—though the last chapter on the ultimate12 philosophy of life, in which he identifies religion with poetry, is distinctly weak. I read his book on the Labor Question with burning cheeks; no work of fiction ever excited me as did this little treatise91. It was ethical in spirit, if not in its ruling ideas. It favored productive co-operation, and seemed to point a way to immediate92 action, as Socialism did not.
The upshot of it was that I now possessed93 a second object, namely, the laborer94, to whom I could apply my non-violation ethics. I had always felt an instinctive20, idealizing reverence for women, and this had its influence in the first practical outcome of the philosophy of life with which I started on my career. I would go out as the minister of a new religious evangel. Instead of preaching the individual God, I was to stir men up to enact95 the Moral Law; and to enact the Moral Law meant at that time primarily to influence the young men with whom I came into contact to reverence womanhood, and to keep inviolate96 the sacred thing, woman’s honor. And now I had a second arrow in my quiver. I was to go out to help to arouse the conscience of the wealthy, the advantaged, the educated classes, to a sense of their guilt in violating the human personality of the laborer. My mother had often sent me as a child on errands of charity, and had always impressed upon me the duty of respecting the dignity of the poor while ministering sympathetically to their needs. I was prepared by this youthful training to resent the indignity97 offered to the personality of the laborer, as well as the suffering endured by him in consequence of existing conditions.
13
Accordingly, on returning from abroad, my first action consisted in founding among men of my own or nearly my own age a little society which we ambitiously called a union for the Higher Life, based on three tacit assumptions: sex purity, the principle of devoting the surplus of one’s income beyond that required for one’s own genuine needs to the elevation98 of the working class, and thirdly, continued intellectual development. A second practical enterprise attempted was the establishment of a co-operative printing shop. This having failed because of the selfishness actuating the members, the Workingman’s School was founded, with the avowed99 object of creating a truly co-operative spirit among workingmen.
I must, however, pause at this point to explain how the development described led me to separation from the Hebrew religion, the religion in which I was born, and to the service of which as a Jewish minister it was expected that I should devote my life.
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jointly
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| ad.联合地，共同地 | |
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scorched
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| 烧焦，烤焦( scorch的过去式和过去分词 )； 使（植物）枯萎，把…晒枯； 高速行驶； 枯焦 | |
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narrate
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| v.讲，叙述 | |
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vicissitudes
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| n.变迁，世事变化；变迁兴衰( vicissitude的名词复数 )；盛衰兴废 | |
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ethical
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| adj.伦理的，道德的，合乎道德的 | |
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narration
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| n.讲述，叙述；故事；记叙体 | |
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standing
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ethics
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| n.伦理学；伦理观，道德标准 | |
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physicist
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| n.物理学家，研究物理学的人 | |
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exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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interval
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plunged
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forum
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| n.论坛，讨论会 | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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forth
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sepulcher
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investigation
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profundities
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obtrudes
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instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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instinctively
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humbled
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miserable
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penetrates
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tampers
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| n.捣棒( tamper的名词复数 )；打夯机；夯具；填塞者v.窜改( tamper的第三人称单数 )；篡改；（用不正当手段）影响；瞎摆弄 | |
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mortify
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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guilt
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remorse
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Vogue
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calculus
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| n.微积分；结石 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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incorrigible
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insidious
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decency
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touching
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pedant
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mere
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tract
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publicity
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| n.众所周知，闻名；宣传，广告 | |
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prying
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| adj.爱打听的v.打听，刺探（他人的私事）( pry的现在分词 )；撬开 | |
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illustrate
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tallies
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| n.账( tally的名词复数 )；符合；（计数的）签；标签v.计算，清点( tally的第三人称单数 )；加标签（或标记）于；（使）符合；（使）吻合 | |
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expounded
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| 论述，详细讲解( expound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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philosophic
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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dissent
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briefly
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labor
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| n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦 | |
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assent
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infringement
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inhibiting
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| 抑制作用的，约束的 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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derided
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scruples
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| n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 )；顾虑，顾忌v.感到于心不安，有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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impure
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| adj.不纯净的，不洁的；不道德的，下流的 | |
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retention
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solitude
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opposition
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persevere
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prevailing
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doctrine
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revered
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Christian
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atheism
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disappearance
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deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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rigor
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sublimity
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| 崇高，庄严，气质高尚 | |
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follower
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| n.跟随者；随员；门徒；信徒 | |
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socialist
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| n.社会主义者；adj.社会主义的 | |
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socialists
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adherence
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reprobate
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| n.无赖汉；堕落的人 | |
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adversary
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| adj.敌手，对手 | |
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underlie
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manifestation
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| n.表现形式；表明；现象 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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82
previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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83
superseded
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| [医]被代替的，废弃的 | |
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84
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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85
oblivious
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| adj.易忘的，遗忘的，忘却的，健忘的 | |
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86
materialism
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| n.［哲］唯物主义，唯物论；物质至上 | |
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87
dispelled
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| v.驱散，赶跑( dispel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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88
fictitious
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| adj.虚构的，假设的；空头的 | |
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89
glamor
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| n.魅力，吸引力 | |
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90
materialistic
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| a.唯物主义的，物质享乐主义的 | |
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91
treatise
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| n.专著；(专题)论文 | |
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92
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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93
possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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laborer
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| n.劳动者，劳工 | |
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95
enact
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| vt.制定(法律)；上演，扮演 | |
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96
inviolate
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| adj.未亵渎的，未受侵犯的 | |
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97
indignity
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| n.侮辱，伤害尊严，轻蔑 | |
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98
elevation
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| n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高 | |
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avowed
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| adj.公开声明的，承认的v.公开声明，承认( avow的过去式和过去分词) | |
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