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Liberty_201-250.indd 4 8/28/08 1:38:29 PM CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSION Thrown into a positive form, the doctrine contended for in the foregoing chapters is this: 1. The whole management and direction of human life depends upon the question whether or not there is a God and a future state of human existence. If there is a God, but no future state, God is nothing to us. If there is a future state, but no God, we can form no rational guess about the future state. 2. If there is no God and no future state, reasonable men will regulate their conduct either by inclination or by common utilitarianism (p. 167). 3. If there is a God and a future state, reasonable men will regulate their conduct by a wider kind of utilitarianism (pp. 182-83). 4. By whatever rule they regulate their conduct, no room is left for any rational enthusiasm for the order of ideas hinted at by the phrase 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity'; for, whichever rule is applied, there are a vast number of matters in respect of which men ought not to be free; they are fundamentally unequal, and they are not brothers at all, or only under qualifications which make the assertion of their fraternity unimportant. It is impossible to carryon speculations which lead to such results without being led to ask oneself the question whether they are or can be of any sort of importance? The questions which I have been discussing have been debated in various forms for thousands of years. Is this consistent with the possibility that they can ever be solved, and, if not, why should they be debated by anyone who has no taste for a conflict never ending, still beginning, fighting still, and still destroying? 204 Liberty_201-250.indd 5 8/28/08 1:38:30 PM CONCLUSION The answer is that though these speculations may be expected to be endless, and though their results are mainly destructive, they are nevertheless of great use, and, indeed, are absolutely necessary. They can show that particular sets of opinions are incoherent, and so, properly speaking, not opinions at all. They can cut down to their proper proportions exaggerated estimates of the probability of particular systems and expose their pretensions to attain to something more than probability. Lastly, they can show how particular opinions are related to each other. And this is a wide field. As long as men have any mental activity at all, they will speculate, as they always have speculated, about themselves, their destiny, and their nature. They will ask in different dialects the questions What? Whence? Whither? And their answers to these questions will be bold and copious, whatever else they may be. It seems to me improbable in the highest degree that any answer will ever be devised to any one of these questions which will be accepted by all mankind in all ages as final and conclusive. The facts of life are ambiguous. Different inferences may be drawn from them, and they do not present by any means the same general appearance to people who look at them from different points of view. To a scientific man society has a totally different appearance, it is, as far as he is concerned, quite a different thing, from what it is to a man whose business lies with men. Again, the largest and by far the most important part of all our speculations about mankind is based upon our experience of ourselves, and proceeds upon the supposition that the motives and principles of action of others are substantially the same as our own. The degree to which tastes of all sorts differ is a standing proof of the truth that this assumption includes an allowance of error, though it is error of a kind from which it is impossible for any human creature to free himself. It would be easy to accumulate other observations of the same sort. It is enough for my purpose to observe in general that mankind appear to me to be in the following difficulty, from which I see no means of extrication. Either they must confine their conclusions to matters which can be verified by actual experience, in which case the questions which principally interest them must be dismissed from consideration as insoluble riddles; or they must be satisfied with probable solutions of them, in which case their solutions will always contain a certain degree of error and will require...

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