[32] The classical - and still, it seems to me, the best - exposition of this state of mind is to be found in Max Weber's distinction between the ethics of conscience and the ethics of responsibility in 'Politics as a Vocation': see Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays m Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), pp. 77-128.
[33] A reference to the American Declaration of Independence, which includes among men's 'unalienable rights' 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Ed.
i Emile Faguet once paraphrased Joseph de Maistre by observing that, when Rousseau asked why it was that men who were born free were nevertheless everywhere in chains, this was like asking why it was that sheep, who were born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibbled grass. Emile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvieme siecle, 1st series (Paris, 1899), p. 41 [cf. Maistre: 'What does [Rousseau] mean? . .. This mad pronouncement, Man is born free, is the opposite of the truth', Oeuvres completes de ]. de Maistre (Lyon/Paris, 1884-7), voL. 2,p. 338].
Similarly the Russian radical Alexander Herzen observed that we classify creatures by zoological types, according to the characteristics and habits that are m°st frequently found to be conjoined. Thus, one of the defining attributes of fish is their liability to live in water; hence, despite the existence of flying fish, we do not say of fish in general that their nature or essence - the 'true' end for which they were created - is to fly, since most fish fail to achieve this and do not display the slightest tendency in this direction. Yet in the case of men, and men alone, we say that the nature of man is to seek freedom, even though only very few men in the long life of our race have in fact pursued it, while the vast majority at most
[35] 'As it really was.'
[36] According to some, for historically or metaphysically inevitable reasons or causes which, however, soon or late, will lose their potency.
[37] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (i 6 5 i), part 1, chapter i 3.
[38] Hence, perhaps, the very different quality of the tone and substance of social protest, however legitimate, in the West in our time, as compared to that of Asian or African critics who speak for societies where large sections of the population are still crushed or submerged.
[39] The history and the logic of the transformation of liberalism in the
[40] See Plan des travaux scientifiques necessaires pour reorganiser Ia societe (1822): p. 53 in Auguste Comte, Appendice general du systeme de politique positive (Paris, 185 4), published as part of vol. 4 of Systeme de politique positive (Paris, i 8 5 1 -4). [Mill quotes this passage in Auguste Comte and Positivism: vol. io, pp. 301-2, in Collected Works ofjohn Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson and others (Toronto/London, 1963-91).]
[41] op. cit. (p. 7 above, note 2), vol. 8, p. 23, line 22.
[42] 'Above all, gentlemen, no zeal whatsoever.' This maxim of Talleyrand's appears in various forms. The earliest I have found is 'N'ayez pas de zele' ('Don't be zealous'), in C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, 'Madame de Stall' (1835): vol. 2, p. 1104, in Sainte-Beuve, Oeuvres, ed. Maxime Leroy ([Paris], 1949-51). The version in the text appears in Philarete Chasles, Voyages d'un critique a travers la vie et les livres (1865-8), vol. 2, Italie et Espagne, p. 204. In this latter version 'point' is often replaced by 'pas trop' ('not too much'), as on p. 304 below, but I have found no nineteenth-century authority for this wording. Ed.
[43] Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1 726), sermon 7, p. 136 [§ 16].
[44] Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humam, ed. O. H. Prior and Yvon Belaval (Paris, 1970), p. 228.
[45] What can and what cannot be done by particular agents in specific circumstances is an empirical question, properly settled, like all such questions, by an appeal to experience. If all acts were causally determined by antecedent conditions which were themselves similarly determined, and so on ad infinitum, such investigations would rest on an illusion. As rational beings we should, in that case, make an effort to disillusion ourselves - to cast off the spell of appearances; but we should surely fail. The delusion, if it is one, belongs to the order of what Kant called 'empirically real' and 'transcendentally ideal'. To try to place ourselves outside the categories which govern our empirical ('real') experience is what he regarded as an unintelligible plan of action. This thesis is surely valid, and can be stated without the paraphernalia of the Kantian system.
[46] This desperate effort to remain at once within and without the engulfing dream, to say the unsayable, is irresistible to German metaphysicians of a certain type: e.g. Schopenhauer and Vaihinger.
[47] E. M. Forster, Howards End (London, 1910), chapter 22, pp. 183-4-
[48] See, for example, the impressive and influential writings of E. H. Carr on the history of our time.
[49] I do not, of course, mean to imply that the great Western moralists, e.g. the philosophers of the medieval Church (and in particular Thomas Aquinas) or those of the Enlightenment, denied moral responsibility; nor that Tolstoy was not agonised by problems raised by it. My thesis is that their determinism committed these thinkers to a dilemma which some among them did not face, and none escaped.
[50] Held, unless I have gravely misunderstood his writings, by Herbert Butter- field.
[51] As opposed to making profitable use of other disciplines, e.g. sociology or economics or psychology.
[52] That history is in this sense different from physical description is a truth discovered long ago by Vico, and most imaginatively and vividly presented by Herder and his followers, and, despite the exaggerations and extravagances to which it led some nineteenth-century philosophers of history, still remains the greatest contribution of the romantic movement to our knowledge. What was then shown, albeit often in a very misleading and confused fashion, was that to
[53] Such 'stability' is a matter of degree. All our categories are, in theory, subject to change. The physical categories - e.g. the three dimensions and infinite extent of ordinary perceptual space, the irreversibility of temporal processes, the multiplicity and countability of material objects - are perhaps the most fixed. Yet even a shift in these most general characteristics is in principle conceivable. After these come orders and relations of sensible qualities - colours, shapes, tastes etc.; then the uniformities on which the sciences are based - these can be quite easily thought away in fairy tales or scientific romances. The categories of value are more fluid than these; and within them tastes fluctuate more than rules of etiquette, and these more than moral standards. Within each category some concepts seem more liable to change than others. When such differences of degree become so marked as to constitute what are called differences of kind, we tend to speak of the wider and more stable distinctions as 'objective', of the narrower and less stable as the opposite. Nevertheless there is no sharp break, no frontier. The concepts form a continuous series from the 'permanent' standards to fleeting momentary reactions, from 'objective' truths and rules to 'subjective' attitudes, and they criss-cross each other in many dimensions, sometimes at unexpected angles, to perceive, discriminate and describe which can be a mark of genius.