First Principles in Politics

They can lay no necessity upon us to fulfil what they indicate as desirable. They are devoid of that categorical imperative indicated by the word "ought," which is the very note of an ethical law. Again, the so-called laws of political economy are usually statements, more or less probable, of the course likely to be adopted by free agents in pursuit of their own advantage; and such statements are not laws in the proper sense of the word. Once more. If we keep strictly within the domain of experimental science, we have no right to speak of laws. The notion which we express by the word "must" has no place in pure physics; its place is taken by the word "is." The mere physicist cannot get beyond ascertained sequences and co-ordinations of phenomena. What he calls "laws" are formulas; hypotheses which have won their way into general credit by explaining all the facts known to us, by satisfying every test applied to them. I am far from denying I strenuously affirm-that there is a sense in which necessity may be predicated of physical laws. But for that sense-nay, for the very notion of necessity—we must quit the proper bounds of physical science; we must go to an order of verities transcending the physical, to what Aristotle called tá petá tá þvoiká—to metaphysics; that is to say, to supersensuous realities, to the world lying beyond the visible and tangible universe. Only those laws are absolutely or metaphysically necessary which

upon the

are stamped upon all that is, and therefore human intellect; which are the very conditions of thought, because they are the conditions under which all things, all beings, even the Being of Beings, the Absolute and Eternal Himself, exist. I need not pursue that topic further. I have said. enough in elucidation of my present point, which is this: that every physical truth is necessarily connected with, or rather taken for granted, some metaphysical principle. "That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working, the same we term a Law," says Hooker, summing up, in his judicious way the Aristotelian and Scholastic teaching on the matter. Note the words "assign," "moderate," "appoint." Law is of the will and of the intellect; and the will and the intellect are not the proper objects of physical science.

I beg of my readers not to suppose that in insisting so strongly upon this matter I am indulging in mere logomachy; in unprofitable strife about words. The question is concerning the true idea of law-an idea of the utmost practical importance. The doctrine that the universe is governed in all things by law, "the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power," is no

1 Ecclesiastical Polity, book i., 2.

mere abstract speculation which men may hold or reject, and be none the better or the worse for holding or rejecting it. No; it is a doctrine fraught with the most momentous consequences in all relations of human life. Law is not something arbitrary, the edict of mere will; it is, in the admirable words of Aquinas, "a function of reason." Lose the true idea of law, and you derationalise the universe. You reduce the wondrous All to mere senseless mechanism. You undo the work of the creative Logos. You enthrone Anarchy in its place.

These are not the words of rhetorical declamation. They are the words of truth and soberness. And if we seek an illustration of them, we have but to look around. For what-if I may use the German word, now indeed, naturalised among us what is the Zeitgeist of the age in which we live? I suppose the first thing that strikes any thoughtful person, conversant with contemporary speculation as exhibited in current literature, is the perfect babel of opinions to which expression is given. All men who can write grammatically—and many, indeed, who cannot seem to think they have a call to express their "views" on all subjects, human and divine. And their views will be found, in the vast majority of cases, to consist of shreds of information, generally distorted and often erroneous, claptrap phrases, picked up at hazard, and dignified by the title of "principles," preferences, and predi

lections, always unreasoned, and not seldom unreasonable. But if we shut our ears to the "hideous hum" of these crude imaginings which fill the newspapers "with voice deceiving," and give heed only to the utterances of those who possess some intelligible claim to be our intellectual guides, what do we usually find? We find exactly the same anarchy of thought. In those sciences, indeed, where we have to deal with phenomena verifiable by sensible experience, order reigns. And there is something majestic in the calm with which they declare, "That is so." But in every region of intellectual activity outside their domain, the minds of men are "clouded with a doubt." It is a doubt which extends to all first principles of thought and action. The temper of the times is anarchical in the proper sense of the word. That is the true account of the Zeitgeist. Nor can we doubt that it arises, in great degree, from the intense devotion of the age to physical science-a devotion so astonishingly fruitful in the development of material civilization-and from the use of its methods in departments where they can produce only a negative result, or no result at all. Certitude is naturally intolerant. In the age of faith, theology supplied ample evidence of this truth. In our age of unfaith, physical science supplies as ample. There has arisen among us a dogmatism of physicists, not less oppressive than the old dogmatism of divines. There has been a tendency, and more

than a tendency, to assert that outside the boundaries of physical science we can know nothing; that its methods are the only methods of arriving at truth: a tendency to restrict our ideas to generalisations of phenomena; to treat mental and moral problems as mere questions of physiology; —in a word, to regard what are called the laws of matter as the sole laws. And the effacement of the true idea of law is directly traceable to the claim made for physical science as the one criterion of reality-a claim made in ignorance or forgetfulness of the unquestionable fact that its foundations are laid in the supersensu ous; that its greatest generalisations are nothing else than the application of primordial ideas of the intellect as psychology reveals them in consciousness.

Such, beyond doubt, is the tendency of the age. And nowhere is it more strikingly exemplified than in the domain of politics. Some time ago I mentioned to an accomplished friend that I had it in intention to write the book upon which I am now engaged, as a sort of sketch of, or introduction to, the laws of human society. He replied, "My dear fellow, you imagine a vain thing. There are no first principles in politics or last principles; there are no principles at all, and no laws giving expression to principles it is a mere matter of expediency, of utility, of convention, of self-interest." The voice of the Zeitgeist spoke through the mouth of my accomplished friend. And, indeed, the literature of