Even with actions which work diffused and indefinite mischiefs it

is the same. Suppose that the man, instead of being dealt with

fraudulently, is calumniated. There is, as before, a hinderance to the

carrying on of life-sustaining activities; for the loss of character

detrimentally affects his business. Nor is this all. The mental

depression caused partially incapacitates him for energetic activity,

and perhaps brings on ill-health. So that maliciously or carelessly

propagating false statements tends both to diminish his life and to

diminish his ability to maintain life. Hence its flagitiousness.

Moreover, if we trace to their ultimate ramifications the effects

wrought by any of these acts which morality called intuitive

reprobates--if we ask what results not to the individual himself only,

but also to his belongings--if we observe how impoverishment hinders

the rearing of his children, by entailing under-feeding or inadequate

clothing, resulting perhaps in the death of some and the constitutional

injury of others; we see that by the necessary connections of things

these acts, besides tending primarily to lower the life of the

individual aggressed upon, tend, secondarily, to lower the lives of all

his family, and thirdly, to lower the life of society at large; which

is damaged by whatever damages its units.

A more distinct meaning will now be seen in the statement that the

utilitarianism which recognizes only the principles of conduct reached

by induction, is but preparatory to the utilitarianism which deduces

these principles from the processes of life as carried on under

established conditions of existence.

§22. Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset,

that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special

tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general

defect--they neglect ultimate causal connections. Of course I do not

mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but

I mean that they recognize them only incidentally. They do not erect

into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes

and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statement of

them.

Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently

generalizes these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage

at which its empirical generalizations are included in a rational

generalization, does it become developed science. Astronomy has already

passed through its successive stages: first collections of facts; then

inductions from them; and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as

corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space.

Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared,

have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological

changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted

that Geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes

are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in

the cooling and solidifying earth, exposed to the sun's heat and the

action of the moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and

is still, exhibiting a like series of steps; the evolution of organic

forms at large is being affiliated on physical actions in operations

from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents are

coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed

of matters that are affected by certain forces and disengage other

forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling

ignored everything like cause, save in recognizing those effects of

habits which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs;

but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as

correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that

is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes:

the implication being that Psychology becomes a science as fast as

these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate

principles. Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by

stray ideas about social organization, scattered through the masses of

worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognized

by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from

time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalizations, are

now beginning to assume the character of generalizations made coherent

by derivation from causes lying in human nature placed under given

conditions. Clearly then, Ethics, which is a science dealing with the

conduct of associated human beings, regarded under one of its aspects,

has to undergo a like transformation; and, at present undeveloped,

can be considered a developed science only when it has undergone this

transformation.

A preparation in the simpler sciences is pre-supposed. Ethics has a

physical aspect; since it treats of human activities which, in common

with all expenditures or energy, conform to the law of the persistence

of energy: moral principles must conform to physical necessities. It

has a biological aspect; since it concerns certain effects, inner and

outer, individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the

highest type of animal. It has a psychological aspect; for its subject

matter is an aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and

guided by intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect; for these

actions, some of them directly and all of them indirectly, affect

associated beings.

What is the implication? Belonging under one aspect to each of these

sciences--physical, biological, psychological, sociological--it can

find its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths

which are common to all of them. Already we have concluded in a general

way that conduct at large, including the conduct Ethics deals with, is

to be fully understood only as an aspect of evolving life; and now we

are brought to this conclusion in a more special way.

§ 23. Here, then, we have to enter on the consideration of moral

phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding

that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has

wrought out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved--if the

solar system as a whole, the earth as a part of it, the life in general

which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism--if

the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in

common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest--if

one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary

implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest

creatures with which Morality is concerned, also conform.

The preceding volumes have prepared the way for dealing with morals

as thus conceived. Utilizing the conclusions they contain, let

us now observe what data are furnished by these. We will take in

succession--the physical view, the biological view, the psychological

view, and the sociological view.

CHAPTER V.

THE PHYSICAL VIEW.

§ 24. Every moment we pass instantly from men's perceived actions to

the motives implied by them; and so are led to formulate these actions

in mental terms rather than in bodily terms. Thoughts and feelings are

referred to when we speak of any one's deeds with praise or blame; not

those outer manifestations which reveal the thoughts and feelings.

Hence we become oblivious of the truth that conduct as actually

experienced consists of changes recognized by touch, sight and hearing.

This habit of contemplating only the psychical face of conduct, is so

confirmed that an effort is required to contemplate only the physical

face. Undeniable as it is that another's behavior to us is made up of

movements of his body and limbs, of his facial muscles, and of his

vocal apparatus, it yet seems paradoxical to say that these are the

only elements of conduct really known by us, while the elements of

conduct which we exclusively think of as constituting it, are not known

but inferred.

Here, however, ignoring for the time being the inferred elements in

conduct, we have to deal with the perceived elements--we have to

observe its traits considered as a set of combined motions. Taking

the evolution point of view, and remembering that while an aggregate

evolves, not only the matter composing it, but also the motion of that

matter, passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite

coherent heterogeneity, we have now to ask whether conduct as it rises

to its higher forms, displays in increasing degrees these characters;

and whether it does not display them in the greatest degree when it

reaches that highest form which we call moral.

§ 25. It will be convenient to deal first with the trait of increasing

coherence. The conduct of lowly-organized creatures is broadly

contrasted with the conduct of highly-organized creatures in having

its successive portions feebly connected. The random movements which

animalcule makes have severally no reference to movements made a

moment before; nor do they affect in specific ways the movements made

immediately after. To-day's wanderings of a fish in search of food,

though perhaps showing by their adjustments to catching different

kinds of prey at different hours, a slightly-determined order, are

unrelated to the wanderings of yesterday and to-morrow. But such more

developed creatures as birds, show us in the building of nests, the

sitting on eggs, the rearing of chicks, and the aiding of them after

they fly, sets of motions which form a dependent series, extending over

a considerable period. And on observing the complexity of the acts

performed in fetching and fixing the fibres of the nest or in catching

and bringing to the young each portion of food, we discover in the

combined motions, lateral cohesion as well as longitudinal cohesion.

Man, even in his lowest state, displays in his conduct far more

coherent combinations of motions. By the elaborate manipulations gone

through in making weapons that are to serve for the chase next year,

or in building canoes and wigwams for permanent uses--by acts of

aggression and defense which are connected with injuries long since

received or committed, the savage exhibits an aggregate of motions

which, in some of its parts, holds together over great periods.

Moreover, if we consider the many movements implied by the transactions

of each day, in the wood, on the water, in the camp, in the family, we

see that this coherent aggregate of movements is composed of many minor

aggregates that are severally coherent within themselves and with one

another.

In civilized man this trait of developed conduct becomes more

conspicuous still. Be his business what it may, its processes involve

relatively numerous dependent motions; and day by day it is so carried

on as to show connections between present motions and motions long gone

by, as well as motions anticipated in the distant future. Besides the

many doings, related to one another, which the farmer goes through in

looking after his cattle, directing his laborers, keeping an eye on his

dairy, buying his implements, selling his produce, etc., the business

of getting his lease involves numerous combined movements on which the

movements of subsequent years depend; and in manuring his fields with a

view to larger returns, or putting down drains with the like motive, he

is performing acts which are parts of a coherent combination relatively

extensive. That the like holds of the shopkeeper, manufacturer,

banker, is manifest; and this increased coherence of conduct among the

civilized will strike us even more when we remember how its parts

are often continued in a connected arrangement through life, for the

purpose of making a fortune, founding a family, gaining a seat in

Parliament.

Now mark that a greater coherence among its component motions broadly

distinguishes the conduct we call moral from the conduct we call

immoral. The application of the word dissolute to the last, and of the

word self-restrained to the first, implies this--implies that conduct

of the lower kind, constituted of disorderly acts, has its parts

relatively loose in their relations with one another; while conduct

of the higher kind, habitually following a fixed order, so gains a

characteristic unity and coherence. In proportion as the conduct is

what we call moral, it exhibits comparatively settled connections

between antecedents and consequents; for the doing right implies that

under given conditions the combined motions constituting conduct

will follow in a way that can be specified. Contrariwise, in the

conduct of one whose principles are not high, the sequences of motions

are doubtful. He may pay the money or he may not; he may keep his

appointment or he may fail; he may tell the truth or he may lie. The

words trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, as used to characterize

the two respectively, sufficiently imply that the actions of the one

can be foreknown while those of the other cannot; and this implies that

the successive movements composing the one bear more constant relations

to one another than do those composing the other--are more coherent.

§ 26. Indefiniteness accompanies incoherence in conduct that is little

evolved; and throughout the ascending stages of evolving conduct there

is an increasingly definite co-ordination of the motions constituting

it.

Such changes of form as the rudest protozoa show us, are utterly

vague--admit of no precise description; and though in higher kinds the

movements of the parts are more definable, yet the movement of the

whole in respect of direction is indeterminate: there is no adjustment

of it to this or the other point in space. In such coelenterate animals

as polypes we see the parts moving in ways which lack precision; and in

one of the locomotive forms, as a medusa, the course taken, otherwise

at random, can be described only as one which carries it toward the

light, where degrees of light and darkness are present. Among annulose

creatures the contrast between the track of a worm, turning this way or

that at hazard, and the definite course taken by a bee in its flight

from flower to flower or back to the hive, shows us the same thing;

the bee's acts in building cells and feeding larvæ further exhibiting

precision in the simultaneous movements as well as in the successive

movements. Though the motions made by a fish in pursuing its prey have

considerable definiteness, yet they are of a simple kind, and are

in this respect contrasted with the many definite motions of body,

head, and limbs gone through by a carnivorous mammal in the course of

waylaying, running down, and seizing a herbivore; and further, the fish

shows us none of those definitely adjusted sets of motions which in the

mammal subserve the rearing of young.

Much greater definiteness, if not in the combined movements forming

single acts, still in the adjustments of many combined acts to various

purposes, characterizes human conduct, even in its lowest stages. In

making and using weapons and in the maneuverings of savage warfare,

numerous movements, all precise in their adaptations to proximate ends,

are arranged for the achievement of remote ends, with a precision not

paralleled among lower creatures. The lives of civilized men exhibit

this trait far more conspicuously. Each industrial art exemplifies

the effects of movements which are severally definite; and which are

definitely arranged in simultaneous and successive order. Business

transactions of every kind are characterized by exact relations between

the sets of motions constituting acts, and the purposes fulfilled,

in time, place, and quantity. Further, the daily routine of each

person shows us in its periods and amounts of activity, of rest, of

relaxation, a measured arrangement which is not shown us by the doings

of the wandering savage, who has no fixed times for hunting, sleeping,

feeding, or any one kind of action.

Moral conduct differs from immoral conduct in the same manner and in a

like degree. The conscientious man is exact in all his transactions.

He supplies a precise weight for a specified sum; he gives a definite

quality in fulfillment of understanding; he pays the full amount he

bargained to do. In times as well as in quantities, his acts answer

completely to anticipations. If he has made a business contract he

is to the day; if an appointment he is to the minute. Similarly in

respect of truth: his statements correspond accurately with the facts.

It is thus too in his family life. He maintains marital relations that

are definite in contrast with the relations that result from breach

of the marriage contract; and as a father, fitting his behavior with

care to the nature of each child and to the occasion; he avoids the

too much and the too little of praise or blame, reward or penalty.

Nor is it otherwise in his miscellaneous acts. To say that he deals

equitably with those he employs, whether they behave well or ill, is

to say that he adjusts his acts to their deserts; and to say that he

is judicious in his charities, is to say that he portions out his aid

with discrimination instead of distributing it indiscriminately to

good and bad, as do those who have no adequate sense of their social

responsibilities.

That progress toward rectitude of conduct is progress toward

duly-proportioned conduct, and that duly-proportioned conduct is

relatively definite, we may see from another point of view. One of

the traits of conduct we call immoral, is excess; while moderation

habitually characterizes moral conduct. Now excesses imply extreme

divergences of actions from some medium, while maintenance of the

medium is implied by moderation; whence it follows that actions of the

last kind can be defined more nearly than those of the first. Clearly

conduct which, being unrestrained, runs into great and incalculable

oscillations, therein differs from restrained conduct of which, by

implication, the oscillations fall within narrower limits. And falling

within narrower limits necessitates relative definiteness of movements.

§ 27. That throughout the ascending forms of life, along with

increasing heterogeneity of structure and function, there goes

increasing heterogeneity of conduct--increasing diversity in the sets

of external motions and combined sets of such motions--needs not be

shown in detail. Nor need it be shown that becoming relatively great

in the motions constituting the conduct of the uncivilized man, this

heterogeneity has become still greater in those which the civilized man

goes through. We may pass at once to that further degree of the like

contrast which we see on ascending from the conduct of the immoral to

that of the moral.

Instead of recognizing this contrast, most readers will be inclined to

identify a moral life with a life little varied in its activities. But

here we come upon a defect in the current conception of morality. This

comparative uniformity in the aggregate of motions, which goes along

with morality as commonly conceived, is not only not moral but is the

reverse of moral. The better a man fulfills every requirement of life,

alike as regards his own body and mind, as regards the bodies and minds

of those dependent on him, and as regards the bodies and minds of his

fellow-citizens, the more varied do his activities become. The more

fully he does all these things, the more heterogeneous must be his

movements.

One who satisfies personal needs only, goes through other things equal,

less multiform processes than one who also administers to the needs

of wife and children. Supposing there are no other differences, the

addition of family relations necessarily renders the actions of the

man who fulfills the duties of husband and parent, more heterogeneous

than those of the man who has no such duties to fulfill, or, having

them, does not fulfill them; and to say that his actions are more

heterogeneous is to say that there is a greater heterogeneity in

the combined motions he goes through. The like holds of social

obligations. These, in proportion as a citizen duly performs them,

complicate his movements considerably. If he is helpful to inferiors

dependent on him, if he takes a part in political agitation, if he aids

in diffusing knowledge, he, in each of these ways, adds to his kinds of

activity--makes his sets of movements more multiform; so differing from

the man who is the slave of one desire or group of desires.

Though it is unusual to consider as having a moral aspect, those

activities which culture involves, yet to the few who hold that due

exercise of all the higher faculties, intellectual and æsthetic,

must be included in the conception of complete life, here identified

with the ideally moral life, it will be manifest that a further

heterogeneity is implied by them. For each of such activities,

constituted by that play of these faculties which is eventually

added to their life-subserving uses, adds to the multiformity of the

aggregated motions.

Briefly, then, if the conduct is the best possible on every occasion,

it follows that as the occasions are endlessly varied the acts will

be endlessly varied to suit--the heterogeneity in the combinations of

motions will be extreme.

§ 28. Evolution in conduct considered under its moral aspect, is, like

all other evolution, toward equilibrium. I do not mean that it is

toward the equilibrium reached at death, though this is, of course, the

final state which the evolution of the highest man has in common with

all lower evolution; but I mean that it is toward a moving equilibrium.

We have seen that maintaining life, expressed in physical terms, is

maintaining a balanced combination of internal actions in face of

external forces tending to overthrow it; and we have seen that advance

toward a higher life, has been an acquirement of ability to maintain

the balance for a longer period, by the successive additions of

organic appliances which by their actions counteract, more and more

fully, the disturbing forces. Here, then, we are led to the conclusion

that the life called moral is one in which this maintenance of the

moving equilibrium reaches completeness, or approaches most nearly to

completeness.

This truth is clearly disclosed on observing how those physiological

rhythms which vaguely show themselves when organization begins, become

more regular, as well as more various in their kinds, as organization

advances. Periodicity is but feebly marked in the actions, inner

and outer, of the rudest types. Where life is low there is passive

dependence on the accidents of the environment; and this entails

great irregularities in the vital processes. The taking in of food by

a polype is at intervals now short, now very long, as circumstances

determine; and the utilization of it is by a slow dispersion of

the absorbed part through the tissues, aided only by the irregular

movements of the creature's body; while, such æration as is effected

is similarly without a trace of rhythm. Much higher up we still find

very imperfect periodicities; as in the inferior molluscs which, though

possessed of vascular systems, have no proper circulation, but merely

a slow movement of the crude blood, now in one direction through the

vessels and then, after a pause, in the opposite direction. Only

with well-developed structures do there come a rhythmical pulse and

a rhythm of the respiratory actions. And then in birds and mammals,

along with great rapidity and regularity in these essential rhythms,

and along with a consequently great vital activity and therefore great

expenditure, comparative regularity in the rhythm of the alimentary

actions is established, as well as in the rhythm of activity and rest;

since the rapid waste to which rapid pulsation and respiration are

instrumental, necessitates tolerably regular supplies of nutriment, as

well as recurring intervals of sleep during which repair may overtake

waste. And from these stages the moving equilibrium characterized

by such interdependent rhythms, is continually made better by the

counteracting of more and more of those actions which tend to perturb

it.

So is it as we ascend from savage to civilized and from the lowest

among the civilized to the highest. The rhythm of external actions

required to maintain the rhythm of internal actions becomes at once

more complicated and more complete, making them into a better moving

equilibrium. The irregularities which their conditions of existence

entail on primitive men, continually cause wide deviations from the

mean state of the moving equilibrium--wide oscillations; which imply

imperfection of it for the time being, and bring about its premature

overthrow. In such civilized men as we call ill conducted, frequent

perturbations of the moving equilibrium are caused by those excesses

characterizing a career in which the periodicities are much broken; and

a common result is that the rhythm of the internal actions being often

deranged, the moving equilibrium, rendered by so much imperfect, is

generally shortened in duration. While one in whom the internal rhythms

are best maintained is one by whom the external actions required to

fulfill all needs and duties, severally performed on the recurring

occasions, conduce to a moving equilibrium that is at once involved and

prolonged.

Of course the implication is that the man who thus reaches the limit

of evolution, exists in a society congruous with his nature, is a man

among men similarly constituted, who are severally in harmony with that

social environment which they have formed. This is, indeed, the only

possibility. For the production of the highest type of man can go on

only _pari passu_ with the production of the highest type of society.

The implied conditions are those before described as accompanying the

most evolved conduct--conditions under which each can fulfill all his

needs and rear the due number of progeny, not only without hindering

others from doing the like, but while aiding them in doing the like.

And evidently, considered under its physical aspect, the conduct of the

individual so constituted, and associated with like individuals, is one

in which all the actions, that is the combined motions of all kinds,

have become such as duly to meet every daily process, every ordinary

occurrence, and every contingency in his environment. Complete life in

a complete society is but another name for complete equilibrium between

the co-ordinated activities of each social unit and those of the

aggregate of units.

§ 29. Even to readers of preceding volumes, and still more to other

readers, there will seem a strangeness, or even an absurdity, in this

presentation of moral conduct in physical terms. It has been needful

to make it, however. If that re-distribution of matter and motion

constituting evolution goes on in all aggregates, its laws must be

fulfilled in the most developed being as in every other thing; and his

actions, when decomposed into motions, must exemplify its laws. This

we find that they do. There is an entire correspondence between moral

evolution and evolution as physically defined.

Conduct, as actually known to us in perception, and not as interpreted

into the accompanying feelings and ideas, consists of combined motions.

On ascending through the various grades of animate creatures, we

find these combined motions characterized by increasing coherence,

increasing definiteness considered singly and in their co-ordinated

groups, and increasing heterogeneity; and in advancing from lower to

higher types of man, as well as in advancing from the less moral to

the more moral type of man, these traits of evolving conduct become

more marked still. Further, we see that the increasing coherence,

definiteness, and heterogeneity, of the combined motions, are

instrumental to the better maintenance of a moving equilibrium. Where

the evolution is small this is very imperfect and soon cut short;

with advancing evolution, bringing greater power and intelligence, it

becomes more steady and longer continued in face of adverse actions; in

the human race at large it is comparatively regular and enduring; and

its regularity and enduringness are greatest in the highest.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW.

§ 30. The truth that the ideally moral man is one in whom the moving

equilibrium is perfect, or approaches nearest to perfection, becomes,

when translated into physiological language, the truth that he is one

in whom the functions of all kinds are duly fulfilled. Each function

has some relation, direct or indirect, to the needs of life: the fact

of its existence as a result of evolution, being itself a proof that it

has been entailed, immediately or remotely, by the adjustment of inner

actions to outer actions. Consequently, non-fulfillment of it in normal

proportion is non-fulfillment of a requisite to complete life. If there

is defective discharge of the function, the organism experiences some

detrimental result caused by the inadequacy. If the discharge is in

excess, there is entailed a reaction upon the other functions, which in

some way diminishes their efficiencies.

It is true that during full vigor, while the momentum of the organic

actions is great, the disorder caused by moderate excess or defect of

any one function, soon disappears--the balance is re-established. But

it is none the less true that always some disorder results from excess

or defect, that it influences every function, bodily and mental, and

that it constitutes a lowering of the life for the time being.

Beyond the temporary falling short of complete life implied by

undue or inadequate discharge of a function there is entailed, as

an ultimate result, decreased length of life. If some function is

habitually performed in excess of the requirement, or in defect of

the requirement; and if, as a consequence, there is an often repeated

perturbation of the functions at large, there results some chronic

derangement in the balance of the functions. Necessarily reacting on

the structures, and registering in them its accumulated effects, this

derangement works a general deterioration; and when the vital energies

begin to decline, the moving equilibrium, further from perfection than

it would else have been, is sooner overthrown: death is more or less

premature.

Hence the moral man is one whose functions--many and varied in their

kinds, as we have seen--are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted to

the conditions of existence.

§ 31. Strange as the conclusion looks, it is nevertheless a conclusion

to be here drawn, that the performance of every function is, in a

sense, a moral obligation.

It is usually thought that morality requires us only to restrain such

vital activities as, in our present state, are often pushed to excess,

or such as conflict with average welfare, special or general; but

it also requires us to carry on these vital activities up to their

normal limits. All the animal functions, in common with all the higher

functions, have, as thus understood, their imperativeness. While

recognizing the fact that in our state of transition, characterized

by very imperfect adaptation of constitution of conditions, moral

obligations of supreme kinds often necessitate conduct which is

physically injurious; we must also recognize the fact that, considered

apart from other effects, it is immoral so to treat the body as in any

way to diminish the fullness or vigor of its vitality.

Hence results one test of actions. There may in every case be put the

questions--Does the action tend to maintenance of complete life for

the time being? and does it tend to prolongation of life to its full

extent? To answer yes or no to either of these questions, is implicitly

to class the action as right or wrong in respect of its immediate

bearings, whatever it may be in respect of its remote bearings.

The seeming paradoxicalness of this statement results from the

tendency, so difficult of avoidance, to judge a conclusion which

presupposes an ideal humanity, by its applicability to humanity as

now existing. The foregoing conclusion refers to that highest conduct

in which, as we have seen, the evolution of conduct terminates--that

conduct in which the making of all adjustments of acts to ends

subserving complete individual life, together with all those subserving

maintenance of offspring and preparation of them for maturity, not only

consist with the making of like adjustments by others, but furthers

it. And this conception of conduct in its ultimate form implies

the conception of a nature having such conduct for its spontaneous

outcome--the product of its normal activities. So understanding the

matter, it becomes manifest that under such conditions any falling

short of function, as well as any excess of function, implies deviation

from the best conduct or from perfectly moral conduct.

§ 32. Thus far in treating of conduct from the biological point

of view, we have considered its constituent actions under their

physiological aspects only; leaving out of sight their psychological

aspects. We have recognized the bodily changes and have ignored the

accompanying mental changes. And at first sight it seems needful for

us here to do this; since taking account of states of consciousness

apparently implies an inclusion of the psychological view in the

biological view.

This is not so however. As was pointed out in the _Principles of

Psychology_, §§ 52, 53, we enter upon psychology proper only when

we begin to treat of mental states and their relations considered

as referring to external agents and their relations. While we

concern ourselves exclusively with modes of mind as correlatives of

nervous changes, we are treating of what was there distinguished as

æstho-physiology. We pass to psychology only when we consider the

correspondence between the connections among subjective states and the

connections among objective actions. Here, then, without transgressing

the limits of our immediate topic, we may deal with feelings and

functions in their mutual dependencies.

We cannot omit doing this; because the psychical changes which

accompany many of the physical changes in the organism are biological

factors in two ways. Those feelings, classed as sensations, which,

directly initiated in the bodily framework, go along with certain

states of the vital organs and more conspicuously with certain states

of the external organs, now serve mainly as guides to the performance

of functions, but partly as stimuli, and now serve mainly as stimuli,

but in a smaller degree as guides. Visual sensations which, as

co-ordinated, enable us to direct our movements, also, if vivid, raise

the rate of respiration; while sensations of cold and heat, greatly

depressing or raising the vital actions, serve also for purposes of

discrimination. So, too, the feelings classed as emotions, which are

not localizable in the bodily framework, act in more general ways,

alike as guides and stimuli--having influences over the performance

of functions more potent even than have most sensations. Fear, at the

same time that it urges flight and evolves the forces spent in it,

also affects the heart and the alimentary canal; while joy, prompting

persistence in the actions bringing it, simultaneously exalts the

visceral processes.

Hence, in treating of conduct under its biological aspect, we are

compelled to consider that interaction of feelings and functions which

is essential to animal life in all its more developed forms.

§ 33. In the _Principles of Psychology_, § 124, it was shown that

necessarily, throughout the animate world at large, "pains are the

correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are

the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare;" since "it is

an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of Evolution, that races

of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other

conditions." The argument was as follows:

If we substitute for the word Pleasure the equivalent phrase--a

feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there,

and if we substitute for the word Pain the equivalent phrase--a

feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out;

we see at once that if the states of consciousness which a creature

endeavors to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and

if the states of consciousness which it endeavors to expel are the

correlatives of beneficial actions, it must quickly disappear through

persistence in the injurious, and avoidance of the beneficial. In

other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which,

on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with

activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable

and habitually avoided feelings went along with activities directly

or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been,

other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals

among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were

the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.

Fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in

living things, even before consciousness arises; and after the rise

of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than

to become better established. At the very outset, life is maintained

by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts

which impede it; and whenever sentiency make its appearance as an

accompaniment, its forms must be such that in the one case the produced

feeling is of a kind that will be sought--pleasure, and in the other

case is of a kind that will be shunned--pain. Observe the necessity of

these relations as exhibited in the concrete.

A plant which envelops a buried bone with a plexus of rootlets, or

a potato which directs its blanched shoots toward a grating through

which light comes into the cellar, shows us that the changes which

outer agents themselves set up in its tissues are changes which aid the

utilization of these agents. If we ask what would happen if a plant's

roots grew not toward the place where there was moisture, but away from

it, or if its leaves, enabled by light to assimilate, nevertheless

bent themselves toward the darkness, we see that death would result

in the absence of the existing adjustments. This general relation is

still better shown in an insectivorous plant, such as the _Dionoea

muscipula_, which keeps its trap closed round animal matter, but not

round other matter. Here it is manifest that the stimulus arising from

the first part of the absorbed substance itself sets up those actions

by which the mass of the substance is utilized for the plant's benefit.

When we pass from vegetal organisms to unconscious animal organisms, we

see a like connection between proclivity and advantage. On observing

how the tentacles of a polype attach themselves to, and begin to close

round, a living creature, or some animal substance, while they are

indifferent to the touch of other substance, we are similarly shown

that diffusion of some of the nutritive juices into the tentacles,

which is an incipient assimilation, causes the motions effecting

prehension. And it is obvious that life would cease were these

relations reversed.

Nor is it otherwise with this fundamental connection between contact

with food and taking in of food, among conscious creatures, up to the

very highest. Tasting a substance implies the passage of its molecules

through the mucous membrane of the tongue and palate; and this

absorption, when it occurs with a substance serving for food, is but

a commencement of the absorption carried on throughout the alimentary

canal. Moreover, the sensation accompanying this absorption, when it

is of the kind produced by food, initiates at the place where it is

strongest, in front of the pharynx, an automatic act of swallowing, in

a manner rudely analogous to that in which the stimulus of absorption

in a polype's tentacles initiates prehension.

If from these processes and relations that imply contact between a

creature's surface and the substance it takes in, we turn to those set

up by diffused particles of the substance, constituting to conscious

creatures its odor, we meet a kindred general truth. Just as, after

contact, some molecules of a mass of food are absorbed by the part

touched, and excite the act of prehension, so are absorbed such of its

molecules as, spreading through the water, reach the organism; and,

being absorbed by it, excite those actions by which contact with the

mass is effected. If the physical stimulation caused by the dispersed

particles is not accompanied by consciousness, still the motor changes

set up must conduce to survival of the organism, if they are such as

end in contact; and there must be relative innutrition and mortality

of organisms in which the produced contractions do not bring about

this result. Nor can it be questioned that whenever and wherever the

physical stimulation has a concomitant sentiency, this must be such as

consists with, and conduces to, movement toward the nutritive matter:

it must be not a repulsive but an attractive sentiency. And this which

holds with the lowest consciousness, must hold throughout; as we see it

do in all such superior creatures as are drawn to their food by odor.

Besides those movements which cause locomotion those which effect

seizure must no less certainly become thus adjusted. The molecular

changes caused by absorption of nutritive matter from organic substance

in contact, or from adjacent organic substance, initiate motions

which are indefinite where the organization is low, and which become

more definite with the advance of organization. At the outset, while

the undifferentiated protoplasm is everywhere absorbent and everywhere

contractile, the changes of form initiated by the physical stimulation

of adjacent nutritive matter are vague, and ineffectually adapted

to utilization of it; but gradually, along with the specialization

into parts that are contractile and parts that are absorbent, these

motions become better adapted; for necessarily individuals in which

they are least adapted disappear faster than those in which they are

most adapted. Recognizing this necessity we have here especially to

recognize a further necessity. The relation between these stimulations

and adjusted contractions must be such that increase of the one causes

increase of the other; since the directions of the discharges being

once established, greater stimulation causes greater contraction, and

the greater contraction causing closer contact with the stimulating

agent, causes increase of stimulus and is thereby itself further

increased. And now we reach the corollary which more particularly

concerns us. Clearly as fast as an accompanying sentiency arises, this

cannot be one that is disagreeable, prompting desistance, but must be

one that is agreeable, prompting persistence. The pleasurable sensation

must be itself the stimulus to the contraction by which the pleasurable

sensation is maintained and increased; or must be so bound up with

the stimulus that the two increase together. And this relation which

we see is directly established in the case of a fundamental function,

must be indirectly established with all other functions; since

non-establishment of it in any particular case implies, in so far,

unfitness to the conditions of existence.

In two ways then, it is demonstrable that there exists a primordial

connection between pleasure-giving acts and continuance or increase

of life, and, by implication, between pain-giving acts and decrease

or loss of life. On the one hand, setting out with the lowest living

things, we see that the beneficial act and the act which there is

a tendency to perform, are originally two sides of the same; and

cannot be disconnected without fatal results. On the other hand, if

we contemplate developed creatures as now existing, we see that each

individual and species is from day to day kept alive by pursuit of the

agreeable and avoidance of the disagreeable.

Thus approaching the facts from a different side, analysis brings us

down to another face of that ultimate truth disclosed by analysis in a

preceding chapter. We found it was no more possible to frame ethical

conceptions from which the consciousness of pleasure, of some kind,

at some time, to some being, is absent, than it is possible to frame

the conception of an object from which the consciousness of space is

absent. And now we see that this necessity of thought originates in the

very nature of sentient existence. Sentient existence can evolve only

on condition that pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts.

§ 34. Notwithstanding explanations already made, the naked enunciation

of this as an ultimate truth, underlying all estimations of right and

wrong, will in many, if not in most, cause astonishment. Having in

view certain beneficial results that are preceded by disagreeable

states of consciousness, such as those commonly accompanying labor; and

having in view the injurious results that follow the receipt of certain

gratifications, such as those which excess in drinking produces; the

majority tacitly or avowedly believe that the bearing of pains is on

the whole beneficial, and that the receipt of pleasures is on the whole

detrimental. The exceptions so fill their minds as to exclude the rule.

When asked, they are obliged to admit that the pains accompanying

wounds, bruises, sprains, are the concomitants of evils, alike to

the sufferer and to those around him; and that the anticipations

of such pains serve as deterrents from careless or dangerous acts.

They cannot deny that the tortures of burning or scalding, and the

miseries which intense cold, starvation, and thirst produce, are

indissolubly connected with permanent or temporary mischiefs, tending

to incapacitate one who bears them for doing things that should be

done, either for his own welfare or the welfare of others. The agony of

incipient suffocation they are compelled to recognize as a safeguard

to life, and must allow that avoidance of it is conducive to all that

life can bring or achieve. Nor will they refuse to own that one who is

chained in a cold, damp dungeon, in darkness and silence, is injured in

health and efficiency, alike by the positive pains thus inflicted on

him and by the accompanying negative pains due to absence of light, of

freedom, of companionship.

Conversely, they do not doubt that notwithstanding occasional excesses

the pleasure which accompanies the taking of food goes along with

physical benefit; and that the benefit is the greater the keener the

satisfaction of appetite. They have no choice but to acknowledge that

the instincts and sentiments which so overpoweringly prompt marriage,

and those which find their gratification in the fostering of offspring,

work out an immense surplus of benefit after deducting all evils. Nor

dare they question that the pleasure taken in accumulating property,

leaves a large balance of advantage, private and public, after making

all drawbacks. Yet many and conspicuous as are the cases in which

pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, serve as incentives to

proper acts and deterrents from improper acts, these pass unnoticed;

and notice is taken only of those cases in which men are directly or

indirectly misled by them. The well-working in essential matters is

ignored; and the ill-working in unessential matters is alone recognized.

Is it replied that the more intense pains and pleasures, which have

immediate reference to bodily needs, guide us rightly; while the weaker

pains and pleasures, not immediately connected with the maintenance

of life, guide us wrongly? Then the implication is that the system of

guidance by pleasures and pains, which has answered with all types

of creatures below the human, fails with the human. Or rather, the

admission being that with mankind it succeeds in so far as fulfillment

of certain imperative wants goes, it fails in respect of wants that are

not imperative. Those who think this are required, in the first place,

to show us how the line is to be drawn between the two; and then to

show us why the system which succeeds in the lower will not succeed in

the higher.

§ 35. Doubtless, however, after all that has been said, there will

be raised afresh the same difficulty--there will be instanced the

mischievous pleasures and the beneficent pains. The drunkard, the

gambler, the thief, who severally pursue gratifications, will be

named in proof that the pursuit of gratifications misleads; while the

self-sacrificing relative, the worker who perseveres through weariness,

the honest man who stints himself to pay his way, will be named in

proof that disagreeable modes of consciousness accompany acts that are

really beneficial. But after recalling the fact pointed out in § 20,

that this objection does not tell against guidance by pleasures and

pains at large, since it merely implies that special and proximate

pleasures and pains must be disregarded out of consideration for

remote and diffused pleasures and pains; and, after admitting that in

mankind, as at present constituted, guidance by proximate pleasures and

pains fails throughout a wide range of cases; I go on to set forth the

interpretation Biology gives of these anomalies, as being not necessary

and permanent, but incidental and temporary.

Already, while showing that among inferior creatures, pleasures and

pains have all along guided the conduct by which life has been evolved

and maintained, I have pointed out that since the conditions of

existence for each species have been occasionally changing, there have

been occasionally arising partial misadjustments of the feelings to

the requirements, necessitating readjustments. This general cause of

derangement, operating on all sentient beings, has been operating on

human beings in a manner unusually decided, persistent, and involved.

It needs but to contrast the mode of life followed by primitive men,

wandering in the forests and living on wild food, with the mode of

life followed by rustics, artisans, traders, and professional men in a

civilized community, to see that the constitution, bodily and mental,

well-adjusted to the one, is ill-adjusted to the other. It needs but

to observe the emotions kept awake in each savage tribe, chronically

hostile to neighboring tribes, and then to observe the emotions which

peaceful production and exchange bring into play, to see that the

two are not only unlike, but opposed. And it needs but to note how,

during social evolution, the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the

militant activities carried on by coercive co-operation have been at

variance with the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the industrial

activities, carried on by voluntary co-operation, to see that there has

ever been within each society, and still continues, a conflict between

the two moral natures adjusted to these two unlike modes of life.

Manifestly, then, this readjustment of constitution to conditions,

involving readjustment of pleasures and pains for guidance, which all

creatures from time to time undergo, has been in the human race during

civilization especially difficult, not only because of the greatness

of the change from small nomadic groups to vast settled societies, and

from predatory habits to peaceful habits, but also because the old life

of enmity between societies has been maintained along with the new life

of amity within each society. While there co-exist two ways of life

so radically opposed as the militant and the industrial, human nature

cannot become properly adapted to either.

That hence results such failure of guidance by pleasures and pains as

is daily exhibited, we discover on observing in what parts of conduct

the failure is most conspicuous. As above shown, the pleasurable and

painful sensations are fairly well adjusted to the peremptory physical

requirements: the benefits of conforming to the sensations which prompt

us in respect of nutrition, respiration, maintenance of temperature,

etc., immensely exceed the incidental evils, and such misadjustments

as occur may be ascribed to the change from the outdoor life of the

primitive man to the indoor life which the civilized man is often

compelled to lead. It is the emotional pleasures and pains which are

in so considerable a degree out of adjustment to the needs of life as

carried on in society, and it is of these that the readjustment is made

in the way above shown, so tardy because so difficult.

From the biological point of view, then, we see that the connections

between pleasure and beneficial action and between pain and detrimental

action, which arose when sentient existence began, and have continued

among animate creatures up to man, are generally displayed in him also

throughout the lower and more completely organized part of his nature;

and must be more and more fully displayed throughout the higher part of

his nature, as fast as his adaptation to the conditions of social life

increases.

§ 36. Biology has a further judgment to pass on the relations of

pleasures and pains to welfare. Beyond the connections between acts

beneficial to the organism and the pleasures accompanying performance

of them, and between acts detrimental to the organism and the pains

causing desistance from them, there are connections between pleasure

in general and physiological exaltation, and between pain in general

and physiological depression. Every pleasure increases vitality; every

pain decreases vitality. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every

pain lowers the tide of life. Let us consider, first, the pains.

By the general mischiefs that result from submission to pains, I do

not mean those arising from the diffused effects of local organic

lesions, such as follow an aneurism caused by intense effort spite of

protesting sensations, or such as follow the varicose veins brought on

by continued disregard of fatigue in the legs, or such as follow the

atrophy set up in muscles that are persistently exerted when extremely

weary; but I mean the general mischiefs caused by that constitutional

disturbance which pain forthwith sets up. These are conspicuous when

the pains are acute, whether they be sensational or emotional.

Bodily agony long borne produces death by exhaustion. More frequently,

arresting the action of the heart for a time, it causes that temporary

death we call fainting. On other occasions vomiting is a consequence.

And where such manifest derangements do not result, we still, in the

pallor and trembling, trace the general prostration. Beyond the actual

loss of life caused by subjection to intense cold there are depressions

of vitality less marked caused by cold less extreme--temporary

enfeeblement following too long an immersion in icy water; enervation

and pining away consequent on inadequate clothing. Similarly is it with

submission to great heat: we have lassitude reaching occasionally to

exhaustion; we have, in weak persons, fainting, succeeded by temporary

debilitation; and in steaming tropical jungles Europeans contract

fevers which, when not fatal, often entail life-long incapacities.

Consider, again, the evils that follow violent exertion continued in

spite of painful feelings--now a fatigue which destroys appetite or

arrests digestion if food is taken, implying failure of the reparative

processes when they are most needed; and now a prostration of the

heart, here lasting for a time and there, where the transgression has

been repeated day after day, made permanent: reducing the rest of life

to a lower level.

No less conspicuous are the depressing effects of emotional pains.

There are occasional cases of death from grief; and in other cases

the mental suffering which a calamity causes, like bodily suffering,

shows its effects by syncope. Often a piece of bad news is succeeded

by sickness; and continued anxiety will produce loss of appetite,

perpetual indigestion and diminished strength. Excessive fear, whether

aroused by physical or moral danger, will, in like manner, arrest for

a time the processes of nutrition; and, not unfrequently, in pregnant

women brings on miscarriage; while, in less extreme cases, the cold

perspiration and unsteady hands indicate a general lowering of the

vital activities, entailing partial incapacity of body or mind or both.

How greatly emotional pain deranges the visceral actions is shown us by

the fact that incessant worry is not unfrequently followed by jaundice.

And here, indeed, the relation between cause and effect happens to

have been proved by direct experiment. Making such arrangements that

the bile-duct of a dog delivered its product outside the body, Claude

Bernard observed that so long as he petted the dog and kept him in good

spirits, secretion went on at its normal rate; but on speaking angrily,

and for a time so treating him as to produce depression, the flow of

bile was arrested.

Should it be said that evil results of such kinds are proved to occur

only when the pains, bodily or mental, are great, the reply is that

in healthy persons the injurious perturbations caused by small pains,

though not easily traced, are still produced; and that in those whose

vital powers are much reduced by illness, slight physical irritations

and trifling moral annoyances, often cause relapses.

Quite opposite are the constitutional effects of pleasure. It

sometimes, though rarely, happens that in feeble persons intense

pleasure--pleasure that is almost pain--gives a nervous shock that is

mischievous; but it does not do this in those who are undebilitated by

voluntary or enforced submission to actions injurious to the organism.

In the normal order, pleasures, great and small, are stimulants to the

processes by which life is maintained.

Among the sensations may be instanced those produced by bright light.

Sunshine is enlivening in comparison with gloom--even a gleam excites a

wave of pleasure; and experiments have shown that sunshine raises the

rate of respiration: raised respiration being an index of raised vital

activities in general. A warmth that is agreeable in degree favors the

heart's action, and furthers the various functions to which this is

instrumental. Though those who are in full vigor and fitly clothed can

maintain their temperature in winter, and can digest additional food

to make up for the loss of heat, it is otherwise with the feeble; and,

as vigor declines, the beneficence of warmth becomes conspicuous. That

benefits accompany the agreeable sensations produced by fresh air, and

the agreeable sensations that accompany muscular action after due rest,

and the agreeable sensations caused by rest after exertion cannot be

questioned. Receipt of these pleasures conduces to the maintenance of

the body in fit condition for all the purposes of life.

More manifest still are the physiological benefits of emotional

pleasures. Every power, bodily and mental, is increased by "good

spirits," which is our name for a general emotional satisfaction. The

truth that the fundamental vital actions--those of nutrition--are

furthered by laughter-moving conversation, or rather by the pleasurable

feeling causing laughter, is one of old standing; and every dyspeptic

knows that in exhilarating company, a large and varied dinner,

including not very digestible things, may be eaten with impunity,

and, indeed, with benefit, while a small, carefully chosen dinner of

simple things, eaten in solitude, will be followed by indigestion. This

striking effect on the alimentary system is accompanied by effects,

equally certain though less manifest, on the circulation and the

respiration. Again, one who, released from daily labors and anxieties,

receives delights from fine scenery or is enlivened by the novelties he

sees abroad, comes back showing by toned-up face and vivacious manner,

the greater energy with which he is prepared to pursue his avocation.

Invalids especially, on whose narrowed margin of vitality the influence

of conditions is most visible, habitually show the benefits derived

from agreeable states of feeling. A lively social circle, the call of

an old friend, or even removal to a brighter room, will, by the induced

cheerfulness, much improve the physical state. In brief, as every

medical man knows, there is no such tonic as happiness.

These diffused physiological effects of pleasures and pains, which are

joined with the local or special physiological effects, are, indeed,

obviously inevitable. We have seen (_Principles of Psychology_,

§§ 123-125) that while craving, or negative pain, accompanies the

under-activity of an organ, and while positive pain accompanies its

over-activity, pleasure accompanies its normal activity. We have seen

that by evolution no other relations could be established; since,

through all inferior types of creatures, if defect or excess of

function produced no disagreeable sentiency, and medium function no

agreeable sentiency, there would be nothing to insure a proportioned

performance of function. And as it is one of the laws of nervous

action that each stimulus, beyond a direct discharge to the particular

organ acted on, indirectly causes a general discharge throughout the

nervous system (_Prin. of Psy._, §§ 21, 39), it results that the rest

of the organs, all influenced as they are by the nervous system,

participate in the stimulation. So that beyond the aid, more slowly

shown, which the organs yield to one another through the physiological

division of labor, there is the aid, more quickly shown, which mutual

excitation gives. While there is a benefit to be presently felt by the

whole organism from the due performance of each function, there is an

immediate benefit from the exaltation of its functions at large caused

by the accompanying pleasure; and from pains, whether of excess or

defect, there also come these double effects, immediate and remote.

§ 37. Non-recognition of these general truths vitiates moral

speculation at large. From the estimates of right and wrong habitually

framed, these physiological effects wrought on the actor by his

feelings are entirely omitted. It is tacitly assumed that pleasures

and pains have no reactions on the body of the recipient, affecting

his fitness for the duties of life. The only reactions recognized

are those on character; respecting which the current supposition is,

that acceptance of pleasures is detrimental and submission to pains

beneficial. The notion, remotely descended from the ghost-theory of

the savage, that mind and body are independent, has, among its various

implications, this belief that states of consciousness are in no wise

related to bodily states. "You have had your gratification--it is

past; and you are as you were before," says the moralist to one. And

to another he says, "You have borne the suffering--it is over; and

there the matter ends." Both statements are false. Leaving out of view

indirect results, the direct results are that the one has moved a step

away from death and the other has moved a step toward death.

Leaving out of view, I say, the indirect results. It is these indirect

results, here for the moment left out of view, which the moralist has

exclusively in view, being so occupied by them that he ignores the

direct results. The gratification, perhaps purchased at undue cost,

perhaps enjoyed when work should have been done, perhaps snatched

from the rightful claimant, is considered only in relation to remote

injurious effects, and no set-off is made for immediate beneficial

effects. Conversely, from positive and negative pains, borne now in the

pursuit of some future advantage, now in discharge of responsibilities,

now in performing a generous act, the distant good is alone dwelt on

and the proximate evil ignored. Consequences, pleasurable and painful,

experienced by the actor forthwith, are of no importance; and they

become of importance only when anticipated as occurring hereafter to

the actor or to other persons. And further, future evils borne by the

actor are considered of no account if they result from self-denial,

and are emphasized only when they result from self-gratification.

Obviously, estimates so framed are erroneous; and obviously, the

pervading judgments of conduct based on such estimates must be

distorted. Mark the anomalies of opinion produced.

If, as the sequence of a malady contracted in pursuit of illegitimate

gratification, an attack of iritis injures vision, the mischief

is to be counted among those entailed by immoral conduct; but if,

regardless of protesting sensations, the eyes are used in study too

soon after ophthalmia, and there follows blindness for years or for

life, entailing not only personal unhappiness, but a burden on others,

moralists are silent. The broken leg which a drunkard's accident causes

counts among those miseries brought on self and family by intemperance,

which form the ground for reprobating it; but if anxiety to fulfill

duties prompts the continued use of a sprained knee spite of the pain,

and brings on a chronic lameness involving lack of exercise, consequent

ill-health, inefficiency, anxiety, and unhappiness, it is supposed that

ethics has no verdict to give in the matter. A student who is plucked

because he has spent in amusement the time and money that should have

gone in study, is blamed for thus making parents unhappy and preparing

for himself a miserable future; but another who, thinking exclusively

of claims on him, reads night after night with hot or aching head, and,

breaking down, cannot take his degree, but returns home shattered in

health and unable to support himself, is named with pity only, as not

subject to any moral judgment; or rather, the moral judgment passed is

wholly favorable.

Thus recognizing the evils caused by some kinds of conduct only, men

at large, and moralists as exponents of their beliefs, ignore the

suffering and death daily caused around them by disregard of that

guidance which has established itself in the course of evolution. Led

by the tacit assumption common to Pagan stoics and Christian ascetics,

that we are so diabolically organized that pleasures are injurious and

pains beneficial, people on all sides yield examples of lives blasted

by persisting in actions against which their sensations rebel. Here is

one who, drenched to the skin and sitting in a cold wind, pooh-hoohs

his shiverings and gets rheumatic fever, with subsequent heart-disease,

which makes worthless the short life remaining to him. Here is another

who, disregarding painful feelings, works too soon after a debilitating

illness, and establishes disordered health that lasts for the rest of

his days, and makes him useless to himself and others. Now the account

is of a youth who, persisting in gymnastic feats spite of scarcely

bearable straining, bursts a blood-vessel, and, long laid on the shelf,

is permanently damaged; while now it is of a man in middle life who,

pushing muscular effort to painful excess, suddenly brings on hernia.

In this family is a case of aphasia, spreading paralysis and death,

caused by eating too little and doing too much; in that, softening of

the brain has been brought on by ceaseless mental efforts against

which the feelings hourly protested; and in others, less serious brain

affections have been contracted by over-study continued regardless

of discomfort and the cravings for fresh air and exercise.[B] Even

without accumulating special examples, the truth is forced on us by the

visible traits of classes. The careworn man of business too long at

his office, the cadaverous barrister pouring half the night over his

briefs, the feeble factory hands and unhealthy seamstresses passing

long hours in bad air, the anæmic, flat-chested school-girls, bending

over many lessons and forbidden boisterous play, no less than Sheffield

grinders who die of suffocating dust, and peasants crippled with

rheumatism due to exposure, show us the wide spread miseries caused

by persevering in actions repugnant to the sensations and neglecting

actions which the sensations prompt. Nay, the evidence is still more

extensive and conspicuous. What are the puny malformed children, seen

in poverty-stricken districts, but children whose appetites for food

and desires for warmth have not been adequately satisfied? What are

populations stinted in growth and prematurely aged, such as parts of

France show us, but populations injured by work in excess and food in

defect: the one implying positive pain, the other negative pain? What

is the implication of that greater mortality which occurs among people

who are weakened by privations, unless it is that bodily miseries

conduce to fatal illnesses? Or once more, what must we infer from

the frightful amount of disease and death suffered by armies in the

field, fed on scanty and bad provisions, lying on damp ground, exposed

to extremes of heat and cold, inadequately sheltered from rain, and

subject to exhausting efforts; unless it be the terrible mischiefs

caused by continuously subjecting the body to treatment which the

feelings protest against?

It matters not to the argument whether the actions entailing such

effects are voluntary or involuntary. It matters not from the

biological point of view whether the motives prompting them are high or

low. The vital functions accept no apologies on the ground that neglect

of them was unavoidable, or that the reason for neglect was noble. The

direct and indirect sufferings caused by non-conformity to the laws

of life are the same whatever induces the non-conformity; and cannot

be omitted in any rational estimate of conduct. If the purpose of

ethical inquiry is to establish rules of right living; and if the rules

of right living are those of which the total results, individual and

general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness;

then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognize only

the remote results.

§ 38. Here might be urged the necessity for preluding the study of

moral science by the study of biological science. Here might be dwelt

on the error men make in thinking they can understand those special

phenomena of human life with which Ethics deals, while paying little or

no attention to the general phenomena of human life, and while utterly

ignoring the phenomena of life at large. And, doubtless, there would be

truth in the inference that such acquaintance with the world of living

things, as discloses the part which pleasures and pains have played in

organic evolution, would help to rectify these one-sided conceptions of

moralists. It cannot be held, however, that lack of this knowledge is

the sole cause, or the main cause, of their one-sidedness. For facts of

the kind above instanced, which, duly attended to, would prevent such

distortions of moral theory, are facts which it needs no biological

inquiries to learn, but which are daily thrust before the eyes of all.

The truth is, rather, that the general consciousness is so possessed by

sentiments and ideas at variance with the conclusions necessitated by

familiar evidence that the evidence gets no attention. These adverse

sentiments and ideas have several roots.

There is the theological root. As before shown, from the worship of

cannibal ancestors who delighted in witnessing tortures, there resulted

the primitive conception of deities who were propitiated by the bearing

of pains, and, consequently, angered by the receipt of pleasures.

Through the religions of the semi-civilized, in which this conception

of the divine nature remains conspicuous, it has persisted, in

progressively modified forms, down to our own times; and still colors

the beliefs, both of those who adhere to the current creed and of those

who nominally reject it.

There is another root in the primitive and still-surviving militancy.

While social antagonisms continue to generate war, which consists in

endeavors to inflict pain and death while submitting to the risks of

pain and death, and which necessarily involves great privations, it is

needful that physical suffering, whether considered in itself or in

the evils it bequeaths, should be thought little of, and that among

pleasures recognized as most worthy should be those which victory

brings.

Nor does partially developed industrialism fail to furnish a root.

With social evolution, which implies transition from the life of

wandering hunters to the life of settled peoples engaged in labor,

and which therefore entails activities widely unlike those to which

the aboriginal constitution is adapted, there comes an under-exercise

of faculties for which the social state affords no scope, and an

overtaxing of faculties required for the social state; the one implying

denial of certain pleasures and the other submission to certain pains.

Hence, along with that growth of population which makes the struggle

for existence intense, bearing of pains and sacrifice of pleasures is

daily necessitated.

Now always and everywhere, there arises among men a theory conforming

to their practice. The savage nature, originating the conception of a

savage deity, evolves a theory of supernatural control sufficiently

stringent and cruel to influence his conduct. With submission to

despotic government severe enough in its restraints to keep in order

barbarous natures, there grows up a theory of divine right to rule, and

the duty of absolute submission. Where war is made the business of life

by the existence of warlike neighbors, virtues which are required for

war come to be regarded as supreme virtues; while, contrariwise, when

industrialism has grown predominant, the violence and the deception

which warriors glory in come to be held criminal. In like manner,

then, there arises a tolerable adjustment of the actually accepted

(not the nominally accepted) theory of right living, to living as it

is daily carried on. If the life is one that necessitates habitual

denial of pleasures and bearing of pains, there grows up an answering

ethical system under which the receipt of pleasures is tacitly

disapproved and the bearing of pains avowedly approved. The mischiefs

entailed by pleasures in excess are dwelt on, while the benefits which

normal pleasures bring are ignored; and the good results achieved by

submission to pains are fully set forth, while the evils are overlooked.

But while recognizing the desirableness of, and indeed the necessity

for, systems of ethics adapted, like religious systems and political

systems, to their respective times and places, we have here to regard

the first as, like the others, transitional. We must infer that like a

purer creed and a better government, a truer ethics belongs to a more

advanced social state.

Led, _à priori_, to conclude that distortions must exist, we are

enabled to recognize as such the distortions we find: answering in

nature, as these do, to expectation. And there is forced on us the

truth that a scientific morality arises only as fast as the one-sided

conceptions adapted to transitory conditions are developed into

both-sided conceptions. The science of right living has to take account

of all consequences in so far as they affect happiness, personally or

socially, directly or indirectly; and by as much as it ignores any

class of consequences, by so much does it fail to be science.

§ 39. Like the physical view, then, the biological view corresponds

with the view gained by looking at conduct in general from the

standpoint of Evolution.

That which was physically defined as a moving equilibrium, we define

biologically as a balance of functions. The implication of such a

balance is that the several functions, in their kinds, amounts, and

combinations, are adjusted to the several activities which maintain and

constitute complete life; and to be so adjusted is to have reached the

goal toward which the evolution of conduct continually tends.

Passing to the feelings which accompany the performance of functions,

we see that of necessity during the evolution of organic life,

pleasures have become the concomitants of normal amounts of functions,

while pains, positive and negative, have become the concomitants

of excesses and defects of functions. And though in every species

derangements of these relations are often caused by changes of

conditions, they ever re-establish themselves: disappearance of the

species being the alternative.

Mankind, inheriting from creatures of lower kinds, such adjustments

between feelings and functions as concern fundamental bodily

requirements; and daily forced by peremptory feelings to do the things

which maintain life and avoid those which bring immediate death; has

been subject to a change of conditions unusually great and involved.

This has considerably deranged the guidance by sensations, and has

deranged in a much greater degree the guidance by emotions. The result

is that in many cases pleasures are not connected with actions which

must be performed, nor pains with actions which must be avoided, but

contrariwise.

Several influences have conspired to make men ignore the well-working

of these relations between feelings and functions, and to observe

whatever of ill-working is seen in them. Hence, while the evils which

some pleasures entail are dilated upon, the benefits habitually

accompanying receipt of pleasures are unnoticed; at the same time that

the benefits achieved through certain pains are magnified while the

immense mischiefs which pains bring are made little of.

The ethical theories characterized by these perversions are products

of, and are appropriate to the forms of social life which the

imperfectly-adapted constitutions of men produce. But with the progress

of adaptation, bringing faculties and requirements into harmony, such

incongruities of experience, and consequent distortions of theory,

must diminish; until, along with complete adjustment of humanity to

the social state, will go recognition of the truths that actions

are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future

happiness, special and general, they are immediately pleasurable, and

that painfulness, not only ultimate but proximate, is the concomitant

of actions which are wrong.

So that from the biological point of view, ethical science becomes a

specification of the conduct of associated men who are severally so

constituted that the various self-preserving activities, the activities

required for rearing offspring, and those which social welfare demands,

are fulfilled in the spontaneous exercise of duly proportioned

faculties, each yielding when in action its quantum of pleasure, and

who are, by consequence, so constituted that excess or defect in any

one of these actions brings its quantum of pain, immediate and remote.

NOTE TO § 33. In his _Physical Ethics_, Mr. Alfred Barratt has

expressed a view which here calls for notice. Postulating Evolution

and its general laws, he refers to certain passages in the

_Principles of Psychology_ (1st Ed. Pt. III. ch. viii. pp. 395, sqq.

cf. Pt. IV. ch. iv.) in which I have treated of the relation between

irritation and contraction which "marks the dawn of sensitive life;"

have pointed out that "the primordial tissue must be differently

affected by contact with nutritive and with innutritive matters"--the

two being for aquatic creatures respectively the soluble and the

insoluble; and have argued that the contraction by which a protruded

part of a rhizopod draws in a fragment of assimilable matter "is

caused by a commencing absorption of the assimilable matter." Mr.

Barratt, holding that consciousness "must be considered as an

invariable property of animal life, and ultimately, in its elements,

of the material universe" (p. 43), regards these responses of animal

tissue to stimuli, as implying feeling of one or other kind. "Some

kinds of impressed force," he says, "are followed by movements of

retraction and withdrawal, others by such as secure a continuance

of the impression. These two kinds of contraction are the phenomena

and external marks of pain and pleasure respectively. Hence the

tissue acts so as to secure pleasure and avoid pain by a law as truly

physical and natural as that whereby a needle turns to the pole,

or a tree to the light" (p. 52). Not without questioning that the

raw material of consciousness is present even in undifferentiated

protoplasm, and everywhere exists potentially in that Unknowable

Power which, otherwise conditioned, is manifested in physical

action (_Prin. of Psy._, § 272-3), I demur to the conclusion that

it at first exists under the forms of pleasure and pain. These, I

conceive, arise, as the more special feelings do, by a compounding

of the ultimate elements of consciousness (_Prin. of Psy._, §§ 60,

61): being, indeed, general aspects of these more special feelings

when they reach certain intensities. Considering that even in

creatures which have developed nervous systems, a great part of the

vital processes are carried on by unconscious reflex actions, I see

no propriety in assuming the existence of what we understand by

consciousness in creatures not only devoid of nervous systems but

devoid of structures in general.

NOTE TO § 36. More than once in the _Emotions and the Will_, Dr.

Bain insists on the connection between pleasure and exaltation of

vitality, and the connection between pain and depression of vitality.

As above shown, I concur in the view taken by him; which is, indeed,

put beyond dispute by general experience as well as by the more

special experience of medical men.

When, however, from the invigorating and relaxing effects of pleasure

and pain respectively, Dr. Bain derives the original tendencies to

persist in acts which give pleasure and to desist from those which

give pain, I find myself unable to go with him. He says: "We suppose

movements spontaneously begun, and accidentally causing pleasure;

we then assume that with the pleasure there will be an increase of

vital energy, in which increase the fortunate movements will share,

and thereby increase the pleasure. Or, on the other hand, we suppose

the spontaneous movements to give pain, and assume that, with the

pain, there will be a decrease of energy, extending to the movements

that cause the evil, and thereby providing a remedy" (3d Ed. p.

315). This interpretation, implying that "the fortunate movements"

merely _share_ in the effects of augmented vital energy caused by

the pleasure, does not seem to me congruous with observation. The

truth appears rather to be that though there is a concomitant general

increase of muscular tone, the muscles specially excited are those

which, by their increased contraction, conduce to increased pleasure.

Conversely, the implication that desistance from spontaneous

movements which cause pain, is due to a general muscular relaxation

shared in by the muscles causing these particular movements, seems

to me at variance with the fact that the retractation commonly takes

the form not of a passive lapse but of an active withdrawal. Further,

it may be remarked that depressing as pain eventually is to the

system at large, we cannot say that it at once depresses the muscular

energies. Not simply, as Dr. Bain admits, does an acute smart produce

spasmodic movements, but pains of all kinds, both sensational and

emotional, stimulate the muscles (_Essays_, 1st series, p. 360, 1,

or 2d ed. Vol. I. p. 211, 12). Pain, however (and also pleasure when

very intense), simultaneously has an inhibitory effect on all the

reflex actions; and as the vital functions in general are carried on

by reflex actions, this inhibition, increasing with the intensity

of the pain, proportionately depresses the vital functions. Arrest

of the heart's action and fainting is an extreme result of this

inhibition; and the viscera at large feel its effects in degrees

proportioned to the degrees of pain. Pain, therefore, while directly

causing a discharge of muscular energy as pleasure does, eventually

lowers muscular power by lowering those vital processes on which the

supply of energy depends. Hence we cannot, I think, ascribe the

prompt desistance from muscular movements causing pain, to decrease

in the flow of energy; for this decrease is felt only after an

interval. Conversely, we cannot ascribe the persistence in a muscular

act which yields pleasure to the resulting exaltation of energy; but

must, as indicated in § 33, ascribe it to the establishment of lines

of discharge between the place of pleasurable stimulation and those

contractile structures which maintain and increase the act causing

the stimulation--connections allied with the reflex, into which they

pass by insensible gradations.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW.

§ 40. The last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their

relations to conduct, recognized only their physiological aspects:

their psychological aspects were passed over. In this chapter,

conversely, we are not concerned with the constitutional connections

between feelings, as incentives or deterrents, and physical benefits to

be gained, or mischiefs to be avoided; nor with the reactive effects

of feelings on the state of the organism, as fitting or unfitting it

for future action. Here we have to consider represented pleasures

and pains, sensational and emotional, as constituting deliberate

motives--as forming factors in the conscious adjustments of acts to

ends.

§ 41. The rudimentary psychical act, not yet differentiated from a

physical act, implies an excitation and a motion. In a creature of

low type the touch of food excites prehension. In a somewhat higher

creature the odor from nutritive matter sets up motion of the body

toward the matter. And where rudimentary vision exists, sudden

obscuration of light, implying the passage of something large, causes

convulsive muscular movements which mostly carry the body away from

the source of danger. In each of these cases we may distinguish

four factors. There is (_a_) that property of the external object

which primarily affects the organism--the taste, smell, or opacity;

and connected with such property there is in the external object

that character (_b_) which renders seizure of it, or escape from it,

beneficial. Within the organism there is (_c_) the impression or

sensation which the property (_a_) produces, serving as stimulus; and

there is connected with it, the motor change (_d_) by which seizure or

escape is effected.

Now Psychology is chiefly concerned with the connection between the

relation _a b_, and the relation _c d_, under all those forms which

they assume in the course of evolution. Each of the factors, and each

of the relations, grows more involved as organization advances. Instead

of being single, the identifying attribute _a_, often becomes, in the

environment of a superior animal, a cluster of attributes; such as the

size, form, colors, motions, displayed by a distant creature that is

dangerous. The factor _b_, with which this combination of attributes

is associated, becomes the congeries of characters, powers, habits,

which constitute it an enemy. Of the subjective factors, _c_ becomes a

complicated set of visual sensations co-ordinated with one another and

with the ideas and feelings established by experience of such enemies,

and constituting the motive to escape; while _d_ becomes the intricate

and often prolonged series of runs, leaps, doubles, dives, etc., made

in eluding the enemy.

In human life we find the same four outer and inner factors, still more

multiform and entangled in their compositions and connections. The

entire assemblage of physical attributes _a_, presented by an estate

that is advertised for sale, passes enumeration; and the assemblage

of various utilities, _b_, going along with these attributes, is

also beyond brief specification. The perceptions and ideas, likes

and dislikes, _c_, set up by the aspect of the estate, and which,

compounded and recompounded, eventually form the motive for buying

it, make a whole too large and complex for description; and the

transactions, legal, pecuniary, and other, gone through in making

the purchase and taking possession, are scarcely less numerous and

elaborate.

Nor must we overlook the fact that as evolution progresses, not only

do the factors increase in complexity, but also the relations among

them. Originally, _a_ is directly and simply connected with _b_, while

_c_ is directly and simply connected with _d_. But eventually, the

connections between _a_ and _b_, and between _c_ and _d_, become very

indirect and involved. On the one hand, as the first illustration shows

us, sapidity and nutritiveness are closely bound together; as are also

the stimulation caused by the one and the contraction which utilizes

the other. But, as we see in the last illustration, the connection

between the visible traits of an estate and those characters which

constitute its value, is at once remote and complicated; while the

transition from the purchaser's highly composite motive to the numerous

actions of sensory and motor organs, severally intricate, which effect

the purchase, is through an entangled plexus of thoughts and feelings

constituting his decision.

After this explanation will be apprehended a truth otherwise set forth

in the _Principles of Psychology_. Mind consists of feelings and the

relations among feelings. By composition of the relations, and ideas

of relations, intelligence arises. By composition of the feelings,

and ideas of feelings, emotion arises. And, other things equal, the

evolution of either is great in proportion as the composition is great.

One of the necessary implications is that cognition becomes higher in

proportion as it is remoter from reflex action; while emotion becomes

higher in proportion as it is remoter from sensation.

And now of the various corollaries from this broad view of

psychological evolution, let us observe those which concern the motives

and actions that are classed as moral and immoral.

§ 42. The mental process by which, in any case, the adjustment of acts

to ends is effected, and which, under its higher forms, becomes the

subject-matter of ethical judgments, is, as above implied, divisible

into the rise of a feeling or feelings constituting the motive,

and the thought or thoughts through which the motive is shaped and

finally issues in action. The first of these elements, originally an

excitement, becomes a simple sensation; then a compound sensation;

then a cluster of partially presentative and partially representative

sensations, forming an incipient emotion; then a cluster of exclusively

ideal or representative sensations, forming an emotion proper; then a

cluster of such clusters, forming a compound emotion; and eventually

becomes a still more involved emotion composed of the ideal forms

of such compound emotions. The other element, beginning with that

immediate passage of a single stimulus into a single motion, called

reflex action, presently comes to be a set of associated discharges of

stimuli producing associated motions, constituting instinct. Step by

step arise more entangled combinations of stimuli, somewhat variable in

their modes of union, leading to complex motions similarly variable in

their adjustments; whence occasional hesitations in the sensori-motor

processes. Presently is reached a stage at which the combined clusters

of impressions, not all present together, issue in actions not all

simultaneous; implying representation of results, or thought. Afterward

follow stages in which various thoughts have time to pass before the

composite motives produce the appropriate actions. Until at last arise

those long deliberations during which the probabilities of various

consequences are estimated, and the promptings of the correlative

feelings balanced, constituting calm judgment. That under either of

its aspects the later forms of this mental process are the higher,

ethically considered as well as otherwise considered, will be readily

seen.

For from the first, complication of sentiency has accompanied better

and more numerous adjustments of acts to ends; as also has complication

of movement, and complication of the co-ordinating or intellectual

process uniting the two. Whence it follows that the acts characterized

by the more complex motives and the more involved thoughts, have all

along been of higher authority for guidance. Some examples will make

this clear.

Here is an aquatic creature guided by the odor of organic matter

toward things serving for food; but a creature which, lacking any

other guidance, is at the mercy of larger creatures coming near. Here

is another which, also guided to food by odor, possesses rudimentary

vision; and so is made to start spasmodically away from a moving body

which diffuses this odor, in those cases where it is large enough

to produce sudden obscuration of light--usually an enemy. Evidently

life will frequently be saved by conforming to the later and higher

stimulus, instead of to the earlier and lower.

Observe at a more advanced stage a parallel conflict. This is a beast

which pursues others for prey, and, either lacking experience or

prompted by raging hunger, attacks one more powerful than itself,

and gets destroyed. Conversely, that is a beast which, prompted by a

hunger equally keen, but either by individual experience or effects of

inherited experience, made conscious of evil by the aspect of one more

powerful than itself, is deterred from attacking, and saves its life by

subordinating the primary motive, consisting of craving sensations, to

the secondary motive, consisting of ideal feelings, distinct or vague.

Ascending at once from these examples of conduct in animals to examples

of human conduct, we shall see that the contrasts between inferior

and superior have habitually the same traits. The savage of lowest

type devours all the food captured by to-day's chase, and, hungry on

the morrow, has perhaps for days to bear the pangs of starvation. The

superior savage, conceiving more vividly the entailed sufferings if no

game is to be found, is deterred by his complex feeling from giving way

entirely to his simple feeling. Similarly are the two contrasted in the

inertness which goes along with lack of forethought, and the activity

which due forethought produces. The primitive man, idly inclined, and

ruled by the sensations of the moment, will not exert himself until

actual pains have to be escaped; but the man somewhat advanced, able

more distinctly to imagine future gratifications and sufferings, is

prompted by the thought of these to overcome his love of ease: decrease

of misery and mortality resulting from this predominance of the

representative feelings over the presentative feelings.

Without dwelling on the fact that among the civilized, those who lead

the life of the senses are contrasted in the same way with those whose

lives are largely occupied with pleasures not of a sensual kind, let me

point out that there are analogous contrasts between guidance by the

less complex representative feelings, or lower emotions, and guidance

by the more complex representative feelings, or higher emotions. When

led by his acquisitiveness--a re-representative feeling which, acting

under due control, conduces to welfare--the thief takes another man's

property; his act is determined by certain imagined proximate pleasures

of relatively simple kinds, rather than by less clearly imagined

possible pains that are more remote and of relatively involved kinds.

But in the conscientious man, there is an adequate restraining motive,

still more re-representative in its nature, including not only ideas

of punishment, and not only ideas of lost reputation and ruin, but

including ideas of the claims of the person owning the property, and

of the pains which loss of it will entail on him: all joined with a

general aversion to acts injurious to others, which arises from the

inherited effects of experience. And here at the end we see, as we saw

at the beginning, that guidance by the more complex feeling, on the

average, conduces to welfare more than does guidance by the simpler

feeling.

The like holds with the intellectual co-ordinations through which

stimuli issue in motions. The lowest actions, called reflex, in which

an impression made on an afferent nerve causes by discharge through an

efferent nerve a contraction, shows us a very limited adjustment of

acts to ends: the impression being simple, and the resulting motion

simple, the internal co-ordination is also simple. Evidently when there

are several senses which can be together affected by an outer object;

and when, according as such object is discriminated as of one or other

kind, the movements made in response are combined in one or other way;

the intermediate co-ordinations are necessarily more involved. And

evidently each further step in the evolution of intelligence, always

instrumental to better self-preservation, exhibits this same general

trait. The adjustments by which the more involved actions are made

appropriate to the more involved circumstances, imply more intricate,

and, consequently, more deliberate and conscious co-ordinations; until,

when we come to civilized men, who in their daily business, taking into

account many data and conditions, adjust their proceedings to various

consequences, we see that the intellectual actions, becoming of the

kind we call judicial, are at once very elaborate and very deliberate.

Observe, then, what follows respecting the relative authorities of

motives. Throughout the ascent from low creatures up to man, and

from the lowest types of man up to the highest, self-preservation

has been increased by the subordination of simple excitations to

compound excitations--the subjection of immediate sensations to

the ideas of sensations to come--the overruling of preservative

feelings by representative feelings, and of representative feelings

by re-representative feelings. As life has advanced, the accompanying

sentiency has become increasingly ideal; and among feelings produced

by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which have evolved

latest, are the re-compounded or doubly ideal. Hence it follows that

as guides, the feelings have authorities proportionate to the degrees

in which they are removed by their complexity and their ideality from

simple sensations and appetites.

A further implication is made clear by studying the intellectual sides

of these mental processes by which acts are adjusted to ends. Where

they are low and simple, these comprehend the guiding only of immediate

acts by immediate stimuli--the entire transaction in each case,

lasting but a moment, refers only to a proximate result. But with the

development of intelligence, and the growing ideality of the motives,

the ends to which the acts are adjusted cease to be exclusively

immediate. The more ideal motives concern ends that are more

distant; and with approach to the highest types, present ends become

increasingly subordinate to those future ends which the ideal motives

have for their objects. Hence there arises a certain presumption in

favor of a motive which refers to a remote good, in comparison with one

which refers to a proximate good.

§ 43. In the last chapter I hinted that besides the several influences

there named as fostering the ascetic belief that doing things which

are agreeable is detrimental while bearing disagreeable things is

beneficial, there remained to be named an influence of deeper origin.

This is shadowed forth in the foregoing paragraphs.

For the general truth that guidance by such simple pleasures and pains

as result from fulfilling or denying bodily desires, is, under one

aspect, inferior to guidance by those pleasures and pains which the

complex ideal feelings yield, has led to the belief that the promptings

of bodily desires should be disregarded. Further, the general truth

that pursuit of proximate satisfactions is, under one aspect, inferior

to pursuit of ultimate satisfactions, has led to the belief that

proximate satisfactions must not be valued.

In the early stages of every science, the generalizations reached are

not qualified enough. The discriminating statements of the truths

formulated, rise afterward, by limitation of the undiscriminating

statements. As with bodily vision, which at first appreciates only

the broadest traits of objects, and so leads to rude classings, which

developed vision, impressible by minor differences, has to correct,

so with mental vision in relation to general truths, it happens that

at first the inductions, wrongly made all-embracing, have to wait for

scepticism and critical observation to restrict them, by taking account

of unnoticed differences. Hence, we may expect to find the current

ethical conclusions too sweeping. Let us note how, in three ways, these

dominant beliefs, alike of professed moralists and of people at large,

are made erroneous by lack of qualifications.

In the first place, the authority of the lower feelings as guides is

by no means always inferior to the authority of the higher feelings,

but is often superior. Daily occur occasions on which sensations

must be obeyed rather than sentiments. Let any one think of sitting

all night naked in a snow-storm, or going a week without food, or

letting his head be held under water for ten minutes, and he will see

that the pleasures and pains directly related to maintenance of life

may not be wholly subordinated to the pleasures and pains indirectly

related to maintenance of life. Though in many cases guidance by the

simple feelings rather than by the complex feelings is injurious, in

other cases guidance by the complex feelings rather than by the simple

feelings is fatal; and throughout a wide range of cases their relative

authorities as guides are indeterminate. Grant that in a man pursued,

the protesting feelings accompanying intense and prolonged effort,

must, to preserve life, be overruled by the fear of his pursuers; it

may yet happen that, persisting till he drops, the resulting exhaustion

causes death, though, the pursuit having been abandoned, death would

not otherwise have resulted. Grant that a widow left in poverty must

deny her appetite that she may give enough food to her children to keep

them alive; yet the denial of her appetite pushed too far may leave

them not only entirely without food but without guardianship. Grant

that, working his brain unceasingly from dawn till dark, the man in

pecuniary difficulties must disregard rebellious bodily sensations in

obedience to the conscientious desire to liquidate the claims on him;

yet he may carry this subjection of simple feelings to complex feelings

to the extent of shattering his health, and failing in that end

which, with less of this subjection, he might have achieved. Clearly,

then, the subordination of lower feelings must be a conditional

subordination. The supremacy of higher feelings must be a qualified

supremacy.

In another way does the generalization ordinarily made err by

excess. With the truth that life is high in proportion as the

simple presentative feelings are under the control of the compound

representative feelings, it joins, as though they were corollaries,

certain propositions which are not corollaries. The current conception

is, not that the lower must yield to the higher when the two conflict,

but that the lower must be disregarded even when there is no conflict.

This tendency which the growth of moral ideas has generated, to

condemn obedience to inferior feelings when superior feelings protest,

has begotten a tendency to condemn inferior feelings considered

intrinsically. "I really think she does things because she likes to

do them," once said to me one lady concerning another: the form of

expression and the manner both implying the belief not only that such

behavior is wrong, but also that every one must recognize it as wrong.

And there prevails widely a notion of this kind. In practice, indeed,

the notion is very generally inoperative. Though it prompts various

incidental asceticisms, as of those who think it alike manly and

salutary to go without a great-coat in cold weather, or to persevere

through the winter in taking an out-of-door plunge, yet, generally,

the pleasurable feelings accompanying due fulfillment of bodily needs,

are accepted: acceptance being, indeed, sufficiently peremptory. But

oblivious of these contradictions in their practice, men commonly

betray a vague idea that there is something degrading, or injurious,

or both, in doing that which is agreeable and avoiding that which is

disagreeable. "Pleasant but wrong," is a phrase frequently used in a

way implying that the two are naturally connected. As above hinted,

however, such beliefs result from a confused apprehension of the

general truth that the more compound and representative feelings are,

on the average, of higher authority than the simple and presentative

feelings. Apprehended with discrimination, this truth implies that the

authority of the simple, ordinarily less than that of the compound but

occasionally greater, is habitually to be accepted when the compound do

not oppose.

In yet a third way is this principle of subordination misconceived. One

of the contrasts between the earlier evolved feelings and the later

evolved feelings, is that they refer respectively to the more immediate

effects of actions and to the more remote effects; and speaking

generally, guidance by that which is near is inferior to guidance by

that which is distant. Hence has resulted the belief that, irrespective

of their kinds, the pleasures of the present must be sacrificed to the

pleasures of the future. We see this in the maxim often impressed on

children when eating their meals, that they should reserve the nicest

morsel till the last: the check on improvident yielding to immediate

impulse, being here joined with the tacit teaching that the same

gratification becomes more valuable as it becomes more distant. Such

thinking is traceable throughout daily conduct; by no means indeed in

all, but in those who are distinguished as prudent and well regulated

in their conduct. Hurrying over his breakfast that he may catch the

train, snatching a sandwich in the middle of the day, and eating a late

dinner when he is so worn out that he is incapacitated for evening

recreation, the man of business pursues a life in which not only the

satisfactions of bodily desires, but also those of higher tastes and

feelings, are, as far as may be, disregarded, that distant ends may

be achieved; and yet if you ask what are these distant ends, you find

(in cases where there are no parental responsibilities) that they are

included under the conception of more comfortable living in time to

come. So ingrained is this belief that it is wrong to seek immediate

enjoyments and right to seek remote ones only, that you may hear from

a busy man who has been on a pleasure excursion a kind of apology for

his conduct. He deprecates the unfavorable judgments of his friends by

explaining that the state of his health had compelled him to take a

holiday. Nevertheless, if you sound him with respect to his future, you

find that his ambition is by-and-by to retire and devote himself wholly

to the relaxations which he is now somewhat ashamed of taking.

The general truth disclosed by the study of evolving conduct, sub-human

and human, that for the better preservation of life the primitive,

simple, presentative feelings must be controlled by the later-evolved,

compound, and representative feelings, has thus come, in the course of

civilization, to be recognized by men; but necessarily at first in too

indiscriminate a way. The current conception, while it errs by implying

that the authority of the higher over the lower is unlimited, errs

also by implying that the rule of the lower must be resisted even when

it does not conflict with the rule of the higher, and further errs by

implying that a gratification which forms a proper aim if it is remote,

forms an improper aim if it is proximate.

§ 44. Without explicitly saying so, we have been here tracing the

genesis of the moral consciousness. For unquestionably the essential

trait in the moral consciousness is the control of some feeling or

feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

Among the higher animals we may see, distinctly enough, the conflict

of feelings and the subjection of simpler to more compound; as when a

dog is restrained from snatching food by fear of the penalties which

may come if he yields to his appetite; or as when he desists from

scratching at a hole lest he should lose his master, who has walked on.

Here, however, though there is subordination, there is not conscious

subordination--there is no introspection revealing the fact that one

feeling has yielded to another. So is it even with human beings when

little developed mentally. The pre-social man, wandering about in

families and ruled by such sensations and emotions as are caused by the

circumstances of the moment, though occasionally subject to conflicts

of motives, meets with comparatively few cases in which the advantage

of postponing the immediate to the remote is forced on his attention;

nor has he the intelligence requisite for analyzing and generalizing

such of these cases as occur. Only as social evolution renders the life

more complex, the restraints many and strong, the evils of impulsive

conduct marked, and the comforts to be gained by providing for the

future tolerably certain, can there come experiences numerous enough

to make familiar the benefit of subordinating the simpler feelings to

the more complex ones. Only then, too, does there arise a sufficient

intellectual power to make an induction from these experiences,

followed by a sufficient massing of individual inductions into a

public and traditional induction impressed on each generation as it

grows up.

And here we are introduced to certain facts of profound significance.

This conscious relinquishment of immediate and special good to

gain distant and general good, while it is a cardinal trait of

the self-restraint called moral, is also a cardinal trait of

self-restraints other than those called moral--the restraints that

originate from fear of the visible ruler, of the invisible ruler, and

of society at large. Whenever the individual refrains from doing that

which the passing desire prompts, lest he should afterward suffer

legal punishment, or divine vengeance, or public reprobation, or all

of them, he surrenders the near and definite pleasure rather than risk

the remote and greater, though less definite, pains, which taking it

may bring on him; and, conversely, when he undergoes some present

pain, that he may reap some probable future pleasure, political,

religious, or social. But though all these four kinds of internal

control have the common character that the simpler and less ideal

feelings are consciously overruled by the more complex and ideal

feelings; and though, at first, they are practically co-extensive

and undistinguished, yet, in the course of social evolution,

they differentiate; and, eventually, the moral control, with its

accompanying conceptions and sentiments, emerges as independent. Let us

glance at the leading aspects of the process.

While, as in the rudest groups, neither political nor religious rule

exists, the leading check to the immediate satisfaction of each

desire as it arises, is consciousness of the evils which the anger of

fellow-savages may entail, if satisfaction of the desire is obtained

at their cost. In this early stage the imagined pains which constitute

the governing motive are those apt to be inflicted by beings of like

nature, undistinguished in power: the political, religious, and

social restraints are as yet represented only by this mutual dread of

vengeance.

When special strength, skill, or courage, makes one of them a leader in

battle, he necessarily inspires greater fear than any other, and there

comes to be a more decided check on such satisfactions of the desires

as will injure or offend him. Gradually as, by habitual warfare,

chieftainship is established, the evils thought of as likely to arise

from angering the chief, not only by aggression upon him, but by

disobedience to him, become distinguishable both from the smaller evils

which other personal antagonisms cause, and from the more diffused

evils thought of as arising from social reprobation. That is, political

control begins to differentiate from the more indefinite control of

mutual dread.

Meanwhile there has been developing the ghost theory. In all but the

rudest groups the double of a deceased man, propitiated at death and

afterward, is conceived as able to injure the survivors. Consequently,

as fast as the ghost theory becomes established and definite, there

grows up another kind of check on immediate satisfaction of the

desires--a check constituted by ideas of the evils which ghosts may

inflict if offended; and when political headship gets settled, and the

ghosts of dead chiefs, thought of as more powerful and relentless than

other ghosts, are especially dreaded, there begins to take shape the

form of restraint distinguished as religious.