THE MORAL EVOLUTION SINCE THE INCOMING OF DEMOCRACY: THE NEW SOCIAL AND
INTERNATIONAL CONSCIENCE
I. FORCES DETERMINING THE TREND OF THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT
[Sidenote: The incoming of
democracy]
Of all the forces which since the rise of Christianity have given
fresh impulse to the ethical movement inaugurated by the new religion,
none has exerted a greater influence than modern democracy. This is so
because in its essential spirit democracy is at one with Christianity.
It is merely “a principle which continues ... over a wider range of
institutions the same principle as Christianity introduced.”[721] It
extends the Christian principle of equality from the spiritual to the
political, the social, and the economic domain. It makes all men equal
before Cæsar as well as before God.
And like Christianity, democracy extends the range of persons who are
brothers until not only all classes within the same state but all
peoples and races are included. “In the democratic union of nations,”
in the words of Lecky, “we find the last and highest expression of the
Christian ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”[722]
It is this identity of the essential spirit of democracy with the
essential spirit of Christianity which makes the incoming of democracy
a revolution of such supreme importance in the moral history of the
world. To truly democratize society, as to truly christianize it, is to
moralize it.
[Sidenote: Modern inventions and
the new industrialism]
“The causes,” observes Lecky, “which most disturbed or accelerated
the moral progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of
great men; in modern times they have been the appearance of great
inventions.”[723]
In no department of morals, save the international, have modern
inventions exerted a greater influence than in the department of
industrial ethics. In this sphere these inventions have reacted on
morals in two ways: first, they have changed fundamentally for the
masses in all civilized lands the economic conditions of life, which
conditions, as we have seen, are the great molders of morals; and
second, through the changes they have wrought in the processes of
production, and through the immense development they have given to the
whole industrial system, they have caused principles and institutions
once just and beneficent in their outworkings to become instruments of
inequity and oppression, and have thus awakened new moral judgments
respecting these maxims and conventions. The growth of these new
ethical feelings and convictions constitute an important part, perhaps
_the_ most important part, of the moral history of recent times. They
are the motive force in several of the most significant moral movements
of to-day in the industrial world. Preëminently true is this of the
present-day labor movement. “Its form,” as Professor Peabody says, “is
economic, but its motives are moral. It is an effort--often blind and
groping, sometimes pitifully misdirected, yet none the less proceeding
from the conscience of the time--to shape economic life into an
instrument of social justice and peace.”[724] Socialism, too, with all
its ethical aspirations and enthusiasms, is in large part a product of
the new industrialism.
[Sidenote: The doctrine of
evolution]
Not less disturbing to morals than the political and industrial
revolutions has been the revolution in scientific thought effected by
the doctrine of evolution. This theory has been not only a powerful
dissolvent of a large part of the body of medieval theology and hence
of that part of morality dependent upon this system of thought, but,
through the dominant place which this interpretation of the cosmic
process assigns to the self-regarding motives, it has exercised in wide
circles of society an unfavorable influence upon morals by seeming to
give nature’s sanction to self-assertive, antisocial conduct. There
are drifts in both the public and the private morality of the last
half century which, as we shall see, find their explanation in the
disturbance of ethical values created by the general acceptance of the
Darwinian theory of progress through “the survival of the fittest.”
But we shall also see this same theory, better interpreted in its
profoundest intimations, giving strong support to the best ethical
instincts of humanity and supplying new incentives and encouragement to
humanitarian endeavor.
[Sidenote: General intellectual
progress]
The moral history of the Western world since the Renaissance affords
a striking illustration of the dependence of progress in morals upon
progress in general intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that, fostered
by a free press, by the public-school system, and by various other
agencies, the average of intelligence in the modern democratic state
is higher than it was in any of the states--save possibly in some of
the small city states of Greece--of ancient or medieval times. This
new intellectual life, speaking broadly, has reacted favorably upon
the moral life. It has dispelled superstition, destroyed prejudices,
widened the outlook of men, and broadened their moral sympathies. In a
word, the seeing of life and things as they really are has tended to
clarify the moral sense and to render clearer and truer the vision of
the ethical ideal.
[Sidenote: The decline of dogmatic
theology]
The body of hereditary ethical convictions and judgments upon which
modern influences have been especially at work was, as has been seen,
shaped and molded largely by theology. Hence nothing has influenced
more positively the moral evolution in recent times than the profound
modification which, during the period, has taken place in men’s
religious beliefs. Under the influence of advancing intelligence, of
evolutionary science, of ever closer relations between the different
races and nations, and the resulting contact and comparison of
different religions, there has gone on a rapid disintegration of old
creeds. The effect of this upon many has been the elimination from
their moral code of all purely theological elements, the erection of a
new standard of moral values, and the adoption of an ideal of character
which may best be described as being in the main a composite of Greek
and gospel ethics.
[Sidenote: Growing intimacy of
international relations]
The dependence of moral progress in modern times upon inventions, as
Lecky observes, is shown perhaps even more strikingly in the domain of
international than in that of industrial ethics. As in antiquity it
was the world-wide extension of the Roman rule through conquest which
broke the primal isolation of the Mediterranean peoples and created
that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which arose the ethical
universalism characterizing the cultured circles of Roman society in
the later centuries of the Empire, so in this modern age it is the
great inventions of the steamship, the steam railway, the electric
telegraph, the ocean cable, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and
the rest, which have broken the isolation of the nations, bound them
together by a thousand commercial, social, and intellectual ties,
and created that cosmopolitanism in life and thought from which have
naturally sprung those ethical feelings and convictions which form the
growing international conscience of to-day.
Thus it is that inventions, whose aims were primarily to promote
civilization on its material side, have become the most efficient
agencies in creating a sense of ethical oneness among the nations, and
thus in opening a new epoch in the moral evolution of mankind.
II. EXPRESSIONS OF THE NEW MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN DIFFERENT DOMAINS OF
LIFE AND THOUGHT
_1. The Ethics of Democracy_
[Sidenote: The democratic
revolution a moral movement]
The great history-making upheavals and readjustments in human society
are moral in their causes as well as in their effects. They arise from
a divergence between what _is_ and what _ought to be_. The democratic
revolution which began in France in 1789 affirms with emphasis the
correctness of this ethical interpretation of the great passages of
human history. What superficially viewed appears to have been primarily
a political or economic revolution was in truth, in its deepest
motives and impulses, a moral revolution. “It was moral enthusiasm
for the rights of man ... and not the breakdown of an economic
system, which created modern democracy.”[725] The watchwords of the
Revolution--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--are all words of moral
import. They are tremulous with righteous wrath at age-long oppression,
contempt, and abuse; and they are instinct with the living forces of a
noble moral ideal. They express the essential spirit of the Revolution,
which each day, where it has free course, finds fuller embodiment in
political, social, and moral reforms, in humanitarian institutions and
altruistic effort.
[Sidenote: The ethics of democracy
rejects class morality]
Democracy tends in various ways to purify and ennoble morality, but
especially by destroying all invidious class distinctions, and thereby
destroying that class morality which through all periods of history has
hampered the moral progress of the race. All the civilizations known
to history before the incoming of modern democracy had their superior
class, including only the few, who alone were regarded as possessing
capacity for the highest virtues; and their inferior classes, embracing
the many,--sudras, slaves, or serfs,--persons regarded as created
for the use of others and capable of nothing more than a qualified or
servile morality.
Now democracy, recognizing “human capacities in all and not merely in a
few,” throws down the partition walls between classes and puts all on
the same level of opportunity and privilege. It thus establishes the
conditions of a common moral life and of a progressive moral evolution;
for if history teaches any truth, it teaches that a civilization
dominated by a privileged class that uses the masses selfishly or
thoughtlessly for the enhancement of its own interests and pleasures
is foredoomed to moral stagnation and decadence--so true is it that
society is an organic body and that if one member suffers the whole
body suffers with it.
[Sidenote: The ethical import of
education by the state]
Again, democracy has deep significance for morality on account of its
relation to education. Despotic bureaucratic monarchy is indifferent or
positively opposed to the education of the masses because the safest
basis of such a government is sodden ignorance. On the other hand,
general intelligence is the very breath of life of a democracy. Hence
the education of the masses is the foremost task of the modern free
state. The public-school system of the modern world is the outcome of
this imperious demand of democracy.
Now this relation of the democratic state to popular education has
immense importance for the moral life, first, for the reason that
advance in general intelligence means a better maintenance of the moral
standard. To increase the number of schools in a community is to lessen
the need of prisons and reformatories. More than a century ago Beccaria
previsioned this relation of popular education to crime. “The most
certain method of preventing crime,” he maintained, “is to perfect the
system of education.”[726]
And second, education in the modern democratic state has special
significance for the moral development going on in Western
civilization, for the reason that it means not merely a better
maintenance of the moral standard, but also an essential modification
of the moral type itself. For in the establishment of its system of
education the state has assumed what formerly was one of the chief
functions of the Church. This transference of the business of education
from the Church to the state has rightly been pronounced “one of the
most important movements in the history of education since the Dark
Ages.” What renders it of such importance in the view of the historian
of morals is that, in the hands of the state, education has become or
is becoming wholly secularized. In some countries even the reading of
the Bible in the schools or the giving of any religious instruction
whatsoever is prohibited.
Now this secularization of education results inevitably in the
secularization of morality. That portion of the moral code which
derives its sanction from theological or special religious doctrines
is neglected. Thus one outcome of the transfer of the function of
education from the Church to the state has been the imparting of a
fresh impulse to that naturalistic movement in morals whose point of
departure was the classical revival of the fifteenth century. And thus
the three dominant movements in modern European civilization--the
Renaissance, the Reformation (in its ultimate effects), and the
democratic revolution--have all worked together in determining the
general trend of the moral evolution in the Western world.
[Sidenote: The democratic state
assumes the social-ethical
functions of the Church]
The ethical import of the incoming of democracy is shown again in
the assumption by the democratic state of the philanthropic work of
society. Throughout the Middle Ages the Church was the almoner of
society, the builder of hospitals, asylums, and poorhouses. Since the
advent of democracy much of this humanitarian work has, like education,
been taken over by the state. This assumption by the state of these
former functions of the Church is one of the most noteworthy ethical
movements in modern history.[727] What makes it significant is, first,
the fact that the work is undertaken by modern governments largely
from purely philanthropic motives. This means that with the coming to
political power of the people a new spirit has entered into government,
which means, further, that those altruistic sentiments which it has
been a chief function of religion to foster have come to inspire
society at large.
And second, this assumption by the state of the philanthropic functions
of the Church is significant because of what has made its undertaking
of these tasks necessary. This necessity has arisen not merely by
reason of the possession by the state of the taxing power and hence
of the means needed for carrying on this humanitarian work, but also
because of its relation to modern science. Much of this work of rescue
and cure is dependent for its successful administration upon scientific
knowledge and skill. It is largely because the state is in closer
alliance than the Church with modern science, and therefore is the more
efficient agent for carrying on this humanitarian work, that society
makes it, instead of the Church, its chief almoner and trustee.
_2. The Ethics of Industrialism_
[Sidenote: The alliance of modern
industry and science]
A distinctive characteristic of modern industry is its alliance with
science. This union dates from the French Revolution. One aim of
the revolutionists was to put exact knowledge at the service of the
industrial arts, and, by thus increasing the productive forces of
society, to create an abundance for all, banish poverty from the earth,
and advance civilization to a higher point than ever before reached.
And this alliance of industry and science has, in so far as mere
production is concerned, more than met every expectation. Through
the application of inventions and scientific knowledge to the
various industrial processes, society’s powers of production have
been increased threefold, tenfold, fifty-fold, in some arts even a
thousandfold. Surely now all will be fed and clothed and sheltered.
But this vision of a millennium of well-being for all as the result of
the union of science and industry has not come true. The great mass of
the world’s toilers are underfed, ill-clad, and improperly housed. From
the slums, from the dark and noisome tenements of our great cities,
arises the bitter cry of children, ragged, wan, and hungry, robbed
through the parents’ poverty of every delight and right of childhood.
“The poverty of the workers,” cries Henry Demarest Lloyd in passionate
protest, “is the sin of our age.”[728]
[Sidenote: The divorce of modern
industry and ethics: economic
Machiavellism]
The causes of this pitiful failure of the new industrialism,
notwithstanding its capacity for enormous production, to provide for
the wants of all is not far to seek. Our age, while uniting science
and business, has divorced ethics and business, just as in the time of
the Renaissance in Italy there was effected a divorce of ethics and
politics. Political economists have taught that ethics has nothing
to do with economics. And this economic Machiavellism of the schools
has not been merely an academic thing; it has probably exerted as
sinister an influence upon the modern industrial order as the political
doctrines of Machiavelli exerted upon the diplomacy and governmental
policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dominated by this
philosophy our business life has become frankly unmoral--large sections
of it grossly immoral.
[Sidenote: The breakdown of the
system]
But economics and ethics can no more be divorced than politics and
ethics. Machiavellism has succeeded no better in economics than in
politics. “The system based on [this philosophy] is breaking down
all over, in strikes, riots, panics, gluts, unemployed idleness, and
class murder. It is breaking down not because the task of getting
plenty for the body--and the soul--for every one out of the fruitful
earth and the fellowship of man is an impossible task, but because the
task is an impossible one of accomplishment--that or anything else in
human affairs--by the devil’s code of selfishness instead of love, of
solitary advantage instead of the good of all. By such a philosophy
there could be no government, no family; and if it continues, there
will ere long be no business. But it cannot continue.”[729]
[Sidenote: Reforms whose aims are
the moralization of the industrial
order: (_a_) socialization of the
unearned increment in land values]
It cannot continue because there is a fast-growing conviction of the
falsity of the philosophy of economic Machiavellism--an ever-growing
recognition of the truth that the relationships of men in business,
like all other human relationships, are conditioned by the moral law
of human brotherhood. There are profound changes taking place in the
moral feelings and judgments of men respecting many of the customs,
principles, and institutions of the modern industrial order. There is
a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and
arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of
human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more
complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very
embodiment of unreason and injustice.
Among the economic institutions respecting which there is taking place
such a change in moral judgment is that of absolute private property
in land. Although this is an institution unknown to primitive peoples,
in all the great civilizations of the past we find society based upon
it. That the system, since it inevitably results in private monopoly,
has contributed largely to the creation of that gross inequality in
wealth which has characterized every advanced civilization known to
history, and which has helped to prepare its downfall, does not admit
of reasonable doubt. The monopolization of land by a class has been one
source, and probably a main source, of the phenomenon in modern society
of deepening poverty in the midst of growing wealth, of dehumanizing
want for the many along with demoralizing luxury for the few. That in
countries of large and thickening population a private monopoly in
the arable land is the embodiment of a colossal and cruel wrong is
incontrovertible. That a single class should be allowed to become the
absolute owners of the soil and thereby acquire the legal right to
exclude all others from it save on the condition that practically all
that can be got from it by the hardest toil, save just enough for the
bare subsistence of the laborer, shall be given over as rent to the
holder of the land, is as great a moral wrong as to take directly from
the worker the product of his toil by reducing him to bodily slavery.
It is this gross inequity which has made the history of many countries,
like much of the history of Ireland, a harrowing tragedy. The wrong, if
not greater, is at least more obvious when the land thus monopolized
is the site of a great city where the enormous ground values have been
created not by any labor or expenditure on the part of the owners, but
by the growth and enterprise of the community as a whole.
Just as the world has got a new conscience in regard to the wrong of
slavery, so is it getting a new conscience in regard to this “great
iniquity,” as Tolstoy calls it, of private monopoly in land. This
growing ethical conviction will ultimately destroy the illusion that
the earth and its resources may, without moral wrong, be monopolized by
a fortunate or favored few and the great masses be dispossessed.[730]
The new conscience will decree that all of nature’s gifts in land and
all increments in its value created by society shall belong to society
and shall be the common heritage of the successive generations of men.
[Sidenote: (_b_) Limitation of
inheritance]
Another of the conventions of our industrial system in which the moral
sense of mankind is beginning to recognize an element of inequity is
the right of unlimited inheritance. So long as land remains the common
property of the community, or so long as there exists substantial
equality in wealth among the members or families of a social group,
the injustice of this is not apparent. But after great extremes of
poverty and wealth have appeared, as in present-day civilization, then
the essential injustice of the institution is disclosed; for there is
thus created an idle class living on the labor of others. When a single
child through the accident of birth becomes the heir of millions, while
hundreds of other children come into the world absolutely portionless
and at the same time shut out from the use of any bit of the earth
even as standing room, then the system becomes a crass denial of human
solidarity and brotherhood. And there is in this law of unlimited
bequest a double wrong. The child of over-great wealth is wronged
as well as the child of poverty. One is born to a life of luxurious
leisure, and the other to a life of unremitting toil. Now, as Professor
Dewey observes, there is moral value in work and there is moral value
in leisure, but “it is beginning to be seen that their values cannot be
divided so that one social class shall perform the labor and the other
enjoy the freedom.”[731]
Therefore the ethical demand for the modification of our laws of
inheritance in such a way that they shall recognize the social as
well as the individual element in wealth must be heeded as much out
of regard for the children of the overrich as out of regard for the
children of the very poor.
[Sidenote: (_c_) Socialism: the
democratization of industry]
Still another institution of modern industrialism which has come or is
coming under the reprobation of the present-day conscience of a rapidly
growing number is private capitalism, that is, private ownership of
the instruments of production, together with competition and the wage
system, the necessary concomitants of this capitalistic régime. These
new ethical feelings and convictions form the real motive force in the
propaganda of modern socialism. The presupposition of socialism is that
not merely ground rents but all returns (interest, dividends, profits)
on every form of private capital embody an unearned increment, and that
this element should determine the ownership and control of capital.
Hence socialists demand that all the material instruments of production
now owned by individuals or by a class shall be held in common; that
there shall be common, democratic management of production; that
competition, as inherently unethical,[732] shall be replaced by
coöperation; and that the wage system shall be replaced by a system of
distribution by public authority which shall give the manual workers of
the world a more equitable share of the products of industry.
Socialism embodies one of the largest funds of ethical feeling that
have become active in Western civilization since the incoming of
Christianity. In truth, in its real essence and purified form it
is the spirit of primitive Christianity at work in the industrial
domain. It is a recognition of human fraternity. It is an effort to
unite economics and ethics, to make business life a realization of the
moral ideal. The aim of true socialists is to make the benefits of
science, invention, and civilization a common heritage. They recognize
that society can continuously progress only as these benefits become
the possession not merely of a few but of all. In the disregard of
this immutable law of human progress they discern the main cause of
the retrogression, decay, and failure of every great civilization of
the past; in its solicitous fulfillment they find the only ground of
hope for the constant improvement of human society as a whole and the
uninterrupted moral progress of the world.
_3. The Ethics of Modern Science_
[Sidenote: Science and the virtue
of intellectual sincerity]
We have already referred to the influence of modern science upon
morals. This influence has been felt in the fostering of specific
virtues and in the creation of a certain attitude of mind toward life
and its ethical problems.
Among the particular virtues which science has fostered is
philosophical veracity or love of truth. This virtue of intellectual
sincerity is to the scientist what the virtue of faith or belief is
to the churchman. Without it there is no salvation in the world of
science. The man of science must be a truth-lover, a truth-seeker, and
a truth-teller. He must take every pains to find out what is the exact
fact, and then make a scrupulously veracious report of what he has
found. He must be loyal to the truth at all hazards.
This reverent regard for the truth, this intellectual sincerity, which
is the cardinal virtue of the man of science, is fostered in him
partly by the recognition of the supreme importance of exactness when
it comes to the application of scientific knowledge to the arts of
life. The least departure here from the truth of the matter means dire
disaster and loss. Then also the veraciousness of nature reacts upon
the student of her laws. Nature is not only infinitely exact in all her
movements, but punctual in the fulfillment of all her engagements. She
keeps her word with us, as Emerson says. She is the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever. The careless, unveracious man can enter into no
partnership with her.
Open-mindedness and impartiality are elements of this virtue of
intellectual veracity. The wide divergence between philosophical and
theological morality is here impressed upon the student of moral ideals
and standards. In the ethics of theology doubt, even sincere doubt, is
reckoned as an unfortunate infirmity, or often as positive and fatal
sin. Science, on the other hand, reckons it a cardinal duty. Hardening
oneself in belief when there are circumstances calculated to awaken
doubt, even the slightest conceivable doubt, is justly regarded by the
man of science as treachery to truth and an unpardonable sin.
It is in the creation of this scientific conscience, which pronounces
the habit of accuracy, open-mindedness, impartiality of judgment, love
of truth for truth’s sake a supreme virtue, that science has rendered
one of its greatest services to morality.
[Sidenote: Egotistic tendencies
of the doctrine of evolution: the
philosophy of Nietzsche]
The scientific doctrine of evolution, which teaches that life has
advanced from lower to higher forms through struggle and competition,
resulting in the survival of the fittest, has exercised a profound
influence upon all the sciences relating to man, but upon none has it
left a deeper impress than upon the science of ethics.[733] Nor have
its effects here been confined to ethical speculation; it has largely
shaped and molded actual conduct.
In some respects this influence has been harmful to both ethical theory
and practice. In the domain of philosophy it may best be traced in the
teachings of Nietzsche. Nietzsche insists that man must follow the lead
of nature; that the struggle for existence must be kept up on the human
plane just as it goes on in the lower realms of life; that the strong
should use for their own advancement the weak; that the nurture and
care of the defective and weak is a crime against humanity[734]--for
“the hope of the future lies in perfecting the strong, not in
strengthening the weak”; that only through the struggle for existence
has nature produced her highest type, man, and that it is only through
obedience to this great cosmic law, in accordance with which the higher
prey upon the lower, that “the superman,” the highest possible type of
mankind, can be brought into existence.
This teaching tends to steel the heart against human sympathy and to
blunt all the finer sensibilities. It seems to justify and excuse all
kinds of antisocial action. And, indeed, the doctrine has been used as
a justification and excuse not only of individual self-assertion and
egotism but of national and race self-assertion and egotism as well.
Modern imperialism has sought to justify aggression upon weaker and
so-called “inferior races” by an appeal to this law of evolution as it
works on the lower levels of life. Thus the doctrine has in a certain
measure fostered national egotism, and has stood right in the way of
the development of a true international morality.
[Sidenote: Altruism _versus_
egotism in the cosmic process]
But these drifts toward egotism in modern philosophy and life induced
by evolutionary science are more than compensated by opposing movements
of ethical thought created by a truer interpretation of the facts of
evolution and a deeper insight into the cosmic process.[735]
The philosophy of Nietzsche is a strange misreading of nature. To say
that self-sacrifice is “in open defiance of nature,” is to overlook
the dominant fact in evolution, namely, maternity; for maternity,
motherhood, is only another name for self-sacrifice. And it is further
to overlook the fact that the principle of coöperation is even more
dominant and controlling in the cosmic process than the principle of
competition. Social animals, those in which the altruistic instincts
are most strongly developed, greatly outnumber the unsocial, solitary
animals.[736] The Carnivora, those animals that live by preying upon
others, are becoming extinct. On the plane of human life this principle
of coöperation, of mutual helpfulness, has supplanted, or is gradually
supplanting, the lower principle of competition. In the struggle
for existence between tribes and peoples those groups have gained
supremacy that have developed the strongest social instincts; that is,
those within which the principle of coöperation and the virtue of the
self-devotion of the individual to the welfare of the whole have been
dominant forces in the life of the community. From these facts we are
justified in assuming that it is the altruistic and not the egoistic
instincts and motives that nature aims to make the permanent and
controlling factors in the cosmic evolution.
Again, that nature is ethical in her aim is disclosed by the fact that
she has brought forth such a being as man. Her preferences are shown in
the preferences of the being she has produced.[737] Man prefers good to
evil; he loves justice and hates injustice; he reveres the truth and
detests falsehood; he recognizes that self-sacrifice is nobler than
selfishness; he divines the final triumph of his ethical ideals. In
man--at his best--nature reveals her preferences. Man is the answer to
the question, “Is Nature good?”[738]
Viewed thus from a higher standpoint the cosmic process of evolution
has reënforced faith in a moral order of the universe and has been an
inspiration and an incentive to humanitarian effort.[739]
[Sidenote: Evolution and animal
ethics[740]]
In Brahmanic India and in all Buddhist lands religious beliefs have,
as we have seen, placed the whole animal creation under the protection
of the moral feelings. In ancient Persia it was religious ideas which
caused one half of the lower animal world to be regarded as sacred and
thus to be brought within the protective pale of morals.
Dogmatic Christianity, falling far short of the ethics of Judaism in
this domain, created a vast rift in the organic world between man and
the lower animals. The dumb creatures were declared to be made solely
for man’s use and enjoyment. Psychical relationship between them and
man was denied, though the ancient world had very generally assumed
this. Indeed, this attitude of the Christian dogmatists toward the
animal creation was made a matter of reproach by their pagan critics.
These teachings were not without their influence on practice.
Humanity to animals became a less prominent virtue than it had been
in pre-Christian times. The closeness to nature of the lives of the
medieval hermits and monks often caused, it is true, a feeling of
tenderness to be awakened in them for their “brothers,” the birds and
animals, which found expression in many beautiful legends. But in
general the attitude of the Christian world toward the lower animals
has been unsympathetic.
The doctrine of evolution, however, teaching the kinship of all life,
has bridged the gulf between man and the lower animal world, and has
brought all dumb creatures more positively than ever before in the
Western world under the protection of the moral sentiment. Societies
for the prevention of cruelty to animals have sprung up and increased
in number as in no other epoch of the Christian era. The new moral
feeling condemns all inhumanity to dumb creatures, and looks with
disapproval upon such sports as cockfighting, bear baiting, and
bullfights, which were favorite amusements only a few generations
ago.[741] Hunting for pastime is also coming under the condemnation of
this growing moral sentiment. Thus “through the portals of spiritual
kinship,” in the words of Professor Evans, ... “our elder brothers
enter into the temple of justice, and enjoy the privilege of sanctuary
against the wanton or unwitting cruelty hitherto authorized by the
assumptions and usurpations of man.”[742]
[Sidenote: Import for morals of
psychical research]
It is undeniable that the earlier tendency of modern science was
agnostic and materialistic. It caused in many minds an attenuation or
an absolute destruction of the belief in a supersensuous world and a
life after death. The practical effect of this fading from the eyes
of men of the vision of another world was, upon certain temperaments,
a loss of faith in the ethical character of the cosmic process and a
consequent lessening of moral enthusiasm.
This attitude of mind, which is still that of a large class, can be
changed only by the reaffirmation by science of the assumptions and
teachings of all the great world religions respecting the existence
of a supersensuous world and a future life. It is therefore a matter
of immeasurable import to morality that these assumptions of religion
are coming to be regarded by an ever-growing number of scientists as
well founded in reality. Psychical research has given a new trend to
large sections of scientific speculation.[743] It is no longer crassly
materialistic. It even assumes the existence of a supersensuous world.
Thus at the conclusion of a careful survey of the evidence of man’s
survival gathered by the English Society for Psychical Research, the
distinguished physicist Sir Oliver Lodge writes: “The boundary between
the two states--the known and the unknown--is still substantial, but
it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a
tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we
are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our
comrades on the other side.”[744]
Incontrovertible proof of man’s survival after bodily death would mark
the opening of a new era in the moral life of humanity; for, in the
minds of many, “ethics can be rendered ethical only on the assumption
that there is a reality deeper than the phenomenal world of sense,
truer than the world we know and better.”[745] It was doubtless a
conviction that the future of both religion and morality is in large
measure dependent upon a firm belief in a future life which led
William Ewart Gladstone to say of psychical research that it is “the
most important work which is being done in the world--by far the most
important.” Indisputably, the reaction of another world lying clear and
distinct in the light of science beyond the frontiers of earth would
give new meaning to life and a fresh impulse to the moral progress of
the race. The effect upon the moral life of the modern world would be
not less profound than that produced upon the moral life of the ancient
world by the incoming of Christianity with its glad affirmation of a
life beyond the tomb.
_4. The Ethics of Theology_
[Sidenote: The progressive
moralization of the idea of God]
In an admirable chapter entitled “Ethics and Theology” the author
of _Moral Evolution_, after noting how religious ideas and beliefs
exert an influence on moral ideas and conduct, remarks: “Now we
are to observe that moral ideals have, in their turn, modified and
clarified doctrine, or, in other words, that there has been an ethical
development of theology, and that contempt of creed is really the
substitution of a moral for an immoral or a nonmoral theology.”[746]
The same truth is expressed by Newman Smyth in these words:
“Reformations have grown out of the ethical protest of the Christian
mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in
the vitalizing influence of ethics.”[747]
As a result of the growth and refinement of the moral feelings, there
has been going on in wide circles in Western Christendom just such a
change in men’s conception of the character of God as marked the best
Hebrew thought during the later centuries of the history of the people
of Israel. The idea of God inherited by the modern from the medieval
age was an incongruous blending of ideas derived from three different
sources. There was, first, the crude archaic notion of deity derived
from the Old Testament records of what conduct in his chosen people
Yahweh approved; second, the dogmas of Augustinian theology respecting
imputed sin, election, everlasting punishment, and other supposed
principles of the divine government; and third, conceptions wholly
inconsistent with these drawn from the New Testament narratives of the
life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.
Gradually, through the growth of the moral feelings, this conception
of the divine character has been purged of its grosser, archaic, and
immoral elements. The early Hebrew ideas have been rejected as the
immature and unworthy notions of deity of a race still on a low plane
of religious development; the Calvinistic idea of God has become “the
supreme incredibility”; while the Gospel teaching of deity has been
received by the instructed reason and conscience as the only credible
ideal of the divine.[748]
Since, as we have repeatedly had brought to our attention, religious
ideas exert a profound influence on moral ideas and on conduct, this
moralization of the conception of the divine character has deep
significance for the progressive purification and refinement of the
moral life of man.
[Sidenote: The moralization of the
conception of future punishment]
Closely connected with these changes in men’s idea of God, indeed
forming a part of that conception, are the changes which have taken
place in their ideas of the divine government in the hereafter.
At different stages of our study we have noted how the classifications
and arrangements of the invisible world are the work of the moral
faculty, and how the developing moral feelings of the historic peoples
have, with the lapse of time, ever modified anew the topography and
moralized afresh the government of the world of spirits.[749]
Now one of the most important modifications ever effected in man’s
conceptions of the other world was brought about by the Protestant
Reformation. The reformers abolished purgatory, and thus left only
two separate realms, heaven and hell, in the world of souls. But in
abolishing purgatory and thereby making all suffering in the hereafter
punitive and eternal, and in failing to recognize gradations of guilt
in human sin by consigning all evildoers, unbelievers, and misbelievers
to the same awful and everlasting torments, the reformers made still
more unethical the government which the popular medieval imagination
had created for the unseen world.
The gradual clarification and growing sensitiveness of the moral
feelings could not long leave unchallenged such a grossly immoral
notion of the divine government. During the last two generations a
notable change has passed over men’s conceptions of the netherworld of
spirits. The hell of the reformers’ imagination has become, like much
else in the Augustinian theology, “the supreme incredibility.” The
blurring of that awful vision is one of the most significant changes
which, during the Christian era, have passed over that world which is
at once the creation and the creator of human morality.
[Sidenote: Exchange in rank of the
theological and the natural Gospel
virtues]
The advance in religious ethics during the last few decades is
registered again in the exchange in rank of the theological and the
natural gospel virtues in the moral ideal of Protestant Christendom.
During this period there has taken place here a genuine “transvaluation
of moral values.” Many representative religious teachers have come to
assign a dominant place in the ethical standard to the natural social
virtues, and have relegated to a lower place the purely theological
virtues, such as right religious belief and ritual observances. In the
case of many the rejection of that part of the moral code resting upon
theological dogmas is as complete as was the rejection by Christianity
of the morality based on the ceremonial laws of the Jews. With these
the saving virtue is no longer acceptance of a prescribed creed, but
loving, self-denying service of humanity.[750]
This transvaluation of moral values within the Church itself is one of
the most important movements going on in the moral life of the modern
world.
[Sidenote: Extension to
theological ethics of the
principle of individual
responsibility]
Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is
found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility
to the domain of religion.[751] It will be recalled how completely the
law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive
peoples.[752] With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the
injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual
responsibility comes to be established.
This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the
religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in
accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not
until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like
change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the
more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle
of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained
it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years,
however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle
as the embodiment of a gross inequity. The doctrine that all the
generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his
transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience
as incredible, untrue, and immoral.
This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the
ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with
the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the
consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of
civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history.
_5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience_
[Sidenote: (_a_) As manifested in
the history of the African slave
trade]
By the phrase “social conscience,” as we shall use it here, we mean
those ethical feelings and judgments which cover the relations of
master and slave and the relations of society to its unfortunate and
erring members.
In the entire history of the moral evolution of humanity there is
no chapter which reveals so plainly the upward trend of the ethical
movement in civilization as that which tells the story of the
beginnings and the final suppression of the African slave trade, and of
the rise and fall of the institution of negro slavery among Christian
peoples.[753] Restricting our survey for the moment to the slave trade
as distinct from slavery, the amazing fact which meets us here at the
outset is that until late in the modern period the peoples of Western
Christendom had practically no conscience whatsoever in regard to the
African slave trade, and this notwithstanding that the conscience of
the age was in many other matters true and sensitive. The whole subject
lay practically outside the realm of morals. The slave trade was looked
upon as a perfectly legitimate business.[754] Practically no one
thought it wrong to go to Africa, kidnap or purchase a shipload of the
natives, bring them in stifling holds--where sometimes half the unhappy
victims died on the passage--to the West Indies or to the Spanish and
English mainland of the Americas and sell them as slaves.[755] What
little opposition to the traffic existed, arose in general from other
than feelings of moral disapproval.[756]
The movement for the abolition of the trade constitutes an important
phase of the social and moral life, particularly of England and of the
English colonies in America, during the latter part of the eighteenth
century and the earlier part of the nineteenth. In England the wave
of humanitarian feeling which swept away the obstacles set in the way
of the abolition of the traffic by selfish interests was raised by
the great religious revival led by Whitefield and the Wesleys. The
leaders of the reform were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce.
After twenty years of agitation a bill was passed abolishing the trade
(1807). This marked as great a moral victory as ever was won in the
English Parliament, for it was the aroused moral sentiment of the
nation which was the main force that carried the reform measure through
the Houses.
In America there had arisen among the Quakers of Pennsylvania, even
before the Revolution, a protest against the trade on purely moral
grounds. By the time the Federal Convention met in 1787 sufficient
sentiment had been developed in the matter to secure the adoption of
a provision in the Constitution to the effect that the importation of
slaves should cease in 1808. From that year on, the slave trade, as
distinct from slavery, was under the ban both of the law and of the
public conscience; but it continued to be carried on clandestinely
until the Civil War.
[Sidenote: (_b_) As manifested in
the antislavery movement]
Even before the consummation of the movement for the suppression of the
negro slave trade there had sprung up an agitation for the suppression
of the negro-slave system itself. England abolished slavery in her
colonies in 1833, paying £20,000,000 for the emancipation of 800,000
slaves in her West India possessions. In the United States there was
very little antislavery feeling prior to 1830.[757] At that time
the great majority of the peoples of the Northern as well as of the
Southern states, if they did not look upon negro slavery as wholly
proper and right, at least regarded as reprehensible any interference
with the institution where established. Even the Church in general
denounced the abolitionists as infidels and pronounced their conduct
fanatical and wicked.[758] But notwithstanding this opposition the
abolition movement and the movement for the restriction of slavery to
the states where already established gained impetus steadily, and the
heated debate led up quickly to the Civil War.
The most significant thing in that passage of our history is not the
revolt of the South, but the revolt of the conscience of the North.
Had there been no moral revolt in the North, there would have been no
slaveholders’ revolt in the South.
The development of moral feeling respecting the wrongfulness of
slavery did not cease with the emancipation of the slaves as a
result of the Civil War. Indeed, with the reform an accomplished
fact, the clarification of the moral sense of the people has gone on
uninterruptedly until a gulf has come to separate the present-day
conscience of the great majority of the instructed and thinking classes
in both sections of the Union from the conscience of the same classes
one or two generations ago.
[Sidenote: (_c_) As manifested
in society’s treatment of its
unfortunate and delinquent members]
The record of society’s treatment of its dependent and erring members
forms another inspiring chapter in the history of the growth of
the new social conscience. In a little over one hundred years the
Christian world has advanced from harsh vagrant laws to associated
charities; from the burning of witches to asylums for the insane;
from noisome dungeons to penitentiaries and institutions of rescue
and correction.[759] The numerous and costly private and public
institutions established and maintained by the new humanitarian
sentiment is one of the most distinctive characteristics, ethically
viewed, of modern civilization. So multiform are the expressions of
this new spirit that it is impossible in so brief a survey as the
present to exhibit in more than barest outline this phase of the
ethical evolution.
The recent history of charity, taken in the sense of relief given to
the poor, is a record of change both in motive and method. There has
always been a great deal of almsgiving in the world, since this has
been a duty especially enjoined by religion. But because charity has
had this religious motive, it has often been sullied by self-love, alms
being given not so much for the sake of the poor as for the benefit of
the soul of the donor. In recent times this religious motive has become
less operative, but the amount of almsgiving has undoubtedly increased,
and we are justified in the conclusion that it is motived as never
before by genuine altruistic feeling. It is probably true, however,
that there is less indiscriminate, emotional almsgiving now than
formerly. But there is greater “social compunction,” a deeper sense of
society’s responsibility for the existence of poverty, and an earnest
inquiry respecting the primary social causes of it. Hence effort is
directed not merely to the immediate relief of want and misery through
organized charity, but to the cure of poverty through the removal
of the causes of destitution. At this point the investigations and
labors of the philanthropist merge with those of the sociologist, the
economist, and the statesman.
In society’s treatment of the defective and the insane, as compared
with its treatment of these same classes scarcely more than a century
ago, is registered an ethical progress truly remarkable. A hundred
years or less ago in England and in all the European countries the
idiot and the oddly formed human prodigy were exhibited to afford
amusement to the people. The growth in humanitarian feeling has
rendered all this a thing of the past. “The passing of the freak is
not a casual incident in the history of the circus, but a striking
illustration of the tendency which has been in progress for centuries
toward the humanizing of our amusements.... To spend a merry afternoon
at the madhouse watching the antics of the maniacs in their chains
seemed natural and reasonable to civilized Englishmen not so many
generations ago. It has become absolutely unthinkable.”[760] The
history of the stage offers like testimony. “Not so very long ago,”
writes David Belasco, in giving advice to the amateur playwright, “the
entrance of a cripple or a hunchback was sufficient to get a laugh from
the audience. In these humanitarian times there is no fun to be made
out of physical deformity.”[761]
But it is in society’s treatment of the criminal class that there is to
be traced the greatest progress in humanitarianism. In the pre-Norman
period in England the punishments for crime were characterized by a
barbarity incredibly callous. “Men branded on the forehead, without
hands, without feet, without tongues, lived as an example of the danger
which attended the commission of petty crimes, and as a warning to all
who had the misfortune of holding no higher position than that of a
churl.... The eyes were plucked out; the nose, the ears, and the upper
lips were cut off; the scalp was torn away; and sometimes even, there
is reason to believe, the whole body was flayed alive.”[762]
What was true of English law was true of the laws of every other
European country. And there was little or no essential amelioration
of these savage law systems before the last quarter of the eighteenth
century. Seventy thousand executions took place in England during the
reign of Henry VIII.[763] “In the reign of William III there does not
appear to have been any consciousness that the penal laws were, in many
respects, disgraceful to any community but a tribe of savages.”[764]
If a definite point of departure of the movement for the humanizing
of the criminal laws of Europe and the putting of the treatment of
criminals on an ethical basis be sought, it will be found in the life
and writings of the Italian jurist Beccaria,[765] who maintained that
the effect of cruel punishments is to increase crime by indurating the
sensibilities of the people.[766]
A great impulse to the humanitarian movement initiated by Beccaria
was given by the devoted labors of the great philanthropist John
Howard (1726–1790), who, with his eyes opened to the awful conditions
of prison life through official connection with Bedford jail, where
Bunyan dreamed, spent his life in visiting all lands inspecting prisons
and jails and dungeons and lazar houses, and “taking the gauge and
dimension of misery, depression, and contempt.”
The crusade of John Howard marks the real beginning of practical prison
reform, which has “transformed prisons from hells into hospitals for
recovery,” and revolutionized the entire theory and administration
of judicial punishment.[767] The aim and purpose of the modern
penitentiary system is to develop self-respect and manhood.[768] To
this end the lock-step and striped clothing have been abolished in many
prisons, and along with them all cruel and humiliating punishments. The
establishment of reform schools, reformatories, and penitentiaries, the
introduction of the indeterminate sentence, the proposed creation of
courts of rehabilitation, and the founding of the juvenile court,[769]
mark the ethical advance which the last century has witnessed in this
domain.[770]
_6. International Ethics: the New International Conscience_
[Sidenote: The development
of international morality
foreshadowed by the earlier
development of intranational
morality]
One of the most significant of phylogenetic laws is formulated by
Haeckel in these words: “The short, quick history of an individual
organism is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the species
to which the organism belongs.” Now this law holds good for the
history of the human species as well as for that of the lower tribes of
life. And here it embraces not only the history of the bodily but also
that of the psychical development. Consequently the law under which
the moral evolution of man is going on may be stated in this way: The
history of the development of conscience within a social group (clan,
tribe, nation) is a compressed story of the long, slow history of the
development of conscience in humanity at large, that is to say, between
the groups composing the human race. And since law codes, private and
public, are essentially embodiments of the growing and clarifying
conscience, this mode of the ethical evolution may be expressed in
strictly juristic terms as follows: “The development of international
law follows step by step the earlier development of municipal law.”[771]
With this law in mind we may define moral progress in the international
domain as the gradual assimilation of international to intranational
ethics, or, in other words, the growing conformity of the standard of
public morality to that of private morality.
[Sidenote: The gradual moralizing
of the relations of the advanced
to the backward races: _The White
Man’s Burden_]
As thus defined, a special expression of progress in international
morality is found in the growing recognition by governments that the
obligations of the strong toward the weak are the same for nations as
for individuals. A public conscience that is like the best private
conscience is constantly becoming more and more a regulative force in
the relations of the superior to the inferior races.[772] Unhappily
that exploitation of the weaker by the stronger races, which makes up
so large a part of the history of the past ages, still goes on; but
it is, in general, less grossly unethical than ever before, while with
each succeeding generation the protest of the common conscience of the
civilized world against all unfair and oppressive treatment of the
backward by the more advanced races grows more earnest and insistent.
Good illustrations of this quickening of the public conscience are
found in England’s dealings with India and China. In the year 1813
a resolution declaring that England’s first duty in legislating for
India was to promote the interests of the people of India was proposed
in Parliament, but was defeated. Twenty years later (in 1833) this
principle was definitely embodied in a Government of India Act.[773]
In 1841–1842 England, at the end of what has been justly characterized
as “one of the most dishonorable and detestable wars that ever stained
her annals,” compelled China to keep her ports open to the iniquitous
opium traffic. Two generations later (in 1906) the House of Commons by
resolution unanimously declared the Indian opium trade with China to
be “morally indefensible,” and requested the Government to bring it to
a speedy end.[774] Five years later England entered into an agreement
with China, according to the terms of which the importation of Indian
opium into China will cease on or before 1917. This is a notable
triumph of the new international conscience.
Our dealings with the island of Cuba since its liberation--opinions
may differ in regard to the rightness of our original act of
intervention--affords another encouraging illustration of the progress
the world has made in international morality. And the same is true of
our dealings with the Filipinos, notwithstanding the utterly painful
character of the earlier chapters of the story. There has been no
responsible official utterance on this subject that has represented
our task in our acquired dependency as other than a public trust, as a
guardianship to be exercised solely in the interest of the Filipinos as
the nation’s wards. The better moral feeling of the nation, intensified
in many by deep compunction, has indignantly repudiated all those
unofficial utterances which have cynically represented the islands as
an inviting field for selfish exploitation by American capitalists,
and has demanded that our government in the islands should be inspired
and controlled by the spirit of unselfish service. And this ethical
spirit has in general marked our administration of the affairs of the
islanders. “I believe that I am speaking with historic accuracy and
impartiality,” declares ex-President Roosevelt, “when I say that the
American treatment of and attitude toward the Filipino people, in its
combination of disinterested ethical purpose and sound common sense,
marks a new and long stride forward in advance of all steps that
have hitherto been taken along the path of wise and proper treatment
of weaker by stronger races.” This ethical purpose is especially
manifested in the sending out, in the early period of our rule, of five
hundred young American teachers to carry to this deeply wronged people
the best we have to give--a national act without a parallel in all the
history of the past.
It inspires hope in the future to note how far this last step forward
carries us away from the starting point on this line of ethical
advance. At first the fate of the weaker race was extermination
or slavery; then its fate was to be reduced to the condition of a
tributary; still later, to be subjected to commercial and industrial
exploitation by the conquering people; and lastly, to be made, in
theory if not yet in actual practice, the beneficiaries of a benevolent
self-sacrificing service, which finds lofty expression in Kipling’s
_The White Man’s Burden_:
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
This sentiment would scarcely have found any such response in the
common heart and conscience of any past age of human history as it
finds in the heart and conscience of our own. But, it must be admitted,
the sentiment embodies an ideal yet to be realized, rather than
something already attained.
[Sidenote: Progress in war ethics:
Hugo Grotius]
But it is in the changes effected in men’s feelings respecting what
is morally permissible in warfare that is to be observed the most
encouraging progress in international ethics in modern times. This
progressive clarification of the moral consciousness may be distinctly
traced from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. In no period
of Christian history had war been waged with greater ferocity or with
greater contempt of moral rules than during the so-called religious
wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What little gains had
been made in the humanization of war during preceding eras seem to have
been lost.
This barbarizing of war, however, produced, as all retrogressions in
morality do if the moral life is still on the whole virile and sound,
a reaction which found expression in the epoch-making work, _De Jure
Belli et Pacis_, by the distinguished Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius[775]--a
work that has been pronounced “the most beneficent of all volumes ever
written not claiming divine inspiration.”[776] The aim of Grotius was
not to abolish war,--he did not think universal peace an attainable
ideal,--but simply to moderate its excesses and lessen its atrocities,
to set limits to the rights of the victor. The age of nationalism had
come, and an ethics for nations in their mutual relations must be
formulated. Grotius sought a law that all would recognize as binding.
The law to which he appealed was the Stoic Law of Nature.[777] As the
Stoics had made this law the instrument for the reform of the Roman
civil law, so now would Grotius make it the instrument for the reform
of the laws of war.[778]
The influence of the work of Grotius was profound and widespread. From
the time of its appearance dates a new departure in the humanization of
war, and a fresh moral advance in international law.[779] “His ideas,”
says Dr. Andrew D. White, “found their way into current discussion,
into systems of law, into treaties; and as generations rolled by, the
world began to find itself, it hardly knew how, less and less cruel,
until men looked back on war as practiced in his time as upon a hideous
dream--doubtless much as men in future generations will look back upon
the wars of our times.”[780]
The humane provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1864 and the
establishment of the Red Cross Society, which on the field of
battle cares without discrimination for the stricken, are inspiring
illustrations of the growth of this new humanitarianism.
[Sidenote: Movement for the
abolition of war--a moral issue]
Now this growing sensitiveness of the public conscience which has
effected so many mitigations of the barbarities of war has resulted
in a widespread and insistent demand that war between civilized
nations shall not merely be humanized but that it shall be abolished,
that disputes between nations shall be settled as disputes between
individuals are settled--by courts of justice.
Without doubt many influences, political, social, and economic,[781]
have concurred in creating this great world-wide movement, and in
calling into existence the Hague Conferences and the international
and national peace congresses of the last decade or two; but among all
these forces and motives the one of greatest potency is the awakened
and instructed conscience of the world in regard to the criminality of
war as an established and legalized method of settling controversies
between civilized nations. It is this new conscience and not the
new dreadnought to which we must look to abolish war and to keep it
abolished. For, like the question of slavery two generations ago,
this question of war has become a moral issue, and, like the slavery
question, it will give the world no rest until settled in accordance
with the demands of the new conscience.
[Sidenote: War an abrogation of
the ordinary moral code]
Especially intolerable to the more sensitive conscience of to-day
is the assumption that nations may at will suspend or abrogate the
ordinary moral code. For, as Lord Morley truly says, “To declare war
is to suspend not merely _habeas corpus_ but the Ten Commandments,
and some other good commandments besides.”[782] That is to say, war
is a suspension of a great part of those rules of morality which,
slowly and painfully formulated by the growing moral consciousness of
man, have become the guide and standard of ordinary conduct. In war
the conscience of the commander is inhibited. “The commander who lost
a battle through the activity of his moral nature,” once cynically
declared United States Senator Ingalls, “would be the derision and jest
of history.” And that is so. The world has not yet ceased to deride
those Jews who lost their city to the Romans because their consciences
forsooth would not let them fight on the Sabbath day. War cannot be
conducted by the rules of ordinary morality.
With a great part of the ordinary moral code suspended, there is
substituted for it a war code every maxim of which reveals its archaic,
vestigial character, stamps it as a survival from an early savage
stage of human development, as a legacy from a long-past age of the
historical evolution when morality was as yet only an intratribal
thing, that is, when men felt that they owed duties only to members of
their own tribe or social group.[783]
[Sidenote: Unfavorable reaction of
the ethics of war upon the ethics
of peace]
In many ways, some obvious and others subtle and hidden, war works
“moral damage” to society, but we here confine ourselves to emphasizing
merely the moral loss and hurt resulting from the reaction of its low
archaic code upon the more advanced peace code. For, as Professor J.
Neville Figgis justly observes, “It is impossible to remove the very
notion of morality from international affairs without in the long run
undermining it in private life.”[784] What is regarded as right and
proper in war will come to be regarded as right and proper in peace.
That is to say, the maintenance of a double standard in morals is just
as impossible as the maintenance of a double standard in money. By a
sort of Gresham’s Law the lower standard will drive out the higher or
drag it down to its own low level.
This reaction of the war code upon the ordinary moral code is well
illustrated by what takes place when society metes out to persons
convicted of crime ferocious and barbarous punishments. In the
medieval centuries in Europe when the penalties for offenses were
often fiendishly cruel mutilations of the body, such as cutting off
the ears, the hands, the lips, or the nose, this judicial procedure
was imitated to such a degree by individuals seeking private vengeance
that mayhem, that is, the mutilation of an enemy by depriving him
of a member, became a crime of such frequent occurrence that it was
necessary to make special and severe enactments against it.[785] After
society stopped mutilating the bodies of offenders against its laws,
this offense of mayhem virtually dropped out of the calendar of private
crimes.
In a similar way does the war ethics of the nations react disastrously
upon private morality. The slow moral progress of European civilization
during the last two or three centuries, compared with its wonderful
intellectual and material progress, may with little hesitation be
attributed in large part to the unfavorable influence of its war ethics
upon its everyday moral code. The war code is applied to politics,
to ordinary business, and to the relations of industrial classes.
The politician as a politician does a hundred things he would not
think of doing as a man, and justifies his acts by appealing to the
adage, “Politics is war.” The business man, citing the like maxim,
“Business is business,” which means that competition is a species of
war and must be conducted on war principles, flings his Christian
code to the winds and, pitilessly pushing his competitor to the wall,
compasses his financial ruin. It is the same in the struggle between
labor and capital. In this struggle acts of violence, like those of
the McNamaras, are committed, and the persons who do these things
absolve themselves in the forum of their own consciences on the plea
that a state of war exists between capital and labor and that this
justifies the adoption of war methods. Here doubtless we have the moral
psychology of the suffragette movement in England. Indeed, the leaders
of this startling propaganda tell us frankly that they are waging war,
and that this justifies their suspension of the ordinary rules of
conduct. In the light of this avowal the alleged inscrutability of
their acts disappears. The movement is simply another illustration of
the truth that so long as nations act under the illusion that they may
without moral wrong employ violence to obtain justice, just so long
will there be individuals who with good conscience will seek justice
through violence.
At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in
various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war
ethics, in all other domains and relationships--in the family, in the
Church, and in social intercourse--act in accordance with the higher
moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the
establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices
mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting
from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies
and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground
of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as
Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends
of humanity for the service he has done in ... showing that the whole
sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the
ideals accepted in public affairs.”[786]
[Sidenote: Obsolescence of war
as a school of morals: the war
system an anachronism in modern
civilization]
The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the
civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their
argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of
the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in
the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages
been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true,
as is assumed by Professor William James in his _Moral Equivalent of
War_, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to
common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race
by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past
stages of human development, the time is past when the war system can
serve the highest ends of civilization. It is an anachronism in the
modern world. It has become a drag upon the moral progress of the
race. By an ethical necessity the day of its abolition approaches. At
a time not remote, as history reckons time, the common conscience of
the world will brand war between civilized nations as the greatest of
crimes, and will regard the nation that assaults another with intent
to commit general slaughter as a criminal nation--as a common enemy of
the human race. In that coming and better age men will look with the
same incredulous amazement upon our infernal engines and devices for
wholesale man-killing that we of this age look upon “the iron virgin of
Nuremberg” and the other medieval instruments of torture in the museums
of Europe.
To many this optimistic forecast, in the face of the prevailing
war spirit and the ever-growing armaments of the nations, may seem
oversanguine and incredible. But to think despairingly of the future
argues a failure to discern what is really most significant in the
international situation to-day. The most significant thing in the
ongoings of life at Rome on that memorable day of the year 404 of our
era which saw the last gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was not
that, four hundred years after the incoming of Christianity with its
teachings of the sanctity of human life, gladiators fought on the arena
to make a holiday for Rome; the significant thing was the protest made
by the Christian monk Telemachus and sealed by his martyr death,[787]
for that announced the birth into the Roman world of a new conscience,
and that, through an ethical necessity, meant the speedy abolition of
“the human sacrifices of the amphitheater.”
And so to-day the significant thing is not that nineteen hundred years
after the advent of a religion of peace and good will among men,
gladiator nations still wet the earth with fratricidal blood; the
significant thing is the constantly growing protest against it all, for
that announces the birth into the modern world of a new international
conscience, and that, through an ethical necessity like that which
abolished forever the bloody sacrifices of the Colosseum, means the
certain and speedy abolition of war as a crass negation of human
solidarity and brotherhood, and a venturous denial of a moral order of
the world and the sovereignty of conscience.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Henry T. Buckle, _History of Civilization in England_ (1891), vol.
i, chap. iv. For a trenchant criticism of Buckle’s contention that
there has been no progress in morals during historic times, see article
entitled “The Natural History of Morals,” _North British Review_ for
December, 1867.
[2] For a discussion of the economic theory, see Edwin R. A. Seligman,
_The Economic Interpretation of History_, 2d ed.
[3] _Social Evolution_ (1894), p. 307.
[4] Ralph Barton Perry, _The Moral Economy_ (1909), p. 254.
[5] Immanuel Kant, _Critique of the Practical Reason_; cited by Fisher,
_History of the Christian Church_ (1888), p. 623.
[6] “It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has
originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct,
arrived at by some person or persons.”--T. H. GREEN, _Prolegomena to
Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 361.
[7] _Prolegomena to the History of Israel_, tr. Black and Menzies
(1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
[8] Wake, _The Evolution of Morality_ (1878), vol. ii, p. 4;
Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906),
vol. ii, p. 743; T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 237;
George Harris, _Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 79.
[9] T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 240.
[10] “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality,
which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands
and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly,
“Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” _The International
Journal of Ethics_ for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The
original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man,
as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right
and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most
direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore,
the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than
is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive
man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history
of mankind” (_Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_, tr. Gulliver
and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.
[11] “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”--GEORGE
HARRIS, _Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 54.
[12] “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto
ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole
realm of ethics.”--SCHURMAN, _The Ethical Import of Darwinism_ (1887),
p. 201.
[13] S. Alexander, _Moral Order and Progress_ (1889), p. 354. The same
thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,”
_North British Review_ for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral
graveyard ... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils
which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally
crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall
spring.”
[14] Lecky, _History of European Morals_, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.
[15] “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not
created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice
which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the
inner by the outer.”--G. LOWES DICKINSON, “Ideals and Facts,” _Hibbert
Journal_ for January, 1911, p. 266.
[16] “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and
competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in
sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”--BALDWIN,
_Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development_ (1897), p.
397.
[17] See Chapter XVIII. “The activity of a free people creates a great
number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights;
so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality
than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests
and high faculties of our nature.”--DENIS, _Histoire des théories et
des idées morales dans l’antiquité_ (1879), t. i, p. 10.
[18] _Principles of Economics_, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity
but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of
the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing
engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the
contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the
moral type of the most civilized nations.”--LECKY, _The Map of Life_
(1900), pp. 53 f.
[19] _The Moral Ideal_, new and revised edition, p. 19.
[20] “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from
religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has
suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the
ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and
purified by its religions.”--WILLIAM NEWTON CLARKE, _The Christian
Doctrine of God_ (1909), p. 13.
[21] “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris,
_Moral Evolution_ (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this
dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words
of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an
attainment” (_Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 301).
[22] _Meditations_, tr. Long, xi, 18.
[23] “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which
dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in
another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and
judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”--JAMES BRYCE,
_The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed., p. 261.
[24] _Prolegomena to Ethics_, 5th ed., p. 291.
[25] After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of
Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages
act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours”
(_The Malay Archipelago_, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs
and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the
world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings
Millward in _National Geographic Magazine_ for March, 1909, p. 287).
[26] “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis
in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally
formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the
clan.”--W. ROBERTSON SMITH, _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p.
54.
[27] _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2
Sam. v. 1.
[28] Dudley Kidd, _Savage Childhood_ (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford,
_Lectures and Essays_ (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”
[29] W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d ed., p. 267.
See also Coulanges, _The Ancient City_, bk. ii, chap. ix.
[30] Before this stage in civilization has been reached, religion is
a hindrance to the widening of the moral sympathies; for in earlier
stages “a man is held answerable to his god [only] for wrong done to a
member of his own kindred or political community; ... he may deceive,
rob, or kill an alien without offense to religion; the deity cares
only for his own kinsfolk” (W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the
Semites_, 2d ed., pp. 53 f.).
[31] It should be carefully noted that this is very different from
saying that his life is _im_moral. To pronounce it immoral would be
like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of
right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only
in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be
certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as
rudimentary as his reason” (_Physics and Politics_ (1873), p. 115).
[32] “At the beginning of the developmental series stands the bare
animal impulse, stripped of all moral motives; at the end we have
the complete interpenetration of organic requirement and moral
idea.”--WUNDT, _Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_ (1908), p. 191.
[33] See II, The Ethics of Industrialism, Chapter XVIII.
[34] Respecting certain Brazilian tribes the naturalist Bates remarks:
“The goodness of these Indians, like that of most others amongst whom
I lived, consisted perhaps more in the absence of active bad qualities
than in the possession of good ones; in a word, it was negative rather
than positive” (_The Naturalist on the River Amazon_). Cf. Edward
Howard Griggs, _The New Humanism_, 6th ed., pp. 103 f.
[35] For the relation of motherhood and infancy to the beginnings of
morality, see Fiske, _Cosmic Philosophy_ (1875), vol. ii, pp. 340 ff.
[36] “The spring of virtuous action is the social instinct, which is
set to work by the practice of comradeship.”--CLIFFORD, _Lectures and
Essays_ (1901), vol. ii, p. 253. Cf. Peabody, _The Approach to the
Social Question_ (1909), p. 149.
[37] “This family worship (long-forgotten precursor of our modern
family prayers) was always offered to the ancestors at the domestic
hearth.”--HELEN BOSANQUET, _The Family_ (1906), p. 18. Cf. Wundt,
_Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life_ (1908), p. 171.
[38] The blessing offered at the daily family meal is presumptively a
survival from the consecrated communal meal of the primitive kinship
group.
[39] When such an individual arises he becomes, if circumstances favor,
a lawgiver, and the age of law supersedes the age of custom. Morality
now consists in obedience to the law.
[40] Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_
(1906), vol. i, chap. ii, and passim.
[41] “In early times the solidarity of the kinship is such that it does
not occur to the individual to regard as unjust a suffering which he
endures in behalf of, or along with, his people.”--EDWARD CAIRD, _The
Evolution of Religion_ (1894), p. 37.
[42] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 283.
[43] The system of collective responsibility arises in part, it is
true, from the belief that sin is contagious and infects all persons
related to the transgressor. Therefore the innocent members of the
family or group of the transgressor may be put out of the way as a
merely preventive measure--not as a measure of justice or punishment.
But the ethical element is seldom or never absent and it is this which
gives the conception its importance for the student of morals.
[44] “Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons,
because in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kinsfolk
means he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely without
protection.”--HOBHOUSE, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 90.
[45] Gen. iv. 13, 14.
[46] “Blood atonement ... was one of the very earliest cases
we can find in which there was a notion of duty and social
obligation.”--SUMNER, _Folkways_ (1907), p. 506.
[47] “It [the feud] is the Southern sense of the solidarity of the
family in opposition to extreme Northern individualism.”--WINES,
_Punishment and Reformation_ (1895), p. 33.
[48] On the _Lex talionis_ consult Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 177 ff.; Hobhouse,
_Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, pp. 84 ff.; Spencer, _Principles
of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, pp. 369 ff. The principle embodied in the
_Lex talionis_ has played a large part in the jurisprudence of all
peoples.
[49] _The Religion of the Semites_ (1894), p. 267.
[50] Seeck (_Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt_ (1901), Bd. i,
S. 200) reminds us how the ancient German player when he had lost in a
game where the stake was his own liberty, honorably gave himself up as
the slave of the winner.
[51] _The Truth about the Congo_ (1907), p. 29.
[52] “Throughout tribal life the stranger is a menace; he is a being to
be plundered because he is a being who plunders.... Native houses are
often left for days or weeks, and it would be easy for any one to enter
and rob them. Yet robbery among themselves is not common. To steal,
however, from a white employer ... is no sin.”--STARR, _The Truth about
the Congo_ (1907), pp. 28 f.
[53] See VI, International Ethics: the New International Conscience, in
Chapter XVIII.
[54] On this subject see Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of
the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv, “Hospitality.”
[55] Speaking of the duty of hospitality among the early Greeks,
Farnell says, “The sanctity of the stranger guest ... was almost as
great as the sanctity of the kinsman’s life” (_The Cults of the Greek
States_ (1896), vol. i, p. 73).
[56] Without doubt other feelings and conceptions than purely ethical
ones are sometimes operative in the case of the guest right. The
stranger may be kindly treated because of superstitious fears. Thus
the primitive man’s notions of magic and sorcery may cause him to
be hospitable to the stranger through fear of the consequences of a
refusal, since untutored people are apt to attribute magical powers to
the stranger. See Westermarck, _The Origin and Development of the Moral
Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, chap. xxiv.
[57] Among some uncivilized peoples, however, where the population
is thin and there is little competition wars are unknown. “To the
Greenlander ... war is incomprehensible and repulsive, a thing for
which their language has no word” (Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, p. 334).
[58] Cannibalism springs from several roots. Sometimes savages eat the
body of the enemy slain in battle because they believe that thereby
they destroy the soul or double and thus secure themselves against its
vengeance. Again the custom grows out of the belief that the virtues of
the victim pass into him who eats the flesh. But the most common motive
is the subsistence motive. Indeed, many of the incessant wars waged by
primitive tribes are nothing more nor less than man-hunting expeditions
for securing food. Later these expeditions became raids for securing
slaves.
[59] Quoted by Letourneau, _La guerre dans les diverses races humaines_
(1895), p. vi.
[60] Often we find vestiges of the abandoned practice in what may be
called celestial cannibalism (see W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion
of the Semites_ (1894), p. 224). Thus the god of war of the Mexican
Aztecs and the gods of many Polynesian tribes were cannibals, for
human sacrifices must be regarded as a sort of celestial cannibalism,
when the offering is made in the belief that the god actually repasts
on the blood and the finer essences of the sacrificial victim. Where
men have thus made their gods like unto themselves, and the practice
of cannibalism has been consecrated by religion, the gods, because
religion is always conservative, are certain to remain anthropophagi
much longer than their worshipers. Consequently we find human
sacrifices still lingering on as a kind of survival among peoples, as,
for instance, the Mexicans, who have themselves left far behind the
practice of eating human flesh.
[61] Letourneau, _La guerre dans les diverses races humaines_ (1895),
p. 185.
[62] _Od._ i. 260.
[63] Spencer, _Principles of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, p. 350.
[64] _Ibid._ vol. i, pp. 355 f.
[65] _Ibid._ vol. i, pp. 368, 398, 401.
[66] Spencer, _Principles of Ethics_ (1892), vol. i, pp. 359 f.
[67] _Ibid._ vol. i, p. 349.
[68] For the influence of the war ethics of the modern nations upon
their peace ethics, see VI, International Ethics: the New International
Conscience, in Chapter XVIII.
[69] Breasted, _A History of Egypt_ (1905), p. 65.
[70] _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), p.
176.
[71] Breasted, _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_
(1912), p. 250.
[72] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, p. 172.
[73] This moralization of pure physical myths marks the advance of
all races in culture and morality. As we shall see, Greek and Hebrew
mythologies underwent just such an ethicalizing process.
[74] Renouf, _The Religion of Ancient Egypt_ (1884), p. 73.
[75] “It has long been recognized that the Egyptians had a much more
highly organized conscience than that of most other nations of early
times.”--PETRIE, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_ (1898), p.
86.
[76] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, pp. 193 f.
[77] Wiedemann, _The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of
the Soul_ (1895), pp. 62 f.
[78] Wiedemann, _The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of
the Soul_ (1895), p. 64.
[79] The same evolution is to be traced in China. “Imitations made of
wood, clay, straw, paper, and of other material have been substituted
for the real things.... Slaves and servants, wives and concubines are
also burned, i.e., in paper imitations. They point back to the time
when actual human sacrifices were the custom” (De Groot, _The Religion
of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 71).
[80] _Primitive Culture_ (1874), vol. ii, p. 85.
[81] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, pp. 187 ff.
[82] Truthfulness was one of the cardinal virtues of the Egyptian
ideal. The requirements here were very exact: “I have not altered a
story in the telling of it; I have repeated what I have heard just
as it was told to me,” are the words of one in the judgment hall of
Osiris. Cf. Renouf, _The Religion of Ancient Egypt_ (1884), pp. 76 f.
[83] _The Egyptian Book of the Dead_, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
[84] _The Egyptian Book of the Dead_, tr. Davis, chap. cxxv.
[85] Annihilation appears to have been the lot of the very wicked; but
the texts are not perfectly clear on this point. Consult Wiedemann,
_The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul_ (1895),
p. 55.
[86] Here are six declarations of the confession which correspond
almost exactly with six of the Ten Commandments: (1) I have not
blasphemed; (2) I have not stolen; (3) I have not slain any one
treacherously; (4) I have not slandered any one, or made false
accusations; (5) I have not reviled the face of my father; (6) I have
not eaten my heart through with envy. See Rawlinson, _History of
Ancient Egypt_, 2d ed., vol. i, p. 142.
[87] Petrie, _Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt_ (1898), p. 135.
[88] _Ibid._ p. 162.
[89] “In this judgment the Egyptian introduced for the first time in
the history of man the fully developed idea that the future destiny of
the dead must be dependent entirely upon the ethical quality of the
earthly life, the idea of future responsibility,--of which we found
the first traces in the Old Kingdom” (Breasted, _A History of Egypt_
(1905), p. 173). Professor Breasted suggests a connection between the
growth of the ideal of an ethical ordeal in the hereafter with the
discontinuance of the building of immense pyramids. He says: “It is
impossible to contemplate the colossal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty,
so well known as the pyramids of Gizeh, and to contrast them with the
comparatively diminutive royal tombs which follow in the next two
dynasties, without ... discerning more than exclusively political
causes behind this sudden and startling change.... The recognition of
a judgment and the requirement of moral worthiness in the hereafter
... marked a transition from reliance on agencies external to the
personality of the dead to dependence on inner values. Immortality
began to make its appeal as a thing achieved in a man’s own soul”
(_Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), pp. 178
f.).
[90] _Records of the Past_, New Series, vol. iii. For extended comments
on the maxims of Ptah-hotep, see Amélineau, _Essai sur l’évolution
historique et philosophique des idées morales dans l’Egypt ancienne_
(1895), pp. 93 ff.
[91] Budge, _Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life_ (1899), p. ii.
[92] For other documents of this age which embody the same spirit
of social justice as the precepts of Ptah-hotep, see Breasted,
_Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912), lect.
vii.
[93] Amélineau, _Essai_, pp. 140 f.
[94] Alongside slavery proper there existed the system of serfdom, the
nature of which is revealed by the history of the Children of Israel
in Lower Egypt. The status of the Egyptian serf appears to have been
somewhat like that of the Helots of Laconia in Greece. If we rightly
interpret the Biblical account of the servitude of the Children of
Israel, the number of serfs, if their increase seemed dangerous, was
kept down by enforced infanticide (Ex. i. 7–22).
[95] Laurent, _Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité_, t. i, p. 321.
[96] Amélineau, _Essai_, p. 344. The monotheist Ikhnaton (Amenhotep
IV), the reform Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, it is true, pursued
throughout his reign a peace policy, but this policy manifestly was
dictated by temperament, or the king’s preoccupation with religious
affairs, and not by moral scruples. His reform was essentially a
religious and not a social or moral one. Not one of the historical
documents of the age contains a word in condemnation of war as
inherently wrong (see Breasted, _Ancient Records of Egypt_ (1906), vol.
ii, pp. 382–419), though in these “the customary glorying in war has
almost disappeared” (Petrie, _A History of Egypt_ (1896), vol. ii, p.
218).
[97] This, however, must not be regarded as wholly an act of wanton
savagery. The killing of his prisoners by the king was probably a sort
of sacrifice in honor of the god who had given him victory over his
enemies. See Amélineau, _Essai_, p. 12.
[98] _Essai_, p. ix; see also p. 252, n. 1.
[99] For the influence of the moral ideas of Egypt on Greece, see
Amélineau, _Essai_, chap. xii, pp. 359–399; Wiedemann, _The Ancient
Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul_ (1895), p. x; and
Toy, _Judaism and Christianity_ (1891), p. 387.
[100] Petrie, _Egypt and Israel_ (1911), p. 133.
[101] Demonism here was not, as it was and is in China (p. 55), a
moral educator of the people, for the reason that the spirits were not
conceived as the avengers of wrongdoing, but were thought to molest
indifferently the good and the bad.
[102] It is not possible, however, to draw a definite chronological
line between the nonethical and the ethical texts. Cf. Jastrow, _The
Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_ (1898), p. 297.
[103] King, _Babylonian Religion and Mythology_ (1899), p. 220.
[104] The nature myths constituting the epic literature of the
Babylonians, which consisted largely of elaborate tales of the struggle
between the gods of light and the powers of darkness, were never
moralized like the Egyptian myth of Osiris and Set, or the Iranian myth
of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman.
[105] Here are a few lines of a penitential prayer or psalm:
O my god who art angry with me, accept my prayer;
* * * * *
May my sins be forgiven, my transgressions be wiped out.
May the ban be loosened, the chain broken,
May the seven winds carry off my sighs.
Let me tear away my iniquity, let the birds carry it to heaven;
* * * * *
May the beasts of the field take it away from me,
The flowing waters of the stream wash me clean.
Let me be pure like the sheen of gold.
JASTROW, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_ (1898), p. 323.
[106] Cf. above, p. 35.
[107] The stele which bore this code of laws was discovered at Susa in
1901–1902. The reign of Hammurabi is placed at about the end of the
third millennium B.C. There are translations of the code by C. H. W.
Johns (1903) and Robert Francis Harper (1904).
[108] “If a man owe a debt and Adad [god of storms] inundate his field
and carry away the produce, or, through lack of water, grain have
not grown in the field, in that year he shall not make any return of
grain to the creditor, he shall alter his contract-tablet and he shall
not pay the interest for that year.”--_Code_, sec. 48. [We have used
throughout Harper’s translation.]
[109] _Code_, secs. 196, 197, 200. Cf. similar provisions of the Mosaic
code: Ex. xxi. 23–25; Deut. xix. 21.
[110] _Ibid._ secs. 209, 210.
[111] _Ibid._ secs. 229, 230.
[112] The provisions read: “If a man aid a male or female slave of the
palace, or a male or female slave of a freeman to escape from the city
gate, he shall be put to death.”
“If a man harbor in his home a male or female slave who has fled from
the palace or from a freeman, and do not bring him [the slave] forth
at the call of the commandant, the owner of that house shall be put to
death” (_Code_, secs. 15, 16).
[113] Maspero, _The Dawn of Civilization_, p. 744.
[114] Taylor, _Ancient Ideals_ (1896), vol. i, p. 41.
[115] _Records of the Past_, New Series, vol. ii, pp. 143 ff.
[116] “The white man has no doubt committed great barbarities upon
the savage, but he does not like to speak of them, and when necessity
compels a reference he has always something to say of manifest destiny,
the advance of civilization and the duty of shouldering the white
man’s burden in which he pays tribute to a higher ethical conscience”
(Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 27). King Leopold
may have been responsible for barbarities committed against the natives
of the Kongo as atrocious as those of the Assyrians, but he paid
tribute to the modern conscience by refraining from portraying them in
imperishable marble at The Hague.
[117] Cf. Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 226.
[118] Though the people are shut out from participation in the state
worship, they have set up for themselves a multitude of local shrines
where they worship the spirits of almost every earthly thing, such as
mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks. “Men debarred from communion with
the Great Spirit resorted more eagerly to inferior spirits, to spirits
of the fathers, and to spirits generally.... The accredited worship of
ancestors, with that of the departed great added to it, was not enough
to satisfy the cravings of men’s minds.” (Legge, _The Religions of
China_ (1881), p. 176).
[119] _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 274.
[120] Williams, _The Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. ii, p. 239.
[121] We do not mention Buddhism in this connection for the reason
that it is not possible to trace any decisive influence, save in
the promotion of toleration, that this system has exercised upon
Chinese morality. Buddhism enjoins celibacy, and this, like Christian
asceticism, is in radical opposition to the genius of Confucianism.
For this reason, in conjunction with others,--among these its early
degeneracy,--Buddhism has remained practically inert as an ethical
force in Chinese society. What little influence it has exerted has been
confined almost wholly to the monasteries.
[122] “The dread of spirits is the nightmare of the Chinaman’s
life.”--LEGGE, _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 197.
[123] _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 34.
[124] The Taoist doctrines are contained in the _Tao-teh-king_,
supposed to have been written by Lao-tsze, a sage who lived in the
fifth century B.C. The religion which grew out of his philosophy became
in time degenerate, absorbed the worst elements of Buddhism, and is
to-day a system of gross superstitions, magic, and sorcery, which has
undeniably a blighting effect upon morality.
[125] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), pp. 139 ff.
[126] _Ibid._ 138.
[127] Legge, _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 229.
[128] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 143.
[129] Nietzscheism is in essence at one with Taoism. Nietzsche insists
that man should behave as Nature behaves; for instance, that the
strong should prey upon the weak. The difference between Lao-tsze and
Nietzsche lies in their different readings of the essential qualities
of the universe. See below, p. 355.
[130] Taoism is too lofty a doctrine for the multitude. They are
enjoined to imitate the ancient sages, and as these imitated the way
of heaven and earth, in imitating them they are really imitating the
universe.
[131] De Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 143.
[132] The imitation of the qualities of nature “have given existence
to important state institutions, considered to be for the nation and
rulers matters of life and death.” (De Groot, _The Religion of the
Chinese_ (1910), p. 139).
[133] _The Works of Mencius_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. ii),
bk. vi, pt. i, chap. ii, 2.
[134] “This inference [that man is naturally good] comes into
prominence in the classics as a dogma, and therefore has been the
principal basis of all Taoistic and Confucian ethics to this day” (De
Groot, _The Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 137). Every schoolboy
is taught this doctrine: “Man commences life with a virtuous nature”
(Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 217).
[135] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. ii, 2. And so
Confucius: “An accordance with this nature [man’s] is called the Path
of Duty” (_The Doctrine of the Mean_, chap. i; The Chinese Classics, 2d
ed., vol. i).
[136] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. i, chap. vii, 2, 3.
[137] _Confucian Analects_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i),
bk. xvii, chap. ii. The student of biology will see in this view an
anticipation of the latest teaching of modern science in respect to the
relative importance of heredity and education in the determining of
character.
[138] “There is nothing in this world so dangerous for the national
safety, public health and welfare as heterodoxy, which means acts,
institutions, doctrines not based upon the classics.”--DE GROOT, _The
Religion of the Chinese_ (1910), p. 48.
[139] Confucius thus describes himself: “A transmitter and not a maker,
believing in and loving the ancients” (_Confucian Analects_, bk. vii,
chap. i).
[140] _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 255.
[141] Chinese literature bears unique testimony to the high
consideration in which the virtue of filial devotion and reverence is
held. It abounds in anecdotes exalting this virtue, holding up great
exemplars of it for imitation by the Chinese youth. See Doolittle,
_Social Life of the Chinese_.
[142] _The Hsiao King_ (Sacred Books of the East, vol. iii), chap.
xviii.
[143] _Ibid._ chap. xi.
[144] Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_ (1868), p. 103.
[145] _Ibid._ p. 103.
[146] _China in Law and Commerce_ (1905), p. 34.
[147] “The chief characteristic of Chinese society and the essence of
Chinese morality is reverence for the past.”--REINSCH, _World Politics_
(1900), p. 90.
[148] _The Great Learning_ (The Chinese Classics, 2d ed., vol. i),
chap. iii, 5.
[149] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xi, chap. xv, 3.
[150] It is interesting to compare the portraiture of The Princely Man,
as depicted by the pagan Chinese moralist, with that of The Prince, as
portrayed by Machiavelli.
[151] “The standard of excellence [in The Princely Man] is placed so
high as to be absolutely unattainable by unaided human nature; and
though [the author] probably intended to elevate the character of his
grandfather [Confucius] to this height, and thus hand him down to
future ages as a _shing jin_, or ‘perfect and holy man,’ he has in
the providence of God done his countrymen great service in setting
before them such a character as is here given in the _Chung Yung_.
By being made a text-book in the schools it has been constantly
studied and memorized by generations of students to their great
benefit.”--WILLIAMS, _The Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. i, pp. 655 f.
[152] _Confucian Analects_, bk. viii, chap. xii.
[153] _The Great Learning_ (text), par. 5.
[154] Quoted by Pfleiderer, _Religions and Historic Faiths_, p. 96.
[155] _The Great Learning_, chap. x, 22.
[156] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xiii, 6.
[157] _The Great Learning_, chap. ix, 8.
[158] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xii, chap. xix.
[159] _The Great Learning_, chap. x, 21.
[160] _Confucian Analects_, bk. xiii, chap. xi.
[161] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Ideals of the East_ (1905), p. 239.
[162] Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_ (1906), vol. i, p. 265.
[163] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. viii, 8.
[164] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. iv, 1.
[165] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. ii, chap. ii, 1. While denouncing the
essential wickedness of war, Mencius sanctioned rebellion against a
tyrannical and wicked ruler.
[166] _The Great Learning_, chap. vi, 2.
[167] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. iv, pt. i, chap. xx.
[168] _Confucian Analects_, bk. iii, chap. iv, 3.
[169] _Ibid._ bk. iv, chap. xv, 2.
[170] _Ibid._ bk. vi, chap. xvii.
[171] _Ibid._ bk. ix, chap. xvii.
[172] _Ibid._ bk. xv, chap. xxiii. The same precept is found in bk.
xii, chap. ii, of the _Analects_, and also in _The Doctrine of the
Mean_, chap. xiii, 3.
[173] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xvii.
[174] _Ibid._ bk. iv, pt. ii, chap. xii.
[175] _Ibid._ bk. vi, pt. i, chap. x, 1.
[176] _Confucian Analects_, bk. vii, chap. xv.
[177] _The Works of Mencius_, bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 2.
[178] _Ibid._ bk. vi, pt. ii, chap. xv, 5.
[179] _Ibid._ bk. vii, pt. i, chap. xviii, 1.
[180] The Chinese pay worship, it is true, to the multitude of inferior
gods of Buddhism, but there is little in these cults calculated to
awaken and discipline the moral feelings.
[181] _The Religions of China_ (1881), p. 256.
[182] See Colquhuon, _China in Transformation_ (1898), p. 189.
[183] Reinsch, _World Politics_ (1900), p. 98. In their relations with
foreigners the Chinese bankers have won an enviable reputation for
integrity and the scrupulous observance of engagements. The word of a
Chinaman in financial matters is his bond.
[184] _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 214.
[185] Froebel has an illuminating comment on the danger to true
morality that lurks here: “A life whose ideal value has been perfectly
established in experience never aims to serve as a model in its form,
but only in its essence, in its spirit. It is the greatest mistake to
suppose that spiritual, human perfection can serve as a model in its
form. This accounts for the common experience that the taking of such
external manifestations of perfection as examples, instead of elevating
mankind, checks, nay, represses, its development” (_The Education of
Man_, pt. i, sec. 10).
[186] Etiquette has been well defined as “the formal expression of
courtesy,” and courtesy as “morality in trifles.” In Japan, as Kikuchi
informs us, etiquette forms a part of the moral instruction in the
schools. See Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_, vol.
ii, p. 342.
[187] Edward A. Ross (_The Changing Chinese_ (1911), p. 193) says
native authorities admit that from one tenth to one twentieth of the
girl infants are abandoned or made away with.
[188] “Female infanticide in some parts is openly confessed and
divested of all disgrace and penalties everywhere” (Williams, _The
Middle Kingdom_ (1883), vol. i, p. 836). Jernigan, however, says, “When
carried to the extreme there is a public sentiment in China which
condemns it, and there are official proclamations against infanticide”
(_China in Law and Commerce_ (1905), p. 123).
[189] The primitive kinship group is a characteristic feature of
Chinese society. “Thousands of Chinese villages comprise exclusively
persons having the same surname and the same ancestors” (A. H. Smith,
_Chinese Characteristics_ (1894), p. 226). “I have seen a town of
25,000 people, all belonging to the same clan and bearing the same
family name” (Martin, _The Lore of Cathay_ (1901), p. 272). Along with
this clan constitution of society goes the principle of collective
responsibility. The group is to a great degree held responsible for
the conduct of each of its members. In case of serious crime, as, for
instance, treason, all the male adult members of the criminal’s family
are punished along with the offender (Westermarck, _The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas_ (1906), vol. i, p. 45). Recently the
punishment of relatives of the offender has been abolished in certain
cases.
[190] The efforts of the Chinese government to put an end to the use of
opium among its subjects--the anti-opium decree was issued in 1906--is
the most noteworthy matter in the recent moral history of China. This
movement is motived by moral feeling as truly as is the movement among
ourselves for the suppression of the liquor traffic. It is, in the
words of Professor Edward A. Ross, “the most extensive warfare on a
vicious private habit that the world has ever known” (_The Changing
Chinese_ (1911), p. 146).
[191] “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”--_Japanese Constitution_,
art. iii.
[192] The state in Japan occupies the place of the Church with us.
“To look up to the state as a sacred institution has always been
characteristic of the people, and from the great work of the recent
reformation onward there has not been a single event of national
consequence which has not originated in this peculiar turn of mind”
(Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii, p. 559).
[193] Corresponding to the knights in European feudalism were the
samurai, above them the daimios, and at the head of the system the
Shogun.
[194] Japanese boys and men, Dr. William Elliot Griffis affirms, are
“more tender and careful with all living creatures than are those of
Christendom” (_The Religions of Japan_ (1895), p. 294). Buddhism caused
in large measure the disuse of flesh for food.
[195] This word means “the way of the warrior,” or “the rule of
knighthood.”
[196] Nitobé, _Bushido: the Soul of Japan_, p. 98. The edition cited
throughout this chapter is that of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905. The
Introduction is by William Elliot Griffis.
[197] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 32.
[198] _Ibid._ p. 30.
[199] For the subject of the downfall of feudalism and the Restoration,
see Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. i, chap. ii.
[200] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 189.
[201] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 323.
[202] Scherer, _What is Japanese Morality?_ (1906), p. 10.
[203] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. vi.
[204] The works of Molière, it is said, have been put under the ban
of the censor in Japan and their circulation forbidden, for the
reason that Molière ridicules old age, and constantly, like the comic
supplement of the newspapers, “makes some father the butt of jokes and
gross wit by his child or children.”
[205] “Any social system of which filial piety is not the moral cement;
any social system in which children leave their parents in order to
establish families of their own; any social system in which it is
considered not only natural but right to love wife and child more
than the author of one’s being; any social system in which marriage
can be decided independently of the will of parents, by the mutual
inclination of the young people themselves; any social system in which
the mother-in-law is not entitled to the obedient service of the
daughter-in-law, appears to him [the Japanese] of necessity a state of
life scarcely better than that of the birds of the air and the beasts
of the field, or at best a sort of moral chaos.”--LAFCADIO HEARN, _Out
of the East_ (1895), p. 89.
[206] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Awakening of Japan_ (1904), p. 179. Romantic
love is almost unknown in Japan. B. H. Chamberlain affirms that in a
residence of twenty-eight years he heard of only one love match, and
then the young people had been brought up in America.
[207] _Out of the East_ (1985), p. 80.
[208] Five per cent of the men have concubines.
[209] “The central idea in Japanese life is obedience to parents and
reverence for ancestors. Should a Japanese father have misfortunes, his
daughter would think it her filial duty to sell her body. She would not
be regarded as fallen and disgraced, but as having done a right and
noble deed, and might afterwards be restored to her place in society.
But, though it is hard to explain, the Japanese woman is as chaste
and pure and exalted in her ideas of womanhood as any woman on the
globe.”--SIR EDWIN ARNOLD (in an interview).
[210] Bacon, _Japanese Girls and Women_ (1891), p. 121.
[211] Chamberlain, _Things Japanese_, 4th ed., p. 220. By “the ancient
way” is meant _hara-kiri_, or disemboweling. The death by his own hand
of General Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, during the funeral of his
departed sovereign Mutsuhito (September 13, 1912), reveals another
motive for suicide which is wholly foreign to our modes of thought
and feeling. “In very early, almost prehistoric, times the custom of
_jun-shi_, or dying with the master, led to the interment of living
Japanese retainers with their dead lord. The custom gradually died
out, but voluntary suicide as a means of showing personal devotion
or attachment to a master or superior persisted for many centuries”
(George Kennan, “The Death of General Nogi,” New York _Outlook_ for
October 5, 1912). It was this ancient custom that Count Nogi followed.
“When all was over”--such is Mr. Kennan’s interpretation of his
act--“he ended his own life as an expression of his boundless devotion
to the man whom he had loved. It was in the spirit of Old Japan,
but Nogi was a man of that era, and lived in the mental and moral
atmosphere of that time.”
[212] Japanese feudalism began about the eleventh century. The year
1868 saw its final downfall.
[213] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 99.
[214] Okakura-Kakuzo, _The Awakening of Japan_ (1904), p. 175. Count
Okuma makes a similar assertion: “The humanitarian efforts which in the
course of the recent war were so much in evidence, and which so much
surprised Western nations, were not, as might have been thought, the
products of the new civilization, but survivals of our ancient feudal
chivalry” (_Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. i, p. 124). By no
people has the Red Cross movement been taken up with greater enthusiasm
than by the Japanese.
[215] Consult Count Okuma, _Fifty Years of New Japan_ (1909), vol. ii,
pp. 566 f.
[216] “The obloquy attached to the calling brought within its pale such
as cared little for social repute” (Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 66). “The
trades-people,” writes Chamberlain, “stood at the very bottom of the
scale. The hucksters or traders were a degraded class in old Japan, and
degraded their business morals remain, which is the principal cause
of the difficulties experienced by European merchants in dealing with
them” (_Things Japanese_, 4th ed., p. 93).
[217] Nitobé, _Bushido_, p. 67.
[218] The statement has obtained wide currency that all the banks in
Japan employ only Chinese as cashiers because they cannot find honest
Japanese for these positions of trust. Chinese are sometimes employed
in Japanese banks, but the true reason for their employment is not the
one here assigned. One well qualified to speak authoritatively on this
subject says:
Chinese bankers and cashiers are largely Shansi men, that is,
men from the province of Shansi, where the profession of banking
has become hereditary in a large number of families. They are
all, or nearly all, members of the powerful organization known
as the Bankers’ Guild, which has branches in every part of the
Empire. The Bankers’ Guild has discovered that it is practically
impossible to conduct large financial operations without honesty;
and it therefore enforces honesty by means of a discipline that
is as rigorous ... as that of the New York Stock Exchange.... If
a Chinese banker breaks faith, violates a contract, or betrays a
trust, he is expelled from his guild and the doors of banks are
closed against him for all time. In the first place, therefore, the
Chinese cashier is honest because honesty is a condition of his
business existence. He may not be honest in other respects,--often
he is not,--but he is absolutely honest in the handling of money.
In the second place, he is probably the most expert man living in
the rapid calculation of exchanges. The monetary system of his
country is the most confused, chaotic, and complicated system in
the world. There are fifteen or twenty different kinds of taels,
no one of which bears a fixed relation to any other, or to any
established monetary standard.... The necessity of dealing in some
way with this great mass of unstable and fluctuating currency and
of earning a subsistence from it has made the Chinese cashier one
of the most expert of living accountants. He will solve difficult
monetary problems by short cuts of mental arithmetic, and he
calculates exchanges to eight points of decimals. In the third
place, the Chinese cashier counts and manipulates bank bills and
coins with extraordinary skill and accuracy. I have had dealings
with him in many parts of the Far East, but I cannot remember ever
to have seen him count a sum of money twice, and I have never
caught him in an error....
Now, when you get a man whose honesty is guaranteed by his guild,
whose manipulation of money is phenomenally dexterous, and who can
calculate exchanges to eight points of decimals, you have an ideal
cashier; and if Japanese bankers employ him, it shows their good
business sense rather than their distrust of their own people. But
all Japanese bankers do not employ him. In some of the largest
banks in Tokyo, Kioto, and Osaka there are no Chinese at all--or
at least I have never seen any. This explanation would not be
worth, perhaps, the space that I have given to it, if the story of
the Chinese cashier had not been so widely circulated, and if it
were not typical of a whole class of cases in which the Japanese
are misjudged on the basis of a single incident or a solitary
fact.--GEORGE KENNAN, “Are the Japanese Honest?” the New York
_Outlook_ for August 31, 1912.
[219] “If the descendants of the samurai can erect a standard of
commercial integrity at all comparable to their fine record for courage
and loyalty, we shall be their debtors, not they ours.”--The New York
_Nation_ for July 30, 1908, p. 90.
[220] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 343.
[221] Baron Kikuchi, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in
Schools_ (1908), vol. ii, p. 331.
[222] _Ibid._ vol. ii, p. 319.
[223] _Ibid._ vol. ii, p. 230.
[224] “I certainly consider that the courage and devotion of the
Japanese soldiers during the late war was to a great extent the result
of this systematic moral instruction and training in schools.”--BARON
KIKUCHI, in Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_ (1908),
vol. ii, p. 344.
[225] Wedgwood (_The Moral Ideal_, 3d ed., p. 22) suggestively
likens the reduction to unity of the various gods of polytheism to
the correlation of the physical forces--light, heat, electricity,
and magnetism. Just as all these are found to be merely different
manifestations of a single force or energy, so are all the deified
phenomena of nature at last discovered to be but different
manifestations of a single primal power--the One, the Supreme, the
Eternal. This correlation of the gods, this reduction of polytheism to
monotheism, holds the same place in the records of the religious and
moral evolution of the race that the correlation of the physical forces
holds in the records of the progress of science.
[226] There may be some philosophers and scientists who profess
materialism, and who make an infinite and eternal unconscious energy
the primal cause of all things. But this is a philosophy of the
universe which has never secured a wide acceptance in the West.
[227] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 59.
[228] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 356.
[229] This was the work of the Brahmans, who, to secure the ascendancy
of their own class, falsified and misinterpreted the sacred books.
[230] _Laws of Manu_ (Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxv), i. 31, 87.
[231] Cf. Hearn, _Kokora_, chap. xii.
[232] _Laws of Manu_, vi. 63.
[233] _Ibid._ xii. 9, 53–58. The germs out of which this system was
developed by the Brahmans formed a part of the animistic conception of
the world held by the conquered natives. By the sixth century B.C. the
system had been fully elaborated. See Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_
(1881), pp. 16 f.
[234] The theory was also undoubtedly in part the creation of the same
ethical necessity that called into existence the purgatory of the
medieval Church. The reincarnations have for aim and purpose not merely
retribution, but expiation and purification.
[235] The reader of Edward Beecher’s _The Conflict of Ages_, wherein
the author attempts to explain the inequalities of earthly life by
the theory of preëxistence, will be able to appreciate this effort of
Indian philosophers to solve the same problem.
[236] Indian pessimism is doubtless to be attributed in part to the
hot, depressing climate, but more largely to the burdensome caste
system and an oppressive government, which made free and joyous life
impossible to the masses, shutting them up, without hope, to an
existence of ache and pain and wretchedness. “Politics and society,
in our opinion,” says Dr. Hopkins, “had more to do with altering the
religion of India than had a higher temperature and miasma” (_The
Religions of India_ (1895), p. 199). But cf. Bloomfield, _The Religion
of the Veda_ (1908), pp. 263 ff.
[237] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 149.
[238] _Ibid._ p. 187.
[239] This Brahmanic notion of sacrifice, that the gods need food,
is the underlying notion in all religions of which sacrifices form
a part. “That the purpose of sacrifice was simply to feed the gods
was admitted on all sides in the controversy which accompanied the
diffusion of Christianity in the ancient world.... The altar, in the
words of Dean Spenser, was merely the table on which food and drink
were set before the languishing deity” (Payne, _History of the New
World called America_ (1892), vol. i, pp. xi f.). “It is on precisely
the same principle that the Mexicans kept their great war-gods ...
alive and vigorous by the blood of young human victims selected from
their tributaries, and the Peruvians maintained the Creator, Sun, Moon,
and Thunder, on whose favor their crops depended, in youth and vigor by
the continual smoke of burnt llamas” (_Ibid._ vol. i, p. 484). Consult
also Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, and Osiris_. All these were divinities of
vegetation, which were believed to die and to come to life again, as
with the revolution of the seasons vegetation died and was renewed.
Along with this belief went the notion that by magical ceremonies
the worshipers of the gods could aid them in recovering their wasted
energies.
[240] _Laws of Manu_, i. 88–91.
[241] _Ibid._ i. 93.
[242] _Ibid._ ii. 32, 35.
[243] _The Gentoo Code_ (1776), xvi. 1.
[244] _Laws of Manu_, iv. 80, 81.
[245] _Ibid._ viii. 379.
[246] _Ibid._ viii. 380.
[247] _Ibid._ viii. 381.
[248] _Ibid._ iv. 147.
[249] _Laws of Manu_, xi. 247.
[250] _Ibid._ iv. 148.
[251] Even the sudra is not shut out from this hope. If he be pure, the
faithful servant of his betters, gentle in his speech and free from
pride, he will at death be reborn into a higher caste (_Laws of Manu_,
ix. 335).
[252] _Laws of Manu_, xi. 60, 69, 71, 72, 132–138, 140–142, 144.
Especially severe is the penance imposed for killing a cow. See _Ibid._
xi. 109–117.
[253] _Ibid._ vi. 68.
[254] _Ibid._ vi. 69.
[255] It is better, however, to abstain wholly from the use of meat,
since this can be obtained only through pain to sentient beings (_Laws
of Manu_, v. 48). There is no sin in eating meat, “but abstention
brings great rewards” (_Ibid._ v. 56).
[256] _Laws of Manu_, v. 40.
[257] _Ibid._ v. 45.
[258] _Ibid._ vii. 101.
[259] _Ibid._ vii. 103.
[260] _Laws of Manu_, vii. 90–93, 104.
[261] _Ibid._ viii. 84.
[262] _Ibid._ v. 106.
[263] _Ibid._ xi. 231.
[264] _Ibid._ vi. 48.
[265] _Ibid._ viii. 312.
[266] _Laws of Manu_, viii. 313.
[267] Gautama or Buddha, “The Enlightened,” the founder of Buddhism,
died about B.C. 480. Long before he began his teachings moral reform
was in the air in India. Many reforming sects came into existence. The
most important of these was the sect of the Jains. The central teaching
of Jainism is the sacredness of all life, and its first and chief
commandment, Do no harm to any living thing. Its spirit of universal
benevolence left a deep impress not only upon Buddhism but also upon
later Hinduism.
[268] _Dhammapada_ (Sacred Books of the East, 2d ed., vol. x), xiv.
190, 191. Cf. Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 209.
[269] Oldenberg, _Buddha_, p. 286.
[270] Cf. Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), p. 21; Hopkins, _The
Religions of India_ (1895), pp. 316 f.
[271] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 220.
[272] _Dhammapada_, xx. 283. This doctrine that peace and contentment
of mind come through suppression of desire was also the teaching of the
Greek Cynics.
[273] “No sentient being can tell in what state the karma that he
possesses will appoint his next birth, though he may be now, and
continue to be until death, one of the most meritorious of men. In that
karma may be the crime of murder, committed many ages ago, but not
yet expiated; and in the next existence its punishment may have to be
endured. There will ultimately be a reward for that which is good, but
it may be long delayed. It acts like an hereditary disease.”--HARDY,
_Manual of Buddhism_ (1880), p. 411.
[274] “The difficulties attendant upon this peculiar dogma [karma] may
be seen in the fact that it is almost universally repudiated.... In
historical composition, in narrative, and in conversation, the common
idea of transmigration is continually presented” (Hardy, _Manual of
Buddhism_ (1880), p. 412). By 250 B.C. “in the North and also in the
South the old heresy of the soul-theory had crept back by side issue
into the doctrine from which it had been categorically and explicitly
excluded by Gautama and his earlier followers” (Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_
(1896), p. 198).
[275] _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), pp. 31, 206. Cf. Hopkins, _The
Religions of India_ (1895), p. 321.
[276] But this, as we have just seen, is not the Buddhism of the
Buddhist world in general. The masses in Buddhist lands have never
accepted the doctrine of Nirvana in the sense of extinction of
existence. The following conversation between Moncure Conway and a
Singhalese priest discloses the meaning of the term to an orthodox
Buddhist of Ceylon: “I asked, ‘Have those who are in Nirvana any
consciousness?’ I was then informed that there is no Singhalese word
for consciousness. Sumangala said, ‘To reach Nirvana is to be no more.’
I pointed to a stone step and said, ‘One is there only as that stone is
here?’ ‘Not so much,’ answered the priest; ‘for the stone is actually
here, but in Nirvana there is no existence at all’” (_My Pilgrimage to
the Wise Men of the East_ (1906), p. 134).
[277] These eight requirements are often condensed into four, and then
the formula is called the fourfold path to deliverance.
[278] Cf. Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 211; Hopkins, _The Religions
of India_ (1895), p. 305.
[279] There is in this teaching respecting desirelessness an apparent
inconsistency, for with all other desires suppressed, there remains
the desire for Nirvana. But the difficulty here is only apparent. A
Buddhist priest, questioned respecting this, replied as follows: “The
desire for Nirvana escapes from the mesh that entangles all other
desires, because it is not desire for any object at all” (Conway,
_My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East_ (1906), p. 134). But all
other desires aside from this desire for Nirvana are in a sense sins
of covetousness. And this is the cardinal sin in the view of the true
Buddhist, for covetousness “is a strong desire for something, and all
desire is a hindrance in one’s way to Nirvana.”
[280] This teaching that mental illumination comes through
contemplation is the doctrine in general of the religious and moral
teachers of the East, and of all mystics. It differs fundamentally from
the scientific view, which makes observation and study the means of
enlightenment.
[281] Buddhism limits transmigration to the animal creation;
Brahmanism, it will be recalled, supposes the soul to transmigrate into
vegetable as well as into animal forms.
[282] “To be a true Buddhist, one must renounce, as lust, all desire
of evil, which brings evil; and must live without other hope than that
of extinguishing all desire and passion, believing that in so doing
he will at death be annihilated.”--HOPKINS, _The Religions of India_
(1895), p. 564.
[283] _Dhammapada_, vii. 90–99.
[284] But--and differing in this from Dr. Hopkins--Professor Rhys
Davids makes this perfection which results in annihilation to consist
not in the extinction of every desire, but only of craving desire and
evil passions.
[285] _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 322.
[286] Hopkins, _The Religions of India_ (1895), p. 317. Stoicism indeed
approaches Buddhism in this respect; but its attitude toward the
doctrine of a future life was in general merely agnostic--it made no
positive denial of immortality.
[287] Cf. Rhys Davids, _Hibbert Lectures_ (1881), p. 123.
[288] Zeller represents Pythagoreanism as springing from an effort to
give an ethical content to life. “We may consider it proved,” he says,
“that the school of Pythagoras, believing in the almighty favor of the
gods, and in future retribution, enforced purity of life, moderation
and justice, minute self-examination and discretion in all actions, and
especially discouraged self-conceit” (_History of Philosophy_ (1881),
vol. i, p. 496). Oldenberg (_Ancient India_ (1896), p. 87) conceives
Pythagoreanism--together with the Orphic worship--as “a bit of Buddhism
in the midst of Greek civilization.”
[289] Gautama’s attitude toward ascetic practices is shown by the
following: “Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or
lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can
purify a mortal who has not overcome desires” (_Dhammapada_, x. 141).
[290] Oldenberg, _Buddha_ (1882), p. 366.