In the Buddhist "Kathâ Sarit Sâgara" it is written: "Why should we cling
to this perishable body? In the eye of the wise the only thing it is
good for is to benefit one's fellow creatures." And another Buddhist
author expresses the same idea with still more force and beauty: "Full
of love for all things in the world, practising virtue in order to
benefit others--this man alone is happy."
But even when the moralists did not lay down the "Golden Rule," they
taught that the cause of sin and of suffering was selfishness; and
they spoke strongly against self-pity, and self-love, and
self-aggrandisement.
What is the lesson of Buddha, and of the Indian, Persian, and Greek
moralists? Buddha went out into the world to search for the cause of
human sin and sorrow. He found the cause to be self-indulgence and the
cure to be self-conquest. "The cause of pain," he said, "is desire."
And this lesson was repeated over and over again by Socrates, Plato,
Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Plutarch, and Seneca..
The moral is that selfishness is bad, and unselfishness is good. And
this moral is backed by the almost universal practice of all men in all
ages and of all races in testing or weighing the virtue or the value of
any person's conduct.
What is the common assay for moral gold? The test of the _motive_. Sir
Gorgio Midas has given £100,000 to found a Midas hospital. What says
the man in the street? "Ah! fine advertisement for the Midas pills!" Mr.
Queech, the grocer and churchwarden, has given £5 to the new Methodist
Sunday School. "H'm!" says the cynical average man, "a sprat to catch a
mackerel." Sir Norman Conquest, Bart, M.P., has made an eloquent speech
in favour of old-age pensions. Chigwin, the incorruptible, remarks with
a sniff that "it looks as if there would soon be a General Election."
What do these gibes mean? They mean that the benevolence of Messrs.
Midas, Queech, and Conquest is inspired by selfishness, and therefore is
not worthy, but base.
Now, when a gang of colliers go down a burning pit to save life, or when
a sailor jumps overboard in a storm to save a drowning fireman, or when
a Russian countess goes to Siberia for trying to free the Russian serfs,
there is no sneer heard. Chigwin's fierce eye lights up, the man in the
street nods approvingly, and the average man in the railway compartment
observes sententiously:
"That's pluck."
Well. Is it not clear that these acts are approved and held good? And is
it not clear that they are held to be good because they are felt to be
unselfish?
Now, I make bold to say that in no case shall we find a man or woman
honoured or praised by men when his conduct is believed to be selfish.
It is always selfishness that men scorn. It is always self-sacrifice or
unselfish service they admire. This shows us that deep in the universal
heart the root idea of morality is social service. This is not a divine
truth: it is a human truth.
Selfishness has come to be called "bad" because it injures the many
without benefiting the one. Unselfishness has come to be called "good"
because it brings benefit and pleasure to one and all. "It is twice
bless'd: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes." As Marcus
Aurelius expresses it: "That which is not for the interest of the whole
swarm is not for the interest of a single bee." And again he puts
it: "Mankind are under one common law; and if so they must be
fellow-citizens, and belong to the same body politic. From whence it
will follow that the whole world is but one commonwealth."
And Epictetus, the Greek slave, said that as "God is the father of all
men, then all men are brothers."
For countless ages this notion of human brotherhood, and of the evil of
self-love, has been to morality what the sap is to the tree. And now let
us think once more how the notion first came into being.
I said that morality--which is the knowledge of good and evil--did not
come by revelation from God, but by means of evolution. And I said that
this idea was first put forth by Spencer and Darwin, and afterwards
dealt with by other writers.
Darwin's idea was two-fold. He held that man inherited his social
instincts (on which morality is built) from the lower animals; and he
thought that very likely the origin of the social instinct in animals
was the relation of the parents to their young. Let us first see what
Darwin said.
In Chapter Four of _The Descent of Man_ Darwin deals with "moral sense."
After remarking that, so far as he knows, no one has approached the
question exclusively from the side of natural history, Darwin goes on:
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable--namely,
that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts,
the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably
acquire a moral sense, or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers
had become as well, or nearly as well, developed as in man.
For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in
the society of its fellows, and feel a certain amount of sympathy with
them, and to perform various services for them....
Every one must have noticed how miserable dogs, horses, sheep, etc., are
when separated from their companions, and what strong mutual affection
the two former kinds, at least, shown on their reunion....
All animals living in a body, which defend themselves or attack their
enemies in concert, must indeed be in some degree faithful to one
another; and those that follow a leader must be in some degree obedient.
When the baboons in Abyssinia plunder a garden, they silently follow a
leader, and if an imprudent young animal makes a noise, he receives a
slap from the others to teach him silence and obedience....
With respect to the impulse which leads certain animals to associate
together, and to aid one another in many ways, we may infer that in most
cases they are impelled by the same sense of satisfaction or pleasure
which they experience in performing other instinctive actions....
In however complex a manner this feeling (sympathy) may have originated,
as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and
defend one another, it will have been increased through natural
selection for those communities which included the greatest number of
sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of
offspring....
Thus the social instincts, which must have been acquired by man in a
very rude state, and probably even by his early apelike progenitors,
still give the impulse to some of his best actions; but his actions are
in a higher degree determined by the expressed wishes and judgment of
his fellow-men, and unfortunately very often by his own strong selfish
desires.
Those quotations should be enough to show Darwin's idea of the origin
of the social, or moral, feelings. But I shall quote besides Haeckel's
comment on Darwin's theory.
Speaking of the "Golden Rule" in his _Confessions of Faith of a Man of
Science_, Haeckel says:
In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident;
as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal
ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of apes and
other social mammals; in a similar manner, but with wider scope, it was
already present in the most primitive communities and among the hordes
of the least advanced savages. Brotherly love--mutual support, succour,
protection, and the like--had already made its appearance among
gregarious animals as a social duty; for without it, the continued
existence of such societies is impossible. Although at a later period,
in the case of man, these moral foundations of society came to be much
more highly developed, their oldest prehistoric source, as Darwin has
shown, is to be sought in the social instincts of animals. Among the
higher vertebrates (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.), the development
of social relations and duties is the indispensable condition of their
living together in orderly societies. Such societies have for man also
been the most important instrument of intellectual and moral progress.
There is a very able article in the March, 1905, issue of the
_Nineteenth Century_, by Prince Kropotkin, the author of _Mutual Aid_,
on Darwin's theory of the origin of the moral sense, in which the
striking suggestion is made that primitive man, besides inheriting from
animals the social instinct, also copied from them the first rudiments
of tribal union and mutual aid. This notion may be gathered from the
following picturesque passages:
Primitive man lived in close intimacy with animals. With some of them he
probably shared the shelters under the rocks, occasionally the caverns,
and very often food....
Our primitive ancestors lived _with_ the animals, in the midst of them.
And as soon as they began to bring some order into their observations
of nature, and to transmit them to posterity, the animals and their life
supplied them with the chief materials for their unwritten encyclopaedia
of knowledge, as well as for their wisdom, which they expressed in
proverbs and sayings. Animal psychology was the first psychology man was
aware of--it is still a favourite subject of talk at the camp fires;
animal life, closely interwoven with that of man, was the subject of
the very first rudiments of art, inspiring the first engravers and
sculptors, and entering into the composition of the most ancient epical
traditions and cosmogonic myths....
The first thing which our children learn in natural history is something
about the beasts of prey--the lions and the tigers; But the first
thing that primitive savages must have learned about nature was that
it represents a vast agglomeration of animal clans and tribes; the
ape tribe, so nearly related to man, the ever-prowling wolf tribe, the
knowing, chattering bird tribe, the ever-busy insect tribe, and on. For
them the animals were an extension of their own kin--only so much wiser
than themselves. And the first vague generalisation which men must
have made about nature--so vague as to hardly differ from a mere
impression--was that the living being and his clan or tribe are
inseparable. _We_ can separate them--_they_ could not; and it seems even
doubtful whether they could _think_ of life otherwise than within a clan
or a tribe....
And that man who had witnessed once an attack of wild dogs, or dholes,
upon the biggest beasts of prey, certainly realised, once and for ever,
the irresistible force of the tribal unions, and the confidence and
courage with which they inspire every individual. Man made divinities of
these dogs, and worshipped them, trying by all sorts of magic to acquire
their courage.
In the prairies and the woods our earliest ancestors saw myriads of
animals, all living in clans and tribes. Countless herds of red deer,
fallow deer, reindeer, gazelles, and antelopes, thousands of droves of
buffaloes and legions of wild horses, wild donkeys, quaggas, zebras, and
so on, were moving over the boundless plains, peacefully grazing side
by side. Even the dreary plateaus had their herds of llamas and wild
camels. And when man approached these animals, he soon realised how
closely connected all these beings were in their respective droves or
herds. Even when they seemed fully absorbed in grazing, and apparently
took no notice of the others, they closely watched each other's
movements, always ready to join in some common action. Man saw that
all the deer tribe, whether they graze or merely gambol, always kept
sentries, which never release their watchfulness and never are late to
signal the approach of a beast of prey; he knew how, in case of a sudden
attack, the males and the females would encircle their young ones and
face the enemy, exposing their lives for the safety of the feeble ones;
and how, even with such timid creatures as the antelopes, or the fallow
deer, the old males would often sacrifice themselves in order to cover
the retreat of the herd. Man knew all that, which we ignore or easily
forget, and he repeated it in his tales, embellishing the acts of
courage and self-sacrifice with his primitive poetry, or mimicking them
in his religious tribal dances....
Social life--that is, _we_, not _I_--is, in the eyes of primitive man,
the normal form of life. _It is life itself_. Therefore "we" must have
been the normal form of thinking for primitive man: a "category" of
his understanding, as Kant might have said. And not even "we," which
is still too personal, because it represents a multiplication of the
"_I's_," but rather such expression as "the men of the beaver tribe,"
"the kangaroo men," or "the turtles." This was the primitive form of
thinking, which nature impressed upon the mind of man.
Here, in that identification, or, we might even say, in this absorption
of the "I" by the tribe, lies the root of all ethical thought. The
self-asserting "individual" came much later on. Even now, with the lower
savages, the "individual" hardly exists at all. It is the tribe, with
its hard-and-fast rules, superstitions, taboos, habits, and interests,
which is always present in the mind of the child of nature. And in that
constant, ever-present identification of the unit with the whole lies
the substratum of all ethics, the germ out of which all the subsequent
conceptions of justice, and the still higher conceptions of morality,
grew up in the course of evolution.
Besides these excellent contributions to the subject, Prince Kropotkin
gives us other new and striking thoughts, bearing upon the parental
source of the social feelings indicated by Darwin. But first let us go
back to Darwin. In Chapter Four of _The De-scent of Man_ Darwin says:
The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the
parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be
developed by the young remaining for a long time with their parents,
and this extension may be attributed in part to habit, but chiefly to
natural selection. With those animals which were benefited by living in
close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in
society would best escape various dangers, whilst those that cared least
for their comrades, and lived solitary, would perish in greater numbers.
Dr. Saleeby, in the _Academy_ in the spring of 1905, had some
interesting remarks upon the origin of altruism. He "finds in the breast
of the mammalian mother the fount whence love has flowed," and points
out that the higher we go in the mammalian scale the more dependent are
the young upon their mothers.
After describing the helplessness of the human baby, he continues thus:
Yet, this is the creature which has spread over the earth so that
he numbers some fifteen hundred millions to-day. He is the "lord of
creation," master of creatures bigger, stronger, fleeter, longer-lived
than himself. The earth is his and the fulness thereof. Yet without love
not one single specimen of him has a chance of reaching maturity, or
even surviving for a week. Verily love is the greatest thing in the
world.
Well, upon this subject of the parental origin of altruism, Prince
Kropotkin throws another light. First, alluding to Darwin's cautious
handling of the subject of the maternal origin of social feelings,
Prince Kropotkin, quotes Darwin's own remarkable comment, thus:
This caution was fully justified, because in other places he pointed
out that the social instinct must be a _separate instinct in itself_,
different from the others--an instinct which has been developed
by natural selection _for its own sake_, as it was useful for the
well-being and preservation of the species. It is so fundamental,
that when it runs against another instinct, even one so strong as the
attachment of the parents to their offspring, it often takes the upper
hand. Birds, when the time has come for their autumn migration, will
leave behind their tender young, not yet old enough for a prolonged
flight, and follow their comrades.
He then offers the following suggestion:
To this striking illustration I may also add that the social instinct is
strongly developed with many lower animals, such as the land-crabs, or
the Molucca crab; as also with certain fishes, with whom it hardly could
be considered as an extension of the filial or parental feelings.
In these cases it appears rather an extension of the _brotherly_ or
_sisterly_ relations or feelings of _comradeship_, which probably
develop each time that a considerable number of young animals, having
been hatched at a given place and at a given moment, continue to live
together--whether they are with their parents or not. It would seem,
therefore, more correct to consider the social and the parental
instincts as _two_ closely connected instincts, of which the former is
perhaps the earlier, and therefore the stronger, and which both go
hand in hand in the evolution of the animal world. Both are favoured by
natural selection, which as soon as they come into conflict keeps the
balance between the two, for the ultimate good of the species.
To sum up all these ideas. We find it suggested that the social feelings
from which morality sprang, were partly inherited by man from his animal
ancestors, partly imitated from observation of the animals he knew so
well in his wild life.
And we find it suggested that these social feelings probably began
in the love of animals for their young, and in the brotherhood and
comradeship of the young for each other.
It was the social feelings of men that made their Bibles: the Bibles did
not make the social feelings.
Morality is the result of evolution, not of revelation.