THE MORAL NORM OF SOCIAL LIFE
I
The true definition of society as an _organised morality_ disposes
of the two false theories that are fashionable in our day--the view
of _moral subjectivism_ which prevents the moral will from being
concretely realised in the life of the community, and the theory of
_social realism_, according to which given social institutions and
interests are of supreme significance in and for themselves, so that
the highest moral principles prove at best to be simply the means or
the instrument for safeguarding those interests. From this point of
view, at present extremely prevalent, this or that _concrete form_
of social life is essential _per se_, although attempts are made to
give it a moral justification by connecting it with moral norms and
principles. But the very fact of seeking a moral basis for human
society proves that neither any concrete form of social life nor social
life _as such_ is the highest or the final expression of human nature.
If man were defined as essentially a social animal (ζῶον πολιτικόν)
and _nothing more_, the _intension_ of the term ‘man’ would be very
much narrowed and its _extension_ would be considerably increased.
Humanity would then include animals such as ants, of whom social life
is as essential a characteristic as it is of man. Sir John Lubbock, the
greatest authority on the subject, writes: “Their nests are no mere
collections of independent individuals, nor even temporary associations
like the flocks of migratory birds, but organised communities labouring
with the utmost harmony for the common good.”[110] These communities
sometimes contain a population so numerous that, in the words of
the same naturalist, of human cities London and Pekin can alone be
compared to them.[111] Far more important are the three following
inner characteristics of the ants’ community. They have a complex
social organisation. There is a distinct difference between different
communities in the degree of that organisation--a difference completely
analogous to the gradual development in the forms of human culture
from the hunting to the agricultural stage. It proves that the social
life of ants did not arise in any accidental or exceptional fashion
but developed according to certain general sociological laws. Finally,
the social tie is remarkably strong and stable, and there is wonderful
practical solidarity between the members of the ants’ community, so far
as the common good is concerned.
With regard to the first point, if division of labour be the
characteristic feature of civilised life, it is impossible to deny
civilisation to ants. Division of labour is in their case carried out
very sharply. They have very brave soldiers armed with enormously
developed pincer-like jaws by which they adroitly seize and snap off
the heads of their enemies, but who are incapable of doing anything
else. They have workmen remarkable for their skill and industry. They
have gentlemen with opposite characteristics who go so far that they
can neither feed themselves nor move about and only know how to use
other ants’ services. Finally, they have slaves (not to be confused
with workmen[112]) who are obtained by conquest and belong to other
species of ants, which fact does not, however, prevent them from being
completely devoted to their masters. Apart from such division of
labour, the high degree of civilisation possessed by ants is proved
by their keeping a number of domestic animals (_i.e._ tamed insects
belonging to other zoological groups), “So that we may truly say,”
Sir John Lubbock remarks, of course with some exaggeration, “that our
English ants possess a much greater variety of domestic animals than we
do ourselves.”[113]
Some of these domestic insects carefully brought up by ants serve
for food (in particular the plant-lice _aphidae_, which Linnaeus
calls ants’ cows (_Aphis formicarum vacca_)); others perform certain
necessary work in the community, _e.g._ act as dustmen; the third, in
Lubbock’s opinion, are kept simply for amusement like our pug-dogs or
canaries. The entomologist André has made a list of 584 species of
insects which are usually found in ants’ communities.
At the present time many large and well-populated communities of ants
live chiefly on the large stores of vegetable products they collect.
Crowds of working ants skilfully and systematically cut blades of
grass and stems of leaves--_reap_ them, as it were. But this semblance
of agriculture is neither their only nor their original means of
subsistence. “We find,” writes Lubbock, “in the different species of
ants different conditions of life, curiously answering to the earlier
stages of human progress. For instance, some species, such as _Formica
fusca_, live principally on the produce of the chase; for though they
feed partly on the honey-dew of aphides, they have not domesticated
those insects. These ants probably retain the habits once common to
all ants. They resemble the lower races of men, who subsist mainly by
hunting. Like them they frequent woods and wilds, live in comparatively
small communities, and the instincts of collective action are but
little developed among them. They hunt singly, and their battles
are single combats, like those of the Homeric heroes. Such species
as _Lassius flavus_ represent a distinctly higher type of social
life; they show more skill in architecture, may literally be said to
have domesticated certain species of aphides, and may be compared
to the pastoral stage of human progress, to the races which live on
the produce of their flocks and herds. Their communities are more
numerous; they act much more in concert; their battles are not mere
single combats, but they know how to act in combination. I am disposed
to hazard the conjecture that they will gradually exterminate the
mere hunting species, just as savages disappear before more advanced
races. Lastly, the agricultural nations may be compared with the
harvesting ants. Thus there seem to be three principal types, offering
a curious analogy to the three great phases--the hunting, pastoral, and
agricultural stages in the history of human development.”[114]
In addition to the complexity of social structure and the graduated
stages in the development of culture, ants’ societies are also
noted, as has been said above, for the remarkable stability of the
social tie. Our author continually remarks on ‘the greatest harmony
that reigns between members of one and the same community.’ This
harmony is _exclusively_ conditioned by the common good. On the
ground of many observations and experiments, Sir John Lubbock proves
that whenever an individual ant undertakes something useful for the
community and exceeding its own powers, _e.g._ attempts to bring to
the ant-heap a dead fly or beetle it has come across, it always calls
and finds comrades to help it. When, on the contrary, an individual
ant gets into trouble which concerns it alone, this does not as a
rule excite any sympathy whatever and no help is rendered to it. The
patient scientist had a number of times brought separate ants into
a state of insensibility by chloroform or spirits and found that
their fellow-citizens either did not take the slightest notice of
the unfortunate ones or threw them out as dead. Tender sympathy with
personal grief is not connected with any social function and therefore
does not form part of the idea of social life as such. But the feeling
of civic duty or the devotion to general order are so great among ants
that they never have any quarrels or civil wars. Their armies are
intended solely for outside wars. And even in the highly developed
communities, which have a special class of dustmen and a breed of
domestic clowns, not a single observer could discover any trace of
organised police or gendarmerie.
II
Social life is at least as essential a characteristic of these insects
as it is of man. If, however, we do not admit that they are equal to
ourselves--if we do not agree to bestow upon each of the innumerable
ants living in our forests the rights of man and of citizen, it means
that man has another and a more essential characteristic, one that is
independent of social instincts and, on the contrary, conditions the
distinctive character of _human_ society. This characteristic consists
in the fact that each man, as such, is a moral being--_i.e._ a being
who, apart from his social utility, has absolute worth and absolute
right to live and freely develop his positive powers. It directly
follows from this that _no man under any conditions and not for any
reason may be regarded as only a means_ for purposes extraneous to
himself. We cannot be merely an _instrument either for the good of
another person_ or for the good of a _whole class_ or even for the
so-called _common good_, _i.e._ the good of the majority of men.
This ‘common good’ or ‘general utility’ has a claim not upon man as
a person, but upon his activity or work to the extent to which that
work, being useful for the community, secures at the same time a worthy
existence to the worker. The right of the person as such is based upon
his human dignity inherent in him and inalienable, upon the formal
infinity of reason in every human being, upon the fact that each person
is unique and individual, and must therefore be an end in himself and
not merely a means or an instrument. This right of the person is from
its very nature _unconditional_, while the rights of the community
with regard to the person are _conditioned_ by the recognition of
his individual rights. Society, therefore, can compel a person to do
something only through an act of his own will,--otherwise it will
not be a case of laying an obligation upon a person, but of making
use of a thing. This does not mean, of course (as one of my critics
imagined), that in order to pass a legal or administrative measure, the
central power must ask the individual consent of each person. The moral
principle in its application to politics logically involves not an
absurd _liberum veto_ of this kind, but the right of each responsible
person freely to change his allegiance as well as his religion. In
other words, _no social group or institution has a right forcibly to
detain any one among its members_.
The human dignity of each person or his nature as a moral being does
not in any way depend upon his particular qualities or his social
utility. Such qualities and utility may determine man’s external
position in society and the relative value set upon him by other
people; they do not determine his own worth and his human rights. Many
animals are by nature far more virtuous than many human beings. The
conjugal virtue of pigeons and storks, the maternal love of hens, the
gentleness of deer, the faithfulness and devotion of dogs, the good
nature of seals and dolphins, the industry and civic virtues of ants
and bees, etc., are characteristic qualities adorning our younger
brothers, while they are by no means predominant in the majority of
human beings. Why is it then that it has never occurred to any one to
deprive the most worthless of men of his human rights in order to pass
them to the most excellent of animals as a reward for its virtue? As to
utility, not only one strong horse is more useful than a number of sick
beggars, but even inanimate objects, such as the printing-press or the
steam-boiler, have undoubtedly been of far more use to the historical
process as a whole than entire tribes of savages or barbarians. And yet
if (_per impossibile_) Gutenberg and Watt had, for the sake of their
great inventions, intentionally and consciously to sacrifice the life
even of a single savage or barbarian, the usefulness of their _work_
would not prevent their _action_ from being decidedly condemned as
immoral--unless indeed the view be taken that the purpose justifies the
means.
If the common good or the general happiness is to have the significance
of a moral principle, they must be in the full sense general, _i.e._
they must refer not merely to many or to the majority of men but
to _all without exception_. That which is truly the good of all is
for that very reason the good of _each_--no one is excluded and,
therefore, in serving _such_ a social good as an end, the individual
does _not_ thereby become merely a means or an instrument of something
extraneous and foreign to himself. True society which recognises
the absolute right of each person is not the negative limit but the
positive complement of the individual. In serving it with whole-hearted
devotion, the individual does not lose but _realises_ his absolute
worth and significance. For when taken in isolation he is only
_potentially_ absolute and infinite, and becomes so actually only by
being inwardly united to all.[115]
_The only moral norm is the principle of human dignity or of the
absolute worth of each individual, in virtue of which society is
determined as the inward and free harmony of all._[116] It is just as
impossible that there should be many moral norms in the strict sense
of the term, as it is impossible that there should be many supreme
goods or many moralities. It is not difficult to show that religion
(as concretely given in history), family, and property do not as such
contain a moral norm in the strict sense of the term. A thing which,
taken by itself, may or may not be moral, must obviously be determined
as one or the other by means of something else. It cannot, therefore,
be a moral norm on its own account--that is, it cannot give to other
things a character which it itself does not possess. Now there is no
doubt that religion may or may not be moral. Such religions as, for
instance, the cult of Moloch or Astarte (the survivals or analogies of
which are to be met now and then to this day), cannot possibly serve as
a moral norm of anything, since their very essence is directly opposed
to all morality. When, therefore, we are told that religion is the
norm and the moral foundation of society, we must first see whether
religion itself has a moral character and agrees with the principle of
morality; and this means that the ultimate criterion is that principle
and not religion as such. The only reason why we regard Christianity as
the true foundation and norm of all that is good in the world is that,
being a perfect religion, Christianity contains the unconditional moral
principle in itself. But if a separation be introduced between the
demand for moral perfection and the actual life of Christian society,
Christianity at once loses its absolute significance and becomes
historically accidental.
If now we take the family, it cannot be denied that the family too
may or may not be moral, both in individual cases and in the whole
given structure of society. Thus the family of ancient Greece had no
moral character. I refer not to the exceptional heroic families in
which wives murdered their husbands and were killed by their sons, or
sons killed their fathers and married their mothers, but to the usual
normal family of a cultured Athenian, which required as its necessary
complement the institution of hetæras and worse things than that. The
Arabic family (before Islam), in which new-born girl babies, if there
were more than one or two of them, were buried alive, had no moral
character either, though it was stable in its way. The very stable
family of the Romans in which the head of the house had the right of
life and death over his wife and children, also cannot be said to have
been moral. Thus the family, like religion, has no intrinsically moral
character, and, before it can become the norm for anything else, must
itself be put upon a moral basis.
As to property, to recognise it as the moral foundation of
normal society, _i.e._ as something sacred and inviolable, is
neither logically nor, in my own case (and I think in that of my
contemporaries), psychologically possible. The first awakening of
conscious life and thought in our generation was accompanied by
the thunder of the destruction of property in its two fundamental
historical forms of serfdom and slavery. And this abolition of
property, both in America and in Russia, was demanded and accomplished
_in the name of social morality_. The alleged inviolability was
brilliantly disproved by the fact of so successful a violation,
approved by the conscience of all. It is obvious that property is a
thing which stands in need of justification, and so far from containing
a moral norm, demands such a norm _for itself_.
All historical institutions--whether religious or social--are of a
mixed character. But there is no doubt that the moral norm can only
be found in a pure principle, and not in a mixed fact. A principle
which unconditionally affirms that which _ought_ to be is something
essentially inviolable. It may be rejected and disobeyed, but this
is detrimental not to the principle but to the person who rejects
and disobeys it. The law which proclaims ‘you ought to respect the
human dignity of each person, you ought to make no one a means or an
instrument,’ does not depend upon any fact, does not affirm any fact,
and therefore cannot be affected by any fact.
The principle of the absolute worth of human personality does not
depend upon any one or anything; but the moral character of societies
and institutions depends entirely upon it. We know in ancient and
modern heathendom of highly civilised great national bodies in which
the institutions of family, of religion, of property were extremely
stable, but which nevertheless were devoid of the moral character of a
human society. At best they resembled communities of wise insects in
which the mechanism of the good order is present, but that which the
mechanism is to subserve--the good itself--is absent, for the bearer of
it, the free personality, is not there.
III
A vague and distorted consciousness of the essence of morality and of
the true norm of human society exists even where the moral principle
has apparently no application. Thus, in the despotic monarchies of
the East, the real man or person was rightly regarded as possessed
of full rights, but such dignity was ascribed to one man only. Thus
transformed, however, into an exclusive and externally determined
privilege, human right and worth loses its moral character. The sole
bearer of it ceases to be a person, and since as a concrete real being
it cannot become a pure ideal, it becomes an idol. The moral principle
demands of the individual that he should respect human dignity as
such--that is, should respect it in other people as in himself. It
is only in treating others as persons that the individual is himself
determined as a person. The Eastern despot, however, finds in his world
no persons possessed of rights, but only rightless things. And since it
is thus impossible for him to have personal moral relations to any one,
he inevitably himself loses his personal moral character, and becomes a
thing--the most important, sacred, divine, worshipped thing--in short,
a fetish or an idol.
In the civic communities of the classical world the fulness of rights
was the privilege not of one man but of a few (in the aristocracies)
or of many (in the democracies). This extension was very important for
it rendered possible, though within narrow limits only, independent
moral interaction of individuals, and consequently personal
self-consciousness, and realised, at any rate for the given social
union, the idea of justice or equality of rights.[117] But the moral
principle is in its essence universal, since it demands the recognition
of the absolute inner worth of man as such, without any external
limitations. The communities of the ancients, however,--the aristocracy
of Sparta, the Athenian demos, and the peculiar combination of the
two--_senatus populusque Romanus_--recognised the true dignity of man
only within the limits of their civic union. They were not therefore
societies based upon the moral principle, but at best approached and
anticipated such a society.
This structure of life has more than merely a historical interest for
us: in truth, we have not outlived it yet. Consider, indeed, what it
was that limited the moral principle and prevented its realisation in
the world of antiquity. There were three classes of men who were not
recognised as bearers of any rights or as objects of any duties. They
were therefore in no sense an _end_ of action, were not included in the
idea of the _common good_ at all, and were regarded merely as material
_instruments_ of, or material _obstacles_ to, that good. Namely,
these were (1) _enemies_, _i.e._ originally all strangers,[118] then
(2) _slaves_, and, finally, (3) _criminals_. In spite of individual
differences the legalised relation to these three categories of men
was essentially the same, for it was equally immoral. There is no need
to represent the institution of slavery, which replaced the simple
slaughter of the prisoners of war, in an exaggeratedly horrible form.
Slaves had means of livelihood secured to them, and on the whole
were not badly treated. This, however, was an accident--though one
of frequent occurrence--and not a duty, and, therefore, had no moral
significance. Slaves were valued for their utility, but this had
nothing to do with the recognition of their worth as human beings. In
contradistinction to these useful things, which ought to be looked
after for reasons of expediency, external and internal enemies, as
_things_ unquestionably _harmful_, were to be mercilessly exterminated.
With regard, however, to the enemy in war, mercilessness might be
tempered by the respect for his force or the fear of revenge; but with
regard to defenceless criminals, real or supposed, cruelty knew no
limits. In cultured Athens, persons accused of ordinary crimes were
tortured as soon as they were taken into custody, previously to any
trial.
All these facts--war, slavery, executions--were legitimate for the
ancient world, in the sense that they logically followed from the
view held by every one, and were conditioned by the general level of
consciousness. If the worth of man as an independent individual and the
fulness of his rights and dignity depend exclusively upon his belonging
to a certain civic union, the natural consequence is that men who do
not belong to that union and are strange and hostile to it, or men who,
though they belong to it, violate its laws and are a menace to common
safety, are by that very fact deprived of human rights and dignity, and
that with regard to them all things are lawful.
This point of view, however, came to be changed. The development
of ethical thought first among the Sophists and in Socrates, then
among the Greco-Roman Stoics, the work of Roman lawyers and the
very character of the Roman Empire, which embraced many peoples and
nations, and therefore inevitably widened the theoretical and practical
outlook,--all this has gradually effaced the old limits and established
a consciousness of the moral principle in its formal universality
and infinity. At the same time, in the East the religiously moral
teaching of the Jewish prophets was evolving a living ideal of absolute
human dignity. And while a Roman in the theatre of the eternal city
proclaimed, by the mouth of the actor, the new word ‘_homo sum_’ as the
expression of the highest personal dignity, instead of the old ‘_civis
Romanus_,’ another Roman in a remote Eastern province and at a scene
more tragic completed the statement of this new principle by simply
pointing to the actual personal incarnation of it: _Ecce homo_!
The inner change which took place in humanity as the result of the
interaction of the events in Palestine and the Greco-Roman theories
ought, it would seem, to have been the beginning of an entirely new
order of things. Indeed, a complete regeneration of the physical world
was expected; and yet the social and moral world of heathendom still
stands essentially unchanged. This will not be an object for grief
and wonder if the problem of the moral regeneration of humanity is
considered in its full scope. It is clear from the nature of the case,
and is foretold in the Gospels,[119] that this problem can only be
solved by a gradual process before the final catastrophe comes. The
process of such preparation is not yet completed, but is being carried
on, and there is no doubt that from the fifteenth and especially from
the end of the eighteenth century there has been a noticeable change
in the rate of the historical progress. It is important from the
practically moral point of view to make clear to ourselves what has
been done already and what still remains to be done in certain definite
directions.
IV
When men of different nationality and social position were spiritually
united in worshipping a _foreigner and a beggar_--the Galilean who
was executed as a _criminal_ in the name of national and class
interests--international wars, rightlessness of the masses, and
executions of criminals were _inwardly_ undermined. Granted that the
inner change took eighteen centuries to manifest itself even to a small
extent; granted that its manifestation is becoming noticeable just
at the time when its first mover--the Christian faith--is weakened,
and seems to disappear from the surface of consciousness--still,
man’s inner attitude towards the old heathen foundations of society
is changing, and the change shows itself more and more in his life.
Whatever the thoughts of individual men may be, advanced humanity as
a collective whole has reached a degree of moral maturity, a state of
feeling and consciousness, which is beginning to make impossible for
it things which to the ancient world were natural. And even individual
men, if they have not renounced reason altogether, hold, in the form of
rational conviction if not in the form of religious faith, the moral
principle which does not permit the legalisation of collective crimes.
The very fact of the remotest parts of humanity coming into contact, of
getting to know one another and becoming mutually connected, does much
to abolish the barriers and estrangement between men, natural from the
narrow point of view of the ancients, for whom the Straits of Gibraltar
were the extreme limit of the universe, and the banks of the Dnieper or
the Don were populated by men with dogs’ heads.
International wars are not yet abolished, but the point of view with
regard to them has changed in a striking degree, especially of late.
The _fear_ of war has become the predominant motive of international
policy, and no Government would venture to confess to harbouring plans
of conquest. Slavery in the proper sense has been finally and wholly
abolished. Other crude forms of personal dependence which survived till
the last century, and, in places, till the middle of the present, have
also been done away with. What remains is only the indirect economic
slavery, but this too is a question whose turn has come. Finally,
the point of view with regard to criminals has since the eighteenth
century been clearly tending to become more moral and Christian. And
to think that this progress--belated, but quick and decisive--along
the path mapped out nineteen centuries ago, should cause anxiety for
the moral foundations of society! In truth, a false conception of
these foundations is the chief obstacle to a thorough moral change
in the social life and consciousness. Religion, family, property
cannot as such, that is, simply as existent facts, be the norm or the
moral foundation of society. The problem is not to preserve these
institutions at any cost _in statu quo_ but to make them conformable to
the one and only moral standard, so that they might be wholly permeated
by the one moral principle.
This principle is essentially universal, the same for all. Now,
religion as such need not be universal, and all religions of
antiquity were strictly national. Christianity, however, being the
embodiment of the absolute moral ideal, is as universal as the moral
principle itself, and at the beginning it had this character. But
historical institutions, which in the course of history came to be
connected with it, ceased to be universal and therefore lost their
pure and all-embracing moral character. And so long as we affirm our
religion, _first_, in its denominational peculiarity, and _then only_
as universal Christianity, we deprive it both of a sound logical
basis and of moral significance, and make it an obstacle in the way
of the spiritual regeneration of humanity. Further, universality
expresses itself not only by the absence of external, national,
denominational and other limitations, but still more by freedom from
inner limitations. To be truly universal, religion must not separate
itself from intellectual enlightenment, from science, from social
and political progress. A religion which fears all these things has
obviously no faith in its own power and is inwardly permeated with
unbelief. While claiming to be the sole moral norm of society, it fails
to fulfil the most elementary moral condition of being genuine.
The positive significance of the _family_, in virtue of which it
may, in a sense, be the moral norm of society, is apparent from the
following consideration. It is physically impossible for a _single_
individual concretely to realise in his everyday life his moral
relation to _all_. However sincerely a man may recognise the absolute
demands of the moral ideal, he cannot, in real life, apply these
demands to _all_ human beings, for the simple reason that the ‘all’
do not concretely exist for him. He cannot give _practical_ proof of
his respect for the human dignity of the millions of men about whom
he knows nothing; he cannot make them _in concreto_ the positive end
of his activity. And yet, unless the moral demand is _completely_
realised in _perceptible_ personal relations, it remains an abstract
principle which enlightens the mind, but does not regenerate the life
of man. The solution of this contradiction is that moral relations
ought to be fully realised within a certain limited environment in
which each man is placed in his concrete everyday existence. This is
precisely the true function of the family. Each member of it is not
only intended and meant to be, but actually is, an end for all the
others; each is perceptibly recognised to have absolute significance,
each is irreplaceable. From this point of view the family is the
pattern and the elementary constitutive cell of universal brotherhood
or of human society as it ought to be. But in order to preserve such
a significance, the family obviously must not become the embodiment
of mutual egoism. It must be the first stage from which each of its
members may be always able to ascend, as much as in him lies, to a
greater realisation of the moral principle in the world. The family is
either the _crowning stage_ of egoism or the _beginning_ of world-wide
union. To uphold it in the first sense does not mean to uphold a ‘moral
foundation’ of society.
Property as such has no moral significance. No one is morally bound
either to be rich or to enrich other people. General equality of
property is as impossible and unnecessary as sameness in the colouring
or in the quantity of hair. There is one condition, however, which
renders the question as to the distribution of property a moral
question. It is inconsistent with human dignity and with the moral norm
of society that a person should be unable to support his existence,
or, that in order to do so he should spend so much time and strength
as to have none left for looking after his human, intellectual and
moral improvement. In that case man ceases to be an end for himself
and for others, and becomes merely a material instrument of economic
production, on a level with soulless machines. And since the moral
principle unconditionally demands that we should respect the human
dignity of all and each, and regard every one as an end in himself
and not only as a means, a society that desires to be morally normal
cannot remain indifferent to such a position of any one of its members.
It is its direct duty to secure to each and all a certain _minimum_
of well-being, just as much as is necessary to support a worthy human
existence. The way to attain this is a problem for economics and not
for ethics. In any case it ought to be, and therefore it can be, done.
All human society, and especially society that professes to be
Christian, must, if it is to go on existing and to attain to a higher
dignity, conform to the moral standard. What matters is not the
external preservation of certain institutions, which may be good or
bad, but a sincere and consistent striving inwardly to improve _all_
institutions and social relations which may be good, by subordinating
them more and more to the one unconditional moral ideal of the _free
union of all in the perfect good_.
Christianity put forward this ideal as a practical task for all peoples
and nations, answered for its being realisable--given a good will on
our part--and promised help from above in the execution of it--help, of
which there is sufficient evidence both in personal and in historical
experience. But just because the task Christianity sets before us is
a moral and therefore a free one, the supreme Good cannot help man by
thwarting the evil will or externally removing the obstacles which that
will puts in the way of the realisation of the kingdom of God. Humanity
as represented by individuals and nations must itself outlive and
overcome these obstacles, which are to be found both in the individual
evil will and in the complex effects of the _collective evil will_.
This is the reason why progress in the Christian world is so slow, and
why Christianity _appears_ to be lifeless and inactive.
FOOTNOTES:
[110] _Ants, Bees, and Wasps_, by Sir John Lubbock, 7th ed., p. 119.
[111] _Ants, Bees, and Wasps_, by Sir John Lubbock, 7th ed., p. 119.
[112] Working ants (like working bees) do not form a distinct
species; they are descended from the common queen but are sexually
under-developed.
[113] _Ibid._ p. 73.
[114] P. 91.
[115] See above, Part III., Chapter I., ‘The Individual and Society.’
[116] This position is logically established in moral philosophy in its
elementary part, which, thanks to Kant, became as strictly scientific
in its own sphere as pure mechanics is in another.
[117] In the despotic monarchies of the East there could be no question
of any _equality of rights_--there was only the negative equality of
general rightlessness. But equal distribution of an injustice does
not render it just. The idea of equality taken in the abstract is
mathematical only, not ethical.
[118] Hospitality to peaceful strangers is a fact of very ancient
date, but can hardly be said to be primitive. In Greece its founder
was supposed to be Zeus--the representative of the _third_ generation
of gods (after Chronos and Uranus). Before being a guest in the sense
of simply a friendly visitor, the stranger was a ‘guest’ in the sense
of ‘merchant,’ and earlier still he was only regarded in the sense of
the Latin _hostis_ (enemy). In times still more ancient, accounts of
which have been handed down in classical tradition, a good guest was
met with still greater joy than in the later, hospitable times, but
only as a savoury dish at the family feast. Apart from such extremes,
the prevalent attitude to strangers in primitive society was no doubt
similar to that observed by Sir John Lubbock among ants. When a
stranger ant belonging to a different community, though one of the same
species, came to an ant heap, ants would drag it about for a while by
its antennae till it was half-dead, and then either finish it off or
drive it away.
[119] In the parables of the leaven, of wheat and tares, of the mustard
seed, etc.