_Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments_
Now, here at last, in encountering the ethical process at work, have we
detected a breach of continuity? Has the moral sentiment been flung in
from outside, or is it a natural result of the cosmic process we have
been sketching? Clearly it is the latter. There has been no breach of
continuity. When the prolongation of infancy produced the clan, there
naturally arose reciprocal necessities of behaviour among the members of
the clan, its mothers and children, its hunters and warriors. If such
reciprocal necessities were to be disregarded the clan would dissolve,
and dissolution would be general destruction. For, bear in mind, the
clan, when once evolved, becomes the unit whose preservation is
henceforth the permanent necessity. It is infancy that has made it so.
A miscellaneous horde, with brief infancies for its younger members, may
survive a very extensive slaughter; but in a clan, where the proportion
of helpless children is much greater, and a considerable division of
labour between nurses and warriors has become established, the case is
different. An amount or degree of calamity sufficient to break up its
organization will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when Nature's travail
has at length brought forth the clan, its requirements forthwith become
paramount, and each member's conduct from babyhood must conform to them.
Natural selection henceforth invests her chief capital in the enterprise
of preserving the clan. In that primitive social unit lie all the
potentiality and promise of Human Society through untold future ages. So
for age after age those clans in which the conduct of the individuals is
best subordinated to the general welfare are sure to prevail over clans
in which the subordination is less perfect. As the maternal instinct
had been cultivated for thousands of generations before clanship came
into existence, so for many succeeding ages of turbulence the patriotic
instinct, which prompts to the defence of home, was cultivated under
penalty of death. Clans defended by weakly loyal or cowardly warriors
were sure to perish. Unflinching bravery and devoted patriotism were
virtues necessary to the survival of the community, and were thus
preserved until at the dawn of historic times, in the most grandly
militant of clan societies, we find the word _virtus_ connoting just
these qualities, and no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open in the
forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps into it, that the commonwealth may
be preserved from harm.
Now the moment a man's voluntary actions are determined by conscious or
unconscious reference to a standard outside of himself and his selfish
motives, he has entered the world of ethics, he has begun to live in a
moral atmosphere. Egoism has ceased to be all in all, and altruism--it
is an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the only one
available--altruism has begun to assert its claim to sovereignty. In the
earlier and purely animal stages of existence it was right enough for
each individual to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; it did not endanger
the welfare of the species, but on the contrary it favoured that
welfare; in its origin avoidance of pain was the surest safeguard for
the perpetuation of life, and with due qualifications that is still the
case. But as soon as sociality became established, and Nature's supreme
end became the maintenance of the clan organization, the standard for
the individual's conduct became shifted, permanently and forever
shifted. Limits were interposed at which pleasure must be resigned and
pain endured, even certain death encountered, for the sake of the clan;
perhaps the individual did not always understand it in that way, but at
all events it was for the sake of some rule recognized in the clan,
some rule which, as his mother and all his kin had from his earliest
childhood inculcated upon him, _ought_ to be obeyed. This conception of
ought, of obligation, of duty, of debt to something outside of self,
resulted from the shifting of the standard of conduct outside of the
individual's self. Once thus externalized, objectivized, the ethical
standard demanded homage from the individual. It furnished the rule for
a higher life than one dictated by mere selfishness. Speaking after the
manner of naturalists, I here use the phrase "higher life" advisedly. It
was the kind of life that was conducive to the preservation and further
development of the highest form of animate existence that had been
attained. It appears to me that we begin to find for ethics the most
tremendous kind of sanction in the nature of the cosmic process.
A word of caution may be needed. It is not for a moment to be supposed
that when primitive men began crudely shaping their conduct with
reference to a standard outside of self, they did so as the result of
meditation, or with any realizing sense of what they were doing. That
has never been the method of evolution. Its results steal upon the world
noiselessly and unobserved, and only after they have long been with us
does reason employ itself upon them. The wolf does not eat the lamb
because he regards a flesh diet as necessary to his health and activity,
but because he is hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he likes lamb.
It was no intellectual perception of needs and consequences that
lengthened the maternal instinct with primeval mothers as the period of
infancy lengthened. Nor was it any such intellectual perception that
began to enthrone "I ought" in the place of "I wish." If in the world's
recurrent crises Nature had waited to be served by the flickering lamp
of reason, the story would not have been what it is. Her method has
been, with the advent of a new situation, to modify the existing group
of instincts; and this work she will not let be slighted; in her train
follows the lictor with the symbols of death, and there is neither pity
nor relenting. In the primeval warfare between clans, those in which the
instincts were not so modified as to shift the standard of conduct
outside of the individual's self must inevitably have succumbed and
perished under the pressure of those in which the instincts had begun to
experience such modification. The moral law grew up in the world not
because anybody asked for it, but because it was needed for the world's
work. If it is not a product of the cosmic process, it would be hard to
find anything that could be so called.
[Illustration]
X
_The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake of Moral Ends_
I have not undertaken to make my outline sketch of the genesis of
Humanity approach to completeness, but only to present enough salient
points to make a closely connected argument in showing how morality is
evolved in the cosmic process and sanctioned by it. In a more complete
sketch it would be necessary to say something about the genesis of
Religion. One of the most interesting, and in my opinion one of the most
profoundly significant, facts in the whole process of evolution is the
first appearance of religious sentiment at very nearly the same stage at
which the moral law began to grow up. To the differential attributes of
Humanity already considered there needs to be added the possession of
religious sentiment and religious ideas. We may safely say that this is
the most important of all the distinctions between Man and other
animals; for to say so is simply to epitomize the whole of human
experience as recorded in history, art, and literature. Along with the
rise from gregariousness to incipient sociality, along with the first
stammerings of articulate speech, along with the dawning discrimination
between right and wrong, came the earliest feeble groping toward a world
beyond that which greets the senses, the first dim recognition of the
Spiritual Power that is revealed in and through the visible and palpable
realm of nature. And universally since that time the notion of Ethics
has been inseparably associated with the notion of Religion, and the
sanction for Ethics has been held to be closely related with the world
beyond phenomena. There are philosophers who maintain that with the
further progress of enlightenment this close relation will cease to be
asserted, that Ethics will be divorced from Religion, and that the
groping of the Human Soul after its God will be condemned as a mere
survival from the errors of primitive savagery, a vain and idle reaching
out toward a world of mere phantoms. I mention this opinion merely to
express unqualified and total dissent from it. I believe it can be shown
that one of the strongest implications of the doctrine of evolution is
the Everlasting Reality of Religion.
But we have not time at present for entering upon so vast a subject. Let
this reference suffice to show that it has not been passed over or
forgotten in my theory of the genesis of Humanity. In an account of the
evolution of the religious sentiment, its first appearance as coeval, or
nearly so, with the beginnings of the ethical process would assume great
importance. We have here been concerned purely with the ethical process
itself, which we have found to be--as Huxley truly says in his
footnote--part and parcel of the general process of evolution. Our
historical survey of the genesis of Humanity seems to show very forcibly
that a society of Human Souls living in conformity to a perfect Moral
Law is the end toward which, ever since the time when our solar system
was a patch of nebulous vapour, the cosmic process has been aiming.
After our cooling planet had become the seat of organic life, the
process of natural selection went on for long ages seemingly, but not
really at random; for our retrospect shows that its ultimate tendency
was towards singling out one creature and exalting his intelligence.
Now we have seen that this increase of intelligence itself, by entailing
upon Man the helplessness of infancy, led directly to the production of
those social conditions that called the ethical process into play and
set it actively to work. Thus we may see the absurdity of trying to
separate the moral nature of Man from the rest of his nature, and to
assign for it a separate and independent history. The essential
solidarity in the cosmic process will admit of no such fanciful
detachment of one part from another. All parts are involved one in
another. Again, the ethical process is not only part and parcel of the
cosmic process, but it is its crown and consummation. Toward the
spiritual perfection of Humanity the stupendous momentum of the cosmic
process has all along been tending. That spiritual perfection is the
true goal of evolution, the divine end that was involved in the
beginning. When Huxley asks us to believe that "the cosmic process has
no sort of relation to moral ends," I feel like replying with the
question, "Does not the cosmic process exist purely for the sake of
moral ends?" Subtract from the universe its ethical meaning, and nothing
remains but an unreal phantom, the figment of false metaphysics.
We have now arrived at a position from which a glimmer of light is
thrown upon some of the dark problems connected with the moral
government of the world. We can begin to see why misery and wrongdoing
are permitted to exist, and why the creative energy advances by such
slow and tortuous methods toward the fulfilment of its divine purpose.
In order to understand these things, we must ask, What is the ultimate
goal of the ethical process? According to the utilitarian philosophy
that goal is the completion of human happiness. But this interpretation
soon refutes itself. A world of completed happiness might well be a
world of quiescence, of stagnation, of automatism, of blankness; the
dynamics of evolution would have no place in it. But suppose we say that
the ultimate goal of the ethical process is the perfecting of human
character? This form of statement contains far more than the other.
Consummation of happiness is a natural outcome of the perfecting of
character, but that perfecting can be achieved only through struggle,
through discipline, through resistance. It is for him that _overcometh_
that the crown of life is reserved. The consummate product of a world
of evolution is the character that _creates_ happiness, that is replete
with dynamic possibilities of fresh life and activity in directions
forever new. Such a character is the reflected image of God, and in it
are contained the promise and potency of life everlasting.
No such character could be produced by any act of special creation in a
garden of Eden. It must be the consummate efflorescence of long ages of
evolution, and a world of evolution is necessarily characterized by slow
processes, many of which to a looker-on seem like tentative experiments,
with an enormous sacrifice of ephemeral forms of life. Thus while the
Earth Spirit goes on, unhasting, yet unresting, weaving in the loom of
Time the visible garment of God, we begin to see that even what look
like failures and blemishes have been from the outset involved in the
accomplishment of the all-wise and all-holy purpose, the perfecting of
the spiritual Man in the likeness of his Heavenly Father.
These points will receive further indirect illustration as we complete
our outline sketch of the cosmic process in the past. It is self-evident
that in the production of an ethical character, altruistic feelings and
impulses must co÷perate. Let us look, then, for some of the beginnings
of altruism in the course of the evolution of life.
[Illustration]