A Review of the Systems of Ethics Founded on the Theory of Evolution Part 5

The G.o.ds of primitive, warlike peoples were G.o.ds of war, and the belief in the moral virtue and honor of war still holds large place in the thought of the world. The ethics of enmity, thus taught at the same time with the ethics of amity necessary to the internal life of society, gave rise to utterly inconsistent and contradictory sentiments and ideas, which, in considerable measure, still exist side by side, in our churches and outside them.

But, together with these ethical conceptions, there have slowly evolved other, utilitarian conceptions, derived from a recognition of the natural consequences of acts. Authority has been introduced into these conceptions as the source of the duty of action in accordance with them; yet there has generally been also some perception of their fitness. Such utilitarian conceptions are to be found in the later Hebrew writings, among the Egyptians, Greeks, etc. "The divergence of expediency-ethics from theological ethics is well ill.u.s.trated in Paley, who in his official character derived right and wrong from divine commands, and in his unofficial character derived them from observation of consequences.

Since his day, the last of these views has spread at the expense of the first."

A still further simultaneous origin of moral dictates is found in the sentiments which have arisen with such habits of conformity to rules of conduct as have been furthered by survival of the fittest. We thus have a conflict of ethical ideas arising from the conflict of these various sanctions; and also from the further conflict that ensues where a later religion has been grafted on a more primitive one, as is the case everywhere in Christendom.

Among modern writers who a.s.sert the existence of a moral sense, there is a division between those who regard the dicta of conscience as supreme, and those who hold them to be subordinate to divine commands. The two are agreed in so far as they regard conscience as having a supernatural origin; and, in that they both recognize the moral sentiment as innate and suppose human nature to be everywhere the same, they are also, by implication, alike in supposing that the moral sentiment is identical in all men.

But as a matter of fact, the moral sentiment is connected with entirely different rules among different peoples, prescribing monogamy among one people, polygamy among another; demanding faithfulness and chast.i.ty on the part of women among one people, encouraging adultery among another, etc.

Common elements in all codes of rules for conduct are the consciousness of authority, whether that of a G.o.d, of a ruler or government, or of conscience, the more or less definite sense of power or coercion on the part of this authority, and the representation of public opinion. These elements, combined in different proportions, result in an idea and a feeling of obligation, forming a body of thought and feeling which may be termed pro-ethical, and which, with the ma.s.s of mankind, stands in place of the ethical.

"For now let us observe that the ethical sentiment and idea, properly so-called, are independent of the ideas and sentiments above described as derived from external authorities, and coercions, and approbations--religious, political, or social. The true moral consciousness which we name conscience does not refer to those extrinsic results of conduct which take the shape of praise or blame, reward or punishment, externally awarded; but it refers to the intrinsic results of conduct which in part and by some intellectually perceived, are mainly and by most intuitively felt. The moral consciousness proper does not contemplate obligations as artificially imposed by an external power; nor is it chiefly occupied with estimates of the amounts of pleasure and pain which given actions may produce, though these may be clearly or dimly perceived; but it is chiefly occupied with recognition of, and regard for, those _conditions_ by fulfilment of which happiness is achieved or misery avoided." It may or may not be in harmony with the pro-ethical sentiment; but in any case it is "vaguely or distinctly recognized as the rightful ruler, responding as it does to consequences which are not artificial and variable, but to consequences which are natural and permanent." With the established supremacy of this ethical sentiment, the feeling of obligation retires into the background, right actions being performed "spontaneously or from liking." "Though, while the moral nature is imperfectly developed, there may often arise conformity to the ethical sentiment under a sense of compulsion by it; and though, in other cases, non-conformity to it may cause subsequent self-reproach (as instance a remembered lack of grat.i.tude, which may be a source of pain without there being any thought of extrinsic penalty); yet with a moral nature completely balanced, neither of these feelings will arise, because that which is done is done in satisfaction of the appropriate desire."

Where the really ethical sentiment conflicts with the fact.i.tious idea and sentiment of obedience to legal authority, the latter may rule at the expense of the former, as, for instance, in the case of a pedler condemned for selling without a license. "His act of selling is morally justifiable, and forbidding him to sell without a license is morally unjustifiable--is an interference with his due liberty which is ethically unwarranted."

The remainder of Part II. of the "Principles of Ethics" is occupied with data cited to show that the amount of internal aggression, of revenge and robbery, is greater among peoples much occupied with external aggression, and that these decrease, while justice, generosity (which Mr. Spencer defines as having a double root, in the philoprogenitive instinct and the relatively modern feeling of sympathy), humanity (including kindness, pity, mercy), filial obedience, and industry, increase as more peaceful habits are reached. A greater veracity is also indirectly the result of this evolution, since a coercive internal structure of society is connected with external enmity, and such coercive structure is unfavorable to veracity. Chast.i.ty also increases with the social evolution, though it does not necessarily characterize societies of the non-militant type. Its increase is connected with the growth of the higher moral and aesthetic feelings; romantic love plays a predominant part in our art. Intemperance, as causing, indirectly, social evil by a lowering of social efficiency, must, in like manner, decrease with social advancement.

In summing up his inductions, Spencer says: "Though, as shown in my first work, 'Social Statics,' I once espoused the doctrine of the intuitive moralists,... yet it has gradually become clear to me that the qualifications required practically obliterate the doctrine as enunciated by them. It has become clear to me that if, among ourselves, the current belief is that a man who robs and does not repent will be eternally d.a.m.ned, while an accepted proverb among the Bilochs is, that 'G.o.d will not favor a man who does not steal and rob'; it is impossible to hold that men have in common an innate perception of right and wrong.

"But now, while we are shown that the moral sense doctrine in its original form is not true, we are also shown that it adumbrates a truth, and a much higher truth. For the facts cited... unite in proving that the sentiments and ideas current in each society become adjusted to the kinds of activity predominating in it.... If the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature.... Men so conditioned will acquire, to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. There needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally, and a rigorous insistance on non-aggression internally, to insure the moulding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues." Complete exemption from war has already been attained by some few isolated peoples. "May we not reasonably infer that the state reached by these small uncultured tribes may be reached by the great cultured nations, when the life of internal amity shall be unqualified by the life of external enmity?"

Part III. of the "Principles of Ethics" is occupied with practical considerations concerning "The Ethics of Individual Life," under the headings "Activity," "Rest," "Nutrition," "Stimulation," "Culture,"

"Amus.e.m.e.nts," "Marriage," "Parenthood." Of the general ethical relation of the individual to society, Spencer says:--"Integration being the primary process of evolution, we may expect that the aggregate of conceptions const.i.tuting ethics enlarges at the same time that its components acquire heterogeneity, definiteness, and that kind of cohesion which system gives to them. As fulfilling this expectation, we may first note that while drawing within its range of judgment numerous actions of men towards one another which at first were not recognized as right or wrong, it finally takes into its sphere the various divisions of private conduct--those actions of each individual which directly concern himself only, and in but remote ways concern his fellows."

Ethics has been commonly regarded as merely a system of interdicts on certain kinds of acts which men would like to do and of injunctions to perform certain acts which they would like not to do. It says nothing about the great ma.s.s of acts const.i.tuting normal life, though these have their ethical aspect. The pleasurable has been too often regarded as outside the legitimate sphere of ethical approval, where not directly the rightful subject of ethical disapproval. But pleasure is an accompaniment of vitality, and furthers the vital activities; and if the general happiness is to be the aim of action, then the happiness of each unit is a fit aim; and there is unquestionably "a division of ethics which yields sanction to all the normal actions of individual life, while it forbids the abnormal ones." There is an altruistic as well as an egoistic justification of the care for self, since the health of descendants and the ability to provide for offspring is directly concerned; and since such care is needful to exclude the risk of becoming a burden to others. And there is a further positive justification of egoism which results from the obligation to expend some effort for others, and to become, as far as possible, a source of social pleasure to others.

It will be seen, from the above a.n.a.lysis, that the chapter appended to Part I. still speaks of an ultimate state of complete adjustment to social life[52]; this chapter was, however, published from the original MS. without alteration. Some pa.s.sages in Part II. seem to involve the same idea of a possible complete attainment of the ethical end,[53] but Part III. closes with reference to "an approximately complete adjustment of the nature to the life which has to be led."

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Spencer elsewhere says "due exercise," _vide_ p. 76.

[39] Essay on "Morals and Moral Sentiment."

[40] P. 105.

[41] _Vide_ "Principles of Psychology."

[42] P. 104.

[43] Pp. 104,105.

[44] Pp. 108, 109.

[45] Pp. 134, 148.

[46] P. 147.

[47] Pp. 202, 203.

[48] P. 231.

[49] See pp. 71, 193.

[50] Pp. 258, 259.

[51] As the "revision" of the theoretical part of this book chiefly consists, like its abridgment, in the elimination of the references to Divine Will and other earlier views held before acquaintance with Darwin's theory of life, there is nothing in the book, in distinction from Mr. Spencer's other later works, that needs especially to be considered here.

[52] See, for instance, _supra_, p. 70.

[53] See _supra_, p. 75.

JOHN FISKE

As Herbert Spencer's closest follower, John Fiske deserves to stand next him in order of a.n.a.lysis. Fiske accepts, though evidently with reluctance, what he terms "the terrible theory" of evolution, which establishes the fact of man's consanguinity with dumb beasts. In his book on "The Destiny of Man" (1884), he sets forth his theory of the evolution of society as foreshowing man's final destiny. With regard to the beginnings of psychical development in the course of evolution, he thus expresses himself: "At length there came a wonderful moment;--silent and unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and less often in other parts of the organism, until bye and bye the size of his brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a thousandfold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very different from that of his brother apes....

No fact in nature is fraught with deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical similarity and enormous psychical divergence between man and the group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. It shows that when humanity began to be evolved, an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that the process of zoological change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place. Henceforth along this supreme line there was to be no further evolution of new species through physical variation, but through the acc.u.mulation of psychical variations one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected.... Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be, not the genesis of species, but the progress of civilization.... In the deadly struggle for existence, which has raged throughout countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last consummate specimen of G.o.d's handiwork, the Human Soul."

And further, of the genesis of this Human Soul: "With the growth of the higher centres, the capacities of action become so various and indeterminate that definite direction is not given to them until after birth." By the increase of cerebral surface, infancy, which is the period of plasticity, is prolonged, Man becomes teachable, and though inherited tendencies and apt.i.tudes still form the foundations of character, yet the career of the individual is no longer wholly predetermined by the careers of its ancestors, but individual experience comes to count as an enormous factor in modifying the career of mankind from generation to generation.

The psychical development of humanity since its earlier stages has been largely due to the reaction of individuals upon one another in those various relations which we characterize as social.

Foreshadowings of social relations occur in the animal world.

Rudimentary moral sentiments are also clearly discernible in the highest members of various mammalian orders and in all but the lowest members of our own order. But in respect of definiteness and permanence, the relations between animals in a state of gregariousness fall far short of the relations between individuals in the rudest human society. The primordial unit of human society is the family, the establishment of which was made necessary and took place through the lengthening of infancy. When childhood had come to extend over a period of ten or a dozen years, a period which would have been doubled where several children were born in succession to the same parents, the relationships between father and mother, brothers and sisters, must have become firmly knit; thus the family came into existence, and the way was opened for the growth of sympathies and ethical feelings. The rudimentary form of the ethical feelings was that of the transient affection of a female bird or mammal for its young. First given a definite direction through the genesis of the primitive human family, the development of altruism has yet scarcely kept pace with the general development of intelligence; the advance of civilized man in justice and kindness has been less marked than his advance in quick intelligence. But the creative energy which has been thus at work through the bygone eternity is not going to become quiescent to-morrow; the psychical development of man is destined to go on in the future as it has in the past. And from the "Origin of Man," when thoroughly comprehended, we may catch some glimpses of his destiny.

The earlier condition of things was a state of universal warfare, on account of the limitation of the food-supply. This warfare was checked by the beginnings of industrial civilization, which made it possible for a vastly greater population to live upon a given area, and in many ways favored social compactness. A new basis of political combination was now furnished by territorial continuity and by community of occupation. The supply of food was no longer strictly limited, for it could be indefinitely increased by peaceful industry; and, moreover, in the free exchange of the products of labor, it ceased to be true that one man's interest was opposed to another's. Men did not, it is true, at once recognize this fact, but have done so only gradually. When the clan had grown into the state, and the state into the empire, in which many states were brought together in pacific relations, the recognized sphere of moral obligation became enlarged, until at length it comprehended all mankind. The coalescence of groups of men into larger and larger political aggregates has been the chief work of civilization; and the chief obstacle to such coalescence has been warfare. Great political bodies have arisen in three ways. The first, conquest without incorporation, proved itself suicidal. The second way was conquest with incorporation, but without representation; and this lacking, the government retrograded and gradually became a despotism. The third method, federation, has been the policy of the English government. The advantage of the habit of self-government has been shown in England's wide conquest and colonization. The federative method of political union, pacific in its very conception, is a.s.suming an unquestionable sway and destined to become universal; the progress of the race will be, as it has been, with the gradual elimination of warfare.

In a race of inferior animals, any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection. But in man there is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degree of completeness which are compatible with maintenance of life; in all grades of civilization above the lowest, there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot, by itself, rectify any particular unfitness. Hence, the action of natural selection upon man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions. Therefore the wicked flourish. Vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, besides the bad ones, which enable it, in spite of them, to subsist and achieve progress.

The fundamental difference between civilized man and the savage lies in the representative power, the imagination, by which men comprehend pleasure and pain in others. Use and disuse, in place of natural selection, have come to be paramount with man; and though the ethical emotions are still too feeble, they will be more and more strengthened by use, while the manifestation of selfish and hateful feelings will be more and more weakened by disuse. Man is slowly pa.s.sing from a primitive social state, in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state, in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it. The "original sin" of theology is the brute inheritance, which is being gradually eliminated; and the message of Christianity: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" will be realized in the state of universal peace towards which mankind is tending. Strife and Sorrow shall disappear. Peace and Love shall reign supreme. The goal of evolution is the perfecting of man, whereby we see, more than ever, that he is the chief object of divine care, the fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the knowable universe.

We know soul only in connection with body. Yet nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; the molecular movements of the brain and the phenomena of thought and feeling are merely concomitants related in some unknown way. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. He who regards man as the consummate fruition of creative energy and the chief object of divine care, is almost irresistibly driven to the belief that the soul's career is not completed with the life upon the earth. Difficulties to this theory he will meet; yet the alternative view contains difficulties at least as great; nor is there any problem in the simplest and most exact departments of science which does not speedily lead us to a transcendental problem that we can neither solve nor elude. A broad common sense argument has often to be called in, where keen-edged metaphysical a.n.a.lysis has confessed itself baffled. The doctrine of evolution does not allow us to take the atheistic view of the position of man; the Darwinian theory, properly understood, replaces as much teleology as it destroys. In the t.i.tanic events of the development of worlds from the nebular mist and their after-destruction, we may find no signs of purpose, or even of a dramatic tendency; but on the earth we do find distinct indications of a dramatic tendency; though doubtless not of purpose in the limited human sense. Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks just for the pleasure of knocking them down again? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. "I can see no insuperable difficulty in the notion that at some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark [the soul] may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material forms and endure forever. Such a crowning wonder seems to me no more than the fit climax to a creative work that has been ineffably beautiful and marvellous in all its myriad stages."

Fiske gives some further definition of social evolution in man, in his "Cosmic Philosophy" (1874). He there denies the incompatibility of free-will with causation, saying that "it is the doctrine of lawlessness, and not the causationist doctrine, which is incompatible with liberty and destructive of responsibility."[54]

He further postulates heterogeneity of the environment as "the chief proximate determining cause of social progress," and defines such evolution as "a continuous establishment of psychical relations within the community, in conformity to physical and psychical relations arising in the environment, during which both the community and the environment pa.s.s from a state of relatively indefinite, incoherent h.o.m.ogeneity to a state of relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the const.i.tuent units of the community become ever more distinctly individual."[55] "The progress of a community, as of an organism, is a process of _adaptation_--the continuous establishment of inner relations in conformity to outer relations. If we contemplate material civilization under its widest aspect, we discover its legitimate aim to be the attainment and maintenance of an equilibrium between the wants of men and the outward means of satisfying them. And while approaching this goal, society is ever acquiring in its economic structure both greater heterogeneity and greater specialization. It is not only that agriculture, manufactures, commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the judge, and the physician, have, since ancient times, grown immeasurably multiform, both in their processes and in their appliances; but it is also that this specialization has resulted in the greatly increased ability of society to adapt itself to the emergencies by which it is now beset."[56] Religion, too, is adjustment; form after form has been outgrown and perished, yet the life of Christianity, incorporated in ever higher forms, is continually renewed. The omission of the moral feeling, as a factor, from Comte's interpretation of the progress of society, is a fatal defect, since moral and social progress depend more on feelings than on ideas. As Wallace shows, tribes which combined for mutual help and protection, restrained appet.i.te by foresight, and felt sympathy, would have an advantage in the struggle for existence.

"As surely as the astronomer can predict the future state of the heavens, the sociologist can foresee that the process of adaptation must go on until, in a remote future, it comes to an end in proximate equilibrium. The increasing interdependence of human interests must eventually go far to realize the dream of the philosophic poet, of a Parliament of Man, a Federation of the World.

"'When the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,' and when the desires of each individual shall be in proximate equilibrium with the means of satisfying them and with the simultaneous desires of all surrounding individuals."[57]

FOOTNOTES:

[54] Vol. II. p. 189.