← catalogue

The Data of Ethics

by Herbert Spencer · English · Gutenberg #46129 · 591,349 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Data of Ethics
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Data of Ethics

Author: Herbert Spencer


        
Release date: June 30, 2014 [eBook #46129]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46129

Credits: E-text prepared by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, David Garcia, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DATA OF ETHICS ***

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustration.
      See 46129-h.htm or 46129-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46129/pg46129-images.html)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46129/46129-h.zip)


      Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/dataofethic00spenuoft





[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER.]


THE DATA OF ETHICS

by

HERBERT SPENCER

Author of "First Principles," "Education," etc.







[Illustration]

A. L. Burt Company,
Publishers, New York




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


A reference to the programme of the "System of Synthetic Philosophy"
will show that the chapters herewith issued constitute the first
division of the work on the _Principles of Morality_, with which the
System ends. As the second and third volumes of the _Principles of
Sociology_ are as yet unpublished, this installment of the succeeding
work appears out of its place.

I have been led thus to deviate from the order originally set down by
the fear that persistence in conforming to it might result in leaving
the final work of the series unexecuted. Hints, repeated of late years
with increasing frequency and distinctness, have shown me that health
may permanently fail, even if life does not end, before I reach the
last part of the task I have marked out for myself. This last part of
the task it is to which I regard all the preceding parts as subsidiary.
Written as far back as 1842, my first essay, consisting of letters on
The _Proper Sphere of Government_, vaguely indicated what I conceived
to be certain general principles of right and wrong in political
conduct, and from that time onward my ultimate purpose, lying behind
all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles
of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis. To leave
this purpose unfulfilled, after making so extensive a preparation for
fulfilling it, would be a failure the probability of which I do not
like to contemplate, and I am anxious to preclude it, if not wholly,
still partially. Hence the step I now take. Though this first division
of the work terminating the Synthetic Philosophy, cannot, of course,
contain the specific conclusions to be set forth in the entire work,
yet it implies them in such wise that, definitely to formulate them
requires nothing beyond logical deduction.

I am the more anxious to indicate in outline, if I cannot complete,
this final work, because the establishment of rules of right conduct
on a scientific basis is a pressing need. Now, that moral injunctions
are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the
secularization of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen
more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no
longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown
up to replace it. Most of those who reject the current creed appear
to assume that the controlling agency furnished by it may safely be
thrown aside, and the vacancy left unfilled by any other controlling
agency. Meanwhile, those who defend the current creed allege that in
the absence of the guidance it yields, no guidance can exist: divine
commandments they think the only possible guides. Thus, between these
extreme opponents, there is a certain community. The one holds that
the gap left by disappearance of the code of supernatural ethics need
not be filled by a code of natural ethics, and the other holds that it
cannot be so filled. Both contemplate a vacuum, which the one wishes
and the other fears. As the change which promises or threatens to
bring about this state, desired or dreaded, is rapidly progressing,
those who believe that the vacuum can be filled, and that it must be
filled, are called on to do something in pursuance of their belief.

To this more special reason I may add a more general reason. Great
mischief has been done by the repellent aspect habitually given
to moral rule by its expositors, and immense benefits are to be
anticipated from presenting moral rule under that attractive aspect
which it has when undistorted by superstition and asceticism. If a
father, sternly enforcing numerous commands, some needful and some
needless, adds to his severe control a behavior wholly unsympathetic;
if his children have to take their pleasures by stealth, or, when
timidly looking up from their play, ever meet a cold glance or more
frequently a frown, his government will inevitably be disliked, if
not hated, and the aim will be to evade it as much as possible.
Contrariwise, a father who, equally firm in maintaining restraints
needful for the well-being of his children or the well-being of other
persons, not only avoids needless restraints, but, giving his sanction
to all legitimate gratifications and providing the means for them,
looks on at their gambols with an approving smile, can scarcely fail
to gain an influence which, no less efficient for the time being,
will also be permanently efficient. The controls of such two fathers
symbolize the controls of Morality as it is and Morality as it should
be.

Nor does mischief result only from this undue severity of the ethical
doctrine bequeathed us by the harsh past. Further mischief results from
the impracticability of its ideal. In violent reaction against the
utter selfishness of life as carried on in barbarous societies, it has
insisted on a life utterly unselfish. But just as the rampant egoism of
a brutal militancy was not to be remedied by attempts at the absolute
subjection of the ego in convents and monasteries, so neither is the
misconduct of ordinary humanity, as now existing, to be remedied by
upholding a standard of abnegation beyond human achievement. Rather
the effect is to produce a despairing abandonment of all attempts at
a higher life. And not only does an effort to achieve the impossible
end in this way, but it simultaneously discredits the possible. By
association with rules that cannot be obeyed, rules that can be obeyed
lose their authority.

Much adverse comment will, I doubt not, be passed on the theory of
right conduct which the following pages shadow forth. Critics of a
certain class, far from rejoicing that ethical principles otherwise
derived by them, coincide with ethical principles scientifically
derived, are offended by the coincidence. Instead of recognizing
essential likeness they enlarge on superficial difference. Since the
days of persecution, a curious change has taken place in the behavior
of so-called orthodoxy toward so-called heterodoxy. The time was
when a heretic, forced by torture to recant, satisfied authority by
external conformity: apparent agreement sufficed, however profound
continued to be the real disagreement. But now that the heretic can
no longer be coerced into professing the ordinary belief, his belief
is made to appear as much opposed to the ordinary as possible. Does
he diverge from established theological dogma? Then he shall be an
atheist; however inadmissible he considers the term. Does he think
spiritualistic interpretations of phenomena not valid? Then he shall be
classed as a materialist; indignantly though he repudiates the name.
And in like manner, what differences exist between natural morality
and supernatural morality, it has become the policy to exaggerate
into fundamental antagonisms. In pursuance of this policy, there will
probably be singled out for reprobation from this volume, doctrines
which, taken by themselves, may readily be made to seem utterly wrong.
With a view to clearness, I have treated separately some correlative
aspects of conduct, drawing conclusions either of which becomes untrue
if divorced from the other; and have thus given abundant opportunity
for misrepresentation.

The relations of this work to works preceding it in the series are such
as to involve frequent reference. Containing, as it does, the outcome
of principles set forth in each of them, I have found it impracticable
to dispense with re-statements of those principles. Further, the
presentation of them in their relations to different ethical theories,
has made it needful, in every case, briefly to remind the reader what
they are, and how they are derived. Hence an amount of repetition which
to some will probably appear tedious. I do not, however, much regret
this almost unavoidable result; for only by varied iteration can alien
conceptions be forced on reluctant minds.

    _June_, 1879.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I.                                PAGE.

  Conduct in General                            1


  CHAPTER II.

  The Evolution of Conduct                      7


  CHAPTER III.

  Good and Bad Conduct                         23


  CHAPTER IV.

  Ways of Judging Conduct                      54


  CHAPTER V.

  The Physical View                            75


  CHAPTER VI.

  The Biological View                          88


  CHAPTER VII.

  The Psychological View                      121


  CHAPTER VIII.

  The Sociological View                       157


  CHAPTER IX.

  Criticisms and Explanations                 178


  CHAPTER X.

  The Relativity of Pains and Pleasures       206


  CHAPTER XI.

  Egoism versus Altruism                      221


  CHAPTER XII.

  Altruism versus Egoism                      237


  CHAPTER XIII.

  Trial and Compromise                        258


  CHAPTER XIV.

  Conciliation                                285


  CHAPTER XV.

  Absolute and Relative Ethics                304


  CHAPTER XVI.

  The Scope of Ethics                         332




THE DATA OF ETHICS.




CHAPTER I.

CONDUCT IN GENERAL.


§ 1. The doctrine that correlatives imply one another--that a father
cannot be thought of without thinking of a child, and that there can be
no consciousness of superior without a consciousness of inferior--has
for one of its common examples the necessary connection between the
conceptions of whole and part. Beyond the primary truth that no idea of
a whole can be framed without a nascent idea of parts constituting it,
and that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some
whole to which it belongs, there is the secondary truth that there can
be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative
whole. There are several ways in which inadequate knowledge of the one
involves inadequate knowledge of the other.

If the part is conceived without any reference to the whole, it
becomes itself a whole--an independent entity; and its relations to
existence in general are misapprehended. Further, the size of the part
as compared with the size of the whole must be misapprehended unless
the whole is not only recognized as including it, but is figured in
its total extent. And again, the position which the part occupies in
relation to other parts, cannot be rightly conceived unless there is
some conception of the whole in its distribution as well as in its
amount.

Still more when part and whole, instead of being statically related
only, are dynamically related, must there be a general understanding
of the whole before the part can be understood. By a savage who has
never seen a vehicle, no idea can be formed of the use and action of a
wheel. To the unsymmetrically-pierced disk of an eccentric, no place or
purpose can be ascribed by a rustic unacquainted with machinery. Even
a mechanician, if he has never looked into a piano, will, if shown a
damper, be unable to conceive its function or relative value.

Most of all, however, where the whole is organic, does complete
comprehension of a part imply extensive comprehension of the whole.
Suppose a being ignorant of the human body to find a detached arm. If
not misconceived by him as a supposed whole, instead of being conceived
as a part, still its relations to other parts, and its structure, would
be wholly inexplicable. Admitting that the co-operation of its bones
and muscles might be divined, yet no thought could be framed of the
share taken by the arm in the actions of the unknown whole it belonged
to; nor could any interpretation be put upon the nerves and vessels
ramifying through it, which severally refer to certain central organs.
A theory of the structure of the arm implies a theory of the structure
of the body at large.

And this truth holds not of material aggregates only, but of immaterial
aggregates--aggregated motions, deeds, thoughts, words. The moon's
movements cannot be fully interpreted without taking into account the
movements of the Solar System at large. The process of loading a gun
is meaningless until the subsequent actions performed with the gun are
known. A fragment of a sentence, if not unintelligible, is wrongly
interpreted in the absence of the remainder. Cut off its beginning and
end, and the rest of a demonstration proves nothing. Evidence given
by a plaintiff often misleads until the evidence which the defendant
produces is joined with it.


§ 2. Conduct is a whole; and, in a sense, it is an organic whole--an
aggregate of inter-dependent actions performed by an organism. That
division or aspect of conduct with which Ethics deals, is a part of
this organic whole--a part having its components inextricably bound
up with the rest. As currently conceived, stirring the fire, or
reading a newspaper, or eating a meal, are acts with which Morality
has no concern. Opening the window to air the room, putting on an
overcoat when the weather is cold, are thought of as having no ethical
significance. These, however, are all portions of conduct. The behavior
we call good and the behavior we call bad, are included, along with
the behavior we call indifferent, under the conception of behavior at
large. The whole of which Ethics forms a part, is the whole constituted
by the theory of conduct in general; and this whole must be understood
before the part can be understood. Let us consider this proposition
more closely.

And first, how shall we define conduct? It is not co-extensive with the
aggregate of actions, though it is nearly so. Such actions as those of
an epileptic in a fit are not included in our conception of conduct:
the conception excludes purposeless actions. And in recognizing this
exclusion, we simultaneously recognize all that is included. The
definition of conduct which emerges is either acts adjusted to ends, or
else the adjustment of acts to ends, according as we contemplate the
formed body of acts, or think of the form alone. And conduct in its
full acceptation must be taken as comprehending all adjustments of acts
to ends, from the simplest to the most complex, whatever their special
natures and whether considered separately or in their totality.

Conduct in general being thus distinguished from the somewhat larger
whole constituted by actions in general, let us next ask what
distinction is habitually made between the conduct on which ethical
judgments are passed and the remainder of conduct. As already said,
a large part of ordinary conduct is indifferent. Shall I walk to the
waterfall to-day? or shall I ramble along the sea-shore? Here the
ends are ethically indifferent. If I go to the waterfall, shall I go
over the moor or take the path through the wood? Here the means are
ethically indifferent. And from hour to hour most of the things we do
are not to be judged as either good or bad in respect of either ends or
means.

No less clear is it that the transition from indifferent acts to acts
which are good or bad is gradual. If a friend who is with me has
explored the sea-shore, but has not seen the waterfall, the choice
of one or other end is no longer ethically indifferent. And if, the
waterfall being fixed on as our goal, the way over the moor is too
long for his strength, while the shorter way through the wood is not,
the choice of means is no longer ethically indifferent. Again, if a
probable result of making the one excursion rather than the other,
is that I shall not be back in time to keep an appointment, or if
taking the longer route entails this risk while taking the shorter
does not, the decision in favor of one or other end or means acquires
in another way an ethical character; and if the appointment is one of
some importance, or one of great importance, or one of life-and-death
importance, to self or others, the ethical character becomes
pronounced. These instances will sufficiently suggest the truth that
conduct with which Morality is not concerned, passes into conduct which
is moral or immoral, by small degrees and in countless ways.

But the conduct that has to be conceived scientifically before we can
scientifically conceive those modes of conduct which are the objects
of ethical judgments, is a conduct immensely wider in range than that
just indicated. Complete comprehension of conduct is not to be obtained
by contemplating the conduct of human beings only; we have to regard
this as a part of universal conduct--conduct as exhibited by all
living creatures. For evidently this comes within our definition--acts
adjusted to ends. The conduct of the higher animals as compared with
that of man, and the conduct of the lower animals as compared with that
of the higher, mainly differ in this, that the adjustments of acts to
ends are relatively simple and relatively incomplete. And as in other
cases, so in this case, we must interpret the more developed by the
less developed. Just as, fully to understand the part of conduct which
Ethics deals with, we must study human conduct as a whole; so, fully
to understand human conduct as a whole, we must study it as a part
of that larger whole constituted by the conduct of animate beings in
general.

Nor is even this whole conceived with the needful fullness, so long
as we think only of the conduct at present displayed around us. We
have to include in our conception the less-developed conduct out of
which this has arisen in course of time. We have to regard the conduct
now shown us by creatures of all orders, as an outcome of the conduct
which has brought life of every kind to its present height. And this
is tantamount to saying that our preparatory step must be to study the
evolution of conduct.




CHAPTER II.

THE EVOLUTION OF CONDUCT.


§ 3. We have become quite familiar with the idea of an evolution of
structures throughout the ascending types of animals. To a considerable
degree we have become familiar with the thought that an evolution of
functions has gone on _pari passu_ with the evolution of structures.
Now, advancing a step, we have to frame a conception of the evolution
of conduct, as correlated with this evolution of structures and
functions.

These three subjects are to be definitely distinguished. Obviously the
facts comparative morphology sets forth, form a whole which, though it
cannot be treated in general or in detail without taking into account
facts belonging to comparative physiology, is essentially independent.
No less clear is it that we may devote our attention exclusively to
that progressive differentiation of functions, and combination of
functions, which accompanies the development of structures--may say no
more about the characters and connections of organs than is implied
in describing their separate and joint actions. And the subject of
conduct lies outside the subject of functions, if not as far as this
lies outside the subject of structures, still, far enough to make it
substantially separate. For those functions which are already variously
compounded to achieve what we regard as single bodily acts, are
endlessly recompounded to achieve that co-ordination of bodily acts
which is known as conduct.

We are concerned with functions in the true sense, while we think of
them as processes carried on within the body; and, without exceeding
the limits of physiology, we may treat of their adjusted combinations,
so long as these are regarded as parts of the vital _consensus_. If we
observe how the lungs aërate the blood which the heart sends to them;
how heart and lungs together supply aërated blood to the stomach, and
so enable it to do its work; how these co-operate with sundry secreting
and excreting glands to further digestion and to remove waste matter;
and how all of them join to keep the brain in a fit condition for
carrying on those actions which indirectly conduce to maintenance
of the life at large; we are dealing with functions. Even when
considering how parts that act directly on the environment--legs, arms,
wings--perform their duties, we are still concerned with functions in
that aspect of them constituting physiology, so long as we restrict our
attention to internal processes, and to internal combinations of them.

But we enter on the subject of conduct when we begin to study such
combinations among the actions of sensory and motor organs as are
externally manifested. Suppose that instead of observing those
contractions of muscles by which the optic axes are converged and the
foci of the eyes adjusted (which is a portion of physiology), and
that instead of observing the co-operation of other nerves, muscles
and bones, by which a hand is moved to a particular place and the
fingers closed (which is also a portion of physiology), we observe
a weapon being seized by a hand under guidance of the eyes. We now
pass from the thought of combined internal functions to the thought of
combined external motions. Doubtless, if we could trace the cerebral
processes which accompany these, we should find an inner physiological
co-ordination corresponding with the outer co-ordination of actions.
But this admission is consistent with the assertion, that when we
ignore the internal combination and attend only to the external
combination, we pass from a portion of physiology to a portion of
conduct. For though it may be objected that the external combination
instanced is too simple to be rightly included under the name conduct,
yet a moment's thought shows that it is joined with what we call
conduct by insensible gradations. Suppose the weapon seized is used to
ward off a blow. Suppose a counter-blow is given. Suppose the aggressor
runs and is chased. Suppose there comes a struggle and a handing him
over to the police. Suppose there follow the many and varied acts
constituting a prosecution. Obviously the initial adjustment of an
act to an end, inseparable from the rest, must be included with them
under the same general head; and obviously from this initial simple
adjustment, having intrinsically no moral character, we pass by degrees
to the most complex adjustments and to those on which moral judgments
are passed.

Hence, excluding all internal co-ordinations, our subject here is the
aggregate of all external co-ordinations; and this aggregate includes
not only the simplest as well as the most complex performed by human
beings, but also those performed by all inferior beings considered as
less or more evolved.


§ 4. Already the question: What constitutes advance in the evolution of
conduct, as we trace it up from the lowest types of living creatures to
the highest? has been answered by implication. A few examples will now
bring the answer into conspicuous relief.

We saw that conduct is distinguished from the totality of actions by
excluding purposeless actions; but during evolution this distinction
arises by degrees. In the very lowest creatures most of the movements
from moment to moment made, have not more recognizable aims than have
the struggles of an epileptic. An infusorium swims randomly about,
determined in its course not by a perceived object to be pursued or
escaped, but, apparently, by varying stimuli in its medium; and its
acts, unadjusted in any appreciable way to ends, lead it now into
contact with some nutritive substance which it absorbs, and now
into the neighborhood of some creature by which it is swallowed and
digested. Lacking those developed senses and motor powers which higher
animals possess, ninety-nine in the hundred of these minute animals,
severally living for but a few hours, disappear either by innutrition
or by destruction. The conduct is constituted of actions so little
adjusted to ends, that life continues only as long as the accidents of
the environment are favorable. But when, among aquatic creatures, we
observe one which, though still low in type, is much higher than the
infusorium--say a rotifer--we see how, along with larger size, more
developed structures, and greater power of combining functions, there
goes an advance in conduct. We see how by its whirling cilia it sucks
in as food these small animals moving around; how by its prehensile
tail it fixes itself to some fit object; how by withdrawing its outer
organs and contracting its body, it preserves itself from this or that
injury from time to time threatened; and how thus, by better adjusting
its own actions, it becomes less dependent on the actions going on
around, and so preserves itself for a longer period.

A superior sub-kingdom, as the Mollusca, still better exemplifies this
contrast. When we compare a low mollusc, such as a floating ascidian,
with a high mollusc, such as a cephalopod, we are again shown that
greater organic evolution is accompanied by more evolved conduct.
At the mercy of every marine creature large enough to swallow it,
and drifted about by currents which may chance to keep it at sea, or
may chance to leave it fatally stranded, the ascidian displays but
little adjustment of acts to ends in comparison with the cephalopod;
which, now crawling over the beach, now exploring the rocky crevices,
now swimming through the open water, now darting after a fish, now
hiding itself from some larger animal in a cloud of ink, and using
its suckered arms at one time for anchoring itself and at another
for holding fast its prey; selects and combines and proportions its
movements from minute to minute, so as to evade dangers which threaten,
while utilizing chances of food which offer: so showing us varied
activities which, in achieving special ends, achieve the general end of
securing continuance of the activities.

Among vertebrate animals we similarly trace up, along with advance in
structures and functions, this advance in conduct. A fish roaming about
at hazard in search of something to eat, able to detect it by smell
or sight only within short distances, and now and again rushing away
in alarm on the approach of a bigger fish, makes adjustments of acts
to ends that are relatively few and simple in their kinds; and shows
us, as a consequence, how small is the average duration of life. So few
survive to maturity that, to make up for destruction of unhatched young
and small fry and half-grown individuals, a million ova have to be
spawned by a cod-fish that two may reach the spawning age. Conversely,
by a highly-evolved mammal, such as an elephant, those general actions
performed in common with the fish are far better adjusted to their
ends. By sight as well, probably, as by odor, it detects food at
relatively great distances; and when, at intervals, there arises a
need for escape, relatively great speed is attained. But the chief
difference arises from the addition of new sets of adjustments. We
have combined actions which facilitate nutrition--the breaking off of
succulent and fruit-bearing branches, the selecting of edible growths
throughout a comparatively wide reach; and, in case of danger, safety
can be achieved not by flight only, but, if necessary, by defence
or attack: bringing into combined use tusks, trunk and ponderous
feet. Further, we see various subsidiary acts adjusted to subsidiary
ends--now the going into a river for coolness, and using the trunk as a
means of projecting water over the body; now the employment of a bough
for sweeping away flies from the back; now the making of signal sounds
to alarm the herd, and adapting the actions to such sounds when made
by others. Evidently, the effect of this more highly-evolved conduct
is to secure the balance of the organic actions throughout far longer
periods.

And now, on studying the doings of the highest of mammals, mankind,
we not only find that the adjustments of acts to ends are both more
numerous and better than among lower mammals, but we find the same
thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of
lower races. If we take any one of the major ends achieved, we see
greater completeness of achievement by civilized than by savage;
and we also see an achievement of relatively numerous minor ends
subserving major ends. Is it in nutrition? The food is obtained more
regularly in response to appetite; it is far higher in quality; it is
free from dirt; it is greater in variety; it is better prepared. Is
it in warmth? The characters of the fabrics and forms of the articles
used for clothing, and the adaptations of them to requirements from
day to day and hour to hour, are much superior. Is it in dwellings?
Between the shelter of boughs and grass which the lowest savage
builds, and the mansion of the civilized man, the contrast in aspect
is not more extreme than is the contrast in number and efficiency
of the adjustments of acts to ends betrayed in their respective
constructions. And when with the ordinary activities of the savage
we compare the ordinary civilized activities--as the business of the
trader, which involves multiplied and complex transactions extending
over long periods, or as professional avocations, prepared for by
elaborate studies, and daily carried on in endlessly varied forms, or
as political discussions and agitations, directed now to the carrying
of this measure and now to the defeating of that--we see sets of
adjustments of acts to ends, not only immensely exceeding those seen
among lower races of men in variety and intricacy, but sets to which
lower races of men present nothing analogous. And along with this
greater elaboration of life produced by the pursuit of more numerous
ends, there goes that increased duration of life which constitutes the
supreme end.

And here is suggested the need for supplementing this conception of
evolving conduct. For besides being an improving adjustment of acts to
ends, such as furthers prolongation of life, it is such as furthers
increased amount of life. Reconsideration of the examples above given
will show that length of life is not by itself a measure of evolution
of conduct; but that quantity of life must be taken into account. An
oyster, adapted by its structure to the diffused food contained in the
water it draws in, and shielded by its shell from nearly all dangers,
may live longer than a cuttle-fish, which has such superior powers
of dealing with numerous contingencies; but then, the sum of vital
activities during any given interval is far less in the oyster than
in the cuttle-fish. So a worm, ordinarily sheltered from most enemies
by the earth it burrows through, which also supplies a sufficiency of
its poor food, may have greater longevity than many of its annulose
relatives, the insects; but one of these during its existence as larva
and imago, may experience a greater quantity of the changes which
constitute life. Nor is it otherwise when we compare the more evolved
with the less evolved among mankind. The difference between the average
lengths of the lives of savage and civilized is no true measure of
the difference between the totalities of their two lives, considered
as aggregates of thought, feeling and action. Hence, estimating life
by multiplying its length into its breadth, we must say that the
augmentation of it which accompanies evolution of conduct, results from
increase of both factors. The more multiplied and varied adjustments of
acts to ends, by which the more developed creature from hour to hour
fulfills more numerous requirements, severally add to the activities
that are carried on abreast, and severally help to make greater the
period through which such simultaneous activities endure. Each further
evolution of conduct widens the aggregate of actions while conducing to
elongation of it.


§ 5. Turn we now to a further aspect of the phenomena, separate from,
but necessarily associated with, the last. Thus far we have considered
only those adjustments of acts to ends which have for their final
purpose complete individual life. Now we have to consider those
adjustments which have to their final purpose the life of the species.

Self-preservation in each generation has all along depended on
the preservation of offspring by preceding generations. And in
proportion as evolution of the conduct subserving individual life is
high, implying high organization, there must previously have been a
highly-evolved conduct subserving nurture of the young. Throughout
the ascending grades of the animal kingdom, this second kind of
conduct presents stages of advance like those which we have observed
in the first. Low down, where structures and functions are little
developed, and the power of adjusting acts to ends but slight, there
is no conduct, properly so named, furthering salvation of the species.
Race-maintaining conduct, like self-maintaining conduct, arises
gradually out of that which cannot be called conduct: adjusted actions
are preceded by unadjusted ones.

Protozoa spontaneously divide and sub-divide, in consequence of
physical changes over which they have no control; or, at other times,
after a period of quiescence, break up into minute portions which
severally grow into new individuals. In neither case can conduct be
alleged. Higher up, the process is that of ripening, at intervals,
germ-cells and sperm-cells, which, on occasion, are sent forth into
the surrounding water and left to their fate: perhaps one in ten
thousand surviving to maturity. Here, again, we see only development
and dispersion going on apart from parental care. Types above these,
as fish which choose fit places in which to deposit their ova, or as
the higher crustaceans which carry masses of ova about until they are
hatched, exhibit adjustments of acts to ends which we may properly call
conduct, though it is of the simplest kind. Where, as among certain
fish, the male keeps guard over the eggs, driving away intruders, there
is an additional adjustment of acts to ends; and the applicability of
the name conduct is more decided.

Passing at once to creatures far superior, such as birds, which,
building nests and sitting on their eggs, feed their broods for
considerable periods, and give them aid after they can fly; or such as
mammals which, suckling their young for a time, continue afterward to
bring them food or protect them while they feed, until they reach ages
at which they can provide for themselves; we are shown how this conduct
which furthers race-maintenance evolves hand-in-hand with the conduct
which furthers self-maintenance. That better organization which makes
possible the last, makes possible the first also.

Mankind exhibit a great progress of like nature. Compared with brutes,
the savage, higher in his self-maintaining conduct, is higher too in
his race-maintaining conduct. A larger number of the wants of offspring
are provided for; and parental care, enduring longer, extends to the
disciplining of offspring in arts and habits which fit them for their
conditions of existence. Conduct of this order, equally with conduct of
the first order, we see becoming evolved in a still greater degree as
we ascend from savage to civilized. The adjustments of acts to ends in
the rearing of children become far more elaborate, alike in number of
ends met, variety of means used, and efficiency of their adaptations;
and the aid and oversight are continued throughout a much greater part
of early life.

In tracing up the evolution of conduct, so that we may frame a true
conception of conduct in general, we have thus to recognize these two
kinds as mutually dependent. Speaking generally, neither can evolve
without evolution of the other; and the highest evolutions of the two
must be reached simultaneously.


§ 6. To conclude, however, that on reaching a perfect adjustment of
acts to ends subserving individual life and the rearing of offspring,
the evolution of conduct becomes complete, is to conclude erroneously.
Or rather, I should say, it is an error to suppose that either of these
kinds of conduct can assume its highest form, without its highest form
being assumed by a third kind of conduct yet to be named.

The multitudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the earth, cannot
live wholly apart from one another, but are more or less in presence
of one another--are interfered with by one another. In large measure
the adjustments of acts to ends which we have been considering, are
components of that "struggle for existence" carried on both between
members of the same species and between members of different species;
and, very generally, a successful adjustment made by one creature
involves an unsuccessful adjustment made by another creature, either
of the same kind or of a different kind. That the carnivore may live
herbivores must die; and that its young may be reared the young of
weaker creatures must be orphaned. Maintenance of the hawk and its
brood involves the deaths of many small birds; and that small birds
may multiply, their progeny must be fed with innumerable sacrificed
worms and larvæ. Competition among members of the same species has
allied, though less conspicuous, results. The stronger often carries
off by force the prey which the weaker has caught. Monopolizing certain
hunting grounds, the more ferocious drive others of their kind into
less favorable places. With plant-eating animals, too, the like holds:
the better food is secured by the more vigorous individuals, while the
less vigorous and worse fed, succumb either directly from innutrition
or indirectly from resulting inability to escape enemies. That is to
say, among creatures whose lives are carried on antagonistically, each
of the two kinds of conduct delineated above, must remain imperfectly
evolved. Even in such few kinds of them as have little to fear from
enemies or competitors, as lions or tigers, there is still inevitable
failure in the adjustments of acts to ends toward the close of life.
Death by starvation from inability to catch prey, shows a falling short
of conduct from its ideal.

This imperfectly-evolved conduct introduces us by antithesis to conduct
that is perfectly evolved. Contemplating these adjustments of acts
to ends which miss completeness because they cannot be made by one
creature without other creatures being prevented from making them,
raises the thought of adjustments such that each creature may make
them without preventing them from being made by other creatures. That
the highest form of conduct must be so distinguished, is an inevitable
implication; for, while the form of conduct is such that adjustments
of acts to ends by some necessitate non-adjustments by others, there
remains room for modifications which bring conduct into a form avoiding
this, and so making the totality of life greater.

From the abstract let us pass to the concrete. Recognizing men as the
beings whose conduct is most evolved, let us ask under what conditions
their conduct, in all three aspects of its evolution, reaches its
limit. Clearly while the lives led are entirely predatory, as those of
savages, the adjustments of acts to ends fall short of this highest
form of conduct in every way. Individual life, ill carried on from
hour to hour, is prematurely cut short; the fostering of offspring
often fails, and is incomplete when it does not fail; and in so far
as the ends of self-maintenance and race-maintenance are met, they
are met by destruction of other beings of different kind or of like
kind. In social groups formed by compounding and re-compounding
primitive hordes, conduct remains imperfectly evolved in proportion as
there continue antagonisms between the groups and antagonisms between
members of the same group--two traits necessarily associated; since
the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression
of individuals on one another. Hence the limit of evolution can be
reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies. That perfect
adjustment of acts to ends in maintaining individual life and rearing
new individuals, which is effected by each without hindering others
from effecting like perfect adjustments, is, in its very definition,
shown to constitute a kind of conduct that can be approached only as
war decreases and dies out.

A gap in this outline must now be filled up. There remains a further
advance not yet even hinted. For beyond so behaving that each achieves
his ends without preventing others from achieving their ends, the
members of a society may give mutual help in the achievement of ends.
And if, either indirectly by industrial co-operation, or directly
by volunteered aid, fellow-citizens can make easier for one another
the adjustments of acts to ends, then their conduct assumes a still
higher phase of evolution; since whatever facilitates the making of
adjustments by each, increases the totality of the adjustments made,
and serves to render the lives of all more complete.


§ 7. The reader who recalls certain passages in _First Principles_, in
the _Principles of Biology_, and in the _Principles of Psychology_,
will perceive above a restatement, in another form, of generalizations
set forth in those works. Especially will he be reminded of the
proposition that Life is "the definite combination of heterogeneous
changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with
external co-existences and sequences;" and still more of that abridged
and less specific formula, in which Life is said to be "the continuous
adjustment of internal relations to external relations."

The presentation of the facts here made differs from the presentations
before made, mainly by ignoring the inner part of the correspondence
and attending exclusively to that outer part constituted of visible
actions. But the two are in harmony; and the reader who wishes
further to prepare himself for dealing with our present topic from
the evolution point of view, may advantageously join to the foregoing
more special aspect of the phenomena, the more general aspects before
delineated.

After this passing remark, I recur to the main proposition set forth in
these two chapters, which has, I think, been fully justified. Guided
by the truth that as the conduct with which Ethics deals is part of
conduct at large, conduct at large must be generally understood before
this part can be specially understood; and guided by the further truth
that to understand conduct at large we must understand the evolution of
conduct, we have been led to see that Ethics has for its subject-matter
that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages
of its evolution. We have also concluded that these last stages in
the evolution of conduct are those displayed by the highest type of
being, when he is forced, by increase of numbers, to live more and
more in presence of his fellows. And there has followed the corollary
that conduct gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities,
becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such
as do not necessitate mutual injury or hinderance, but consist with,
and are furthered by, co-operation and mutual aid.

These implications of the Evolution-Hypothesis, we shall now see
harmonize with the leading moral ideas men have otherwise reached.




CHAPTER III.

GOOD AND BAD CONDUCT.


§ 8. By comparing its meanings in different connections and observing
what they have in common, we learn the essential meaning of a word; and
the essential meaning of a word that is variously applied, may best be
learned by comparing with one another those applications of it which
diverge most widely. Let us thus ascertain what good and bad mean.

In which cases do we distinguish as good, a knife, a gun, a house?
And what trait leads us to speak of a bad umbrella or a bad pair of
boots? The characters here predicted by the words good and bad, are
not intrinsic characters; for apart from human wants, such things
have neither merits nor demerits. We call these articles good or bad
according as they are well or ill adapted to achieve prescribed ends.
The good knife is one which will cut; the good gun is one which carries
far and true; the good house is one which duly yields the shelter,
comfort, and accommodation sought for. Conversely, the badness alleged
of the umbrella or the pair of boots, refers to their failures in
fulfilling the ends of keeping off the rain and comfortably protecting
the feet, with due regard to appearances.

So is it when we pass from inanimate objects to inanimate actions. We
call a day bad in which storms prevent us from satisfying certain of
our desires. A good season is the expression used when the weather has
favored the production of valuable crops.

If from lifeless things and actions we pass to living ones, we
similarly find that these words in their current applications refer
to efficient subservience. The goodness or badness of a pointer or a
hunter, of a sheep or an ox, ignoring all other attributes of these
creatures, refer in the one case to the fitness of their actions for
effecting the ends men use them for, and in the other case to the
qualities of their flesh as adapting it to support human life.

And those doings of men which, morally considered, are indifferent,
we class as good or bad according to their success or failure. A good
jump is a jump which, remoter ends ignored, well achieves the immediate
purpose of a jump; and a stroke at billiards is called good when the
movements are skillfully adjusted to the requirements. Oppositely,
the badness of a walk that is shuffling and an utterance that is
indistinct, is alleged because of the relative non-adaptations of the
acts to the ends.

Thus recognizing the meanings of good and bad as otherwise used, we
shall understand better their meanings as used in characterizing
conduct under its ethical aspects. Here, too, observation shows that
we apply them according as the adjustments of acts to ends are, or are
not, efficient. This truth is somewhat disguised. The entanglement of
social relations is such that men's actions often simultaneously affect
the welfares of self, of offspring, and of fellow-citizens. Hence
results confusion in judging of actions as good or bad; since actions
well fitted to achieve ends of one order, may prevent ends of the other
orders from being achieved Nevertheless, when we disentangle the three
orders of ends, and consider each separately, it becomes clear that the
conduct which achieves each kind of end is regarded as relatively good;
and is regarded as relatively bad if it fails to achieve it.

Take first the primary set of adjustments--those subserving individual
life. Apart from approval or disapproval of his ulterior aims, a man
who fights is said to make a good defense, if his defense is well
adapted for self-preservation; and, the judgments on other aspects
of his conduct remaining the same, he brings down on himself an
unfavorable verdict, in so far as his immediate acts are concerned, if
these are futile. The goodness ascribed to a man of business, as such,
is measured by the activity and ability with which he buys and sells
to advantage; and may co-exist with a hard treatment of dependents
which is reprobated. Though, in repeatedly lending money to a friend
who sinks one loan after another, a man is doing that which, considered
in itself is held praiseworthy; yet, if he does it to the extent of
bringing on his own ruin, he is held blameworthy for a self-sacrifice
carried too far. And thus is it with the opinions we express from hour
to hour on those acts of people around which bear on their health and
personal welfare. "You should not have done that;" is the reproof
given to one who crosses the street amid a dangerous rush of vehicles.
"You ought to have changed your clothes;" is said to another who has
taken cold after getting wet. "You were right to take a receipt;" "you
were wrong to invest without advice;" are common criticisms. All such
approving and disapproving utterances make the tacit assertion that,
other things equal, conduct is right or wrong according as its special
acts, well or ill adjusted to special ends, do or do not further the
general end of self-preservation.

These ethical judgments we pass on self-regarding acts are ordinarily
little emphasized; partly because the promptings of the self-regarding
desires, generally strong enough, do not need moral enforcement, and
partly because the promptings of the other-regarding desires, less
strong, and often overridden, do need moral enforcement. Hence results
a contrast. On turning to that second class of adjustments of acts
to ends which subserve the rearing of offspring, we no longer find
any obscurity in the application of the words good and bad to them,
according as they are efficient or inefficient. The expressions good
nursing and bad nursing, whether they refer to the supply of food, the
quantity and amount of clothing, or the due ministration to infantine
wants from hour to hour, tacitly recognize as special ends which ought
to be fulfilled, the furthering of the vital functions, with a view
to the general end of continued life and growth. A mother is called
good who, ministering to all the physical needs of her children, also
adjusts her behavior in ways conducive to their mental health; and
a bad father is one who either does not provide the necessaries of
life for his family or otherwise acts in a manner injurious to their
bodies or minds. Similarly of the education given to them, or provided
for them. Goodness or badness is affirmed of it (often with little
consistency, however) according as its methods are so adapted to
physical and psychical requirements, as to further the children's lives
for the time being, while preparing them for carrying on complete and
prolonged adult life.

Most emphatic, however, are the applications of the words good and bad
to conduct throughout that third division of it comprising the deeds
by which men affect one another. In maintaining their own lives and
fostering their offspring, men's adjustments of acts to ends are so apt
to hinder the kindred adjustments of other men, that insistance on the
needful limitations has to be perpetual; and the mischiefs caused by
men's interferences with one another's life-subserving actions are so
great that the interdicts have to be peremptory. Hence, the fact that
the words good and bad have come to be specially associated with acts
which further the complete living of others and acts which obstruct
their complete living. Goodness, standing by itself, suggests, above
all other things, the conduct of one who aids the sick in re-acquiring
normal vitality, assists the unfortunate to recover the means of
maintaining themselves, defends those who are threatened with harm in
person, property, or reputation, and aids whatever promises to improve
the living of all his fellows. Contrariwise, badness brings to mind, as
its leading correlative, the conduct of one who, in carrying on his own
life, damages the lives of others by injuring their bodies, destroying
their possessions, defrauding them, calumniating them.

Always, then, acts are called good or bad according as they are well
or ill adjusted to ends; and whatever inconsistency there is in our
uses of the words arises from inconsistency of the ends. Here, however,
the study of conduct in general, and of the evolution of conduct,
have prepared us to harmonize these interpretations. The foregoing
exposition shows that the conduct to which we apply the name good,
is the relatively more evolved conduct; and that bad is the name
we apply to conduct which is relatively less evolved. We saw that
evolution, tending ever toward self-preservation, reaches its limit
when individual life is the greatest, both in length and breadth;
and now we see that, leaving other ends aside, we regard as good the
conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad the conduct tending
to self-destruction. It was shown that along with increasing power
of maintaining individual life, which evolution brings, there goes
increasing power of perpetuating the species by fostering progeny, and
that in this direction evolution reaches its limit when the needful
number of young, preserved to maturity, are then fit for a life that is
complete in fullness and duration; and here it turns out that parental
conduct is called good or bad as it approaches or falls short of this
ideal result. Lastly, we inferred that establishment of an associated
state, both makes possible and requires a form of conduct such that
life may be completed in each and in his offspring, not only without
preventing completion of it in others, but with furtherance of it in
others; and we have found above, that this is the form of conduct most
emphatically termed good. Moreover, just as we there saw that evolution
becomes the highest possible when the conduct simultaneously achieves
the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow
men; so here we see that the conduct called good rises to the conduct
conceived as best, when it fulfills all three classes of ends at the
same time.


§ 9. Is there any postulate involved in these judgments on conduct?
Is there any assumption made in calling good the acts conducive to
life, in self or others, and bad those which directly or indirectly
tend toward death, special or general? Yes; an assumption of extreme
significance has been made--an assumption underlying all moral
estimates.

The question to be definitely raised and answered before entering on
any ethical discussion, is the question of late much agitated: Is life
worth living? Shall we take the pessimist view? or shall we take the
optimist view? or shall we, after weighing pessimistic and optimistic
arguments, conclude that the balance is in favor of a qualified
optimism?

On the answer to this question depends entirely every decision
concerning the goodness or badness of conduct. By those who think life
is not a benefit but a misfortune, conduct which prolongs it is to be
blamed rather than praised; the ending of an undesirable existence
being the thing to be wished, that which causes the ending of it must
be applauded; while actions furthering its continuance, either in self
or others, must be reprobated. Those who, on the other hand, take an
optimistic view, or who, if not pure optimists, yet hold that in life
the good exceeds the evil, are committed to opposite estimates; and
must regard as conduct to be approved that which fosters life in self
and others, and as conduct to be disapproved that which injures or
endangers life in self or others.

The ultimate question, therefore, is: Has evolution been a mistake;
and especially that evolution which improves the adjustment of acts
to ends in ascending stages of organization? If it is held that there
had better not have been any animate existence at all, and that the
sooner it comes to an end the better; then one set of conclusions with
respect to conduct emerges. If, contrariwise, it is held that there
is a balance in favor of animate existence, and if, still further, it
is held that in the future this balance may be increased; then the
opposite set of conclusions emerges. Even should it be alleged that
the worth of life is not to be judged by its intrinsic character, but
rather by its extrinsic sequences--by certain results to be anticipated
when life has passed--the ultimate issue reappears in a new shape. For
though the accompanying creed may negative a deliberate shortening of
life that is miserable, it cannot justify a gratuitous lengthening of
such life. Legislation conducive to increased longevity would, on the
pessimistic view, remain blameable, while it would be praiseworthy on
the optimistic view.

But now, have these irreconcilable opinions anything in common? Men
being divisible into two schools differing on this ultimate question,
the inquiry arises--Is there anything which their radically opposed
views alike take for granted? In the optimistic proposition, tacitly
made when using the words good and bad after the ordinary manner;
and in the pessimistic proposition overtly made, which implies that
the words good and bad should be used in the reverse senses; does
examination disclose any joint proposition--any proposition which,
contained in both of them, may be held more certain than either--any
universally asserted proposition?


§ 10. Yes, there is one postulate in which pessimists and optimists
agree. Both their arguments assume it to be self-evident that life
is good or bad, according as it does, or does not, bring a surplus
of agreeable feeling. The pessimist says he condemns life because
it results in more pain than pleasure. The optimist defends life
in the belief that it brings more pleasure than pain. Each makes
the kind of sentiency which accompanies life the test. They agree
that the justification for life as a state of being, turns on this
issue--whether the average consciousness rises above indifference-point
into pleasurable feeling or falls below it into painful feeling. The
implication common to their antagonist views is, that conduct should
conduce to preservation of the individual, of the family, and of the
society, only supposing that life brings more happiness than misery.

Changing the venue cannot alter the verdict. If either the pessimist,
while saying that the pains of life predominate, or the optimist,
while saying that the pleasures predominate, urges that the pains
borne here are to be compensated by pleasures received hereafter; and
that so life, whether or not justified in its immediate results, is
justified in its ultimate results; the implication remains the same.
The decision is still reached by balancing pleasures against pains.
Animate existence would be judged by both a curse, if to a surplus of
misery borne here were added a surplus of misery to be borne hereafter.
And for either to regard animate existence as a blessing, if here its
pains were held to exceed its pleasures, he must hold that hereafter
its pleasures will exceed its pains. Thus there is no escape from the
admission that in calling good the conduct which subserves life, and
bad the conduct which hinders or destroys it, and in so implying that
life is a blessing and not a curse, we are inevitably asserting that
conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable
or painful.

One theory only is imaginable in pursuance of which other
interpretations of good and bad can be given. This theory is that men
were created with the intention that they should be sources of misery
to themselves; and that they are bound to continue living that their
creator may have the satisfaction of contemplating their misery.
Though this is not a theory avowedly entertained by many--though
it is not formulated by any in this distinct way; yet not a few do
accept it under a disguised form. Inferior creeds are pervaded by the
belief that the sight of suffering is pleasing to the gods. Derived
from bloodthirsty ancestors, such gods are naturally conceived as
gratified by the infliction of pain: when living they delighted in
torturing other beings; and witnessing torture is supposed still to
give them delight. The implied conceptions long survive. It needs but
to name Indian fakirs who hang on hooks, and Eastern dervishes who
gash themselves, to show that in societies considerably advanced are
still to be found many who think that submission to anguish brings
divine favor. And without enlarging on facts and penances, it will
be clear that there has existed, and still exists, among Christian
peoples, the belief that the Deity whom Jephthah thought to propitiate
by sacrificing his daughter, may be propitiated by self-inflicted
pains. Further, the conception accompanying this, that acts pleasing
to self are offensive to God, has survived along with it, and still
widely prevails; if not in formulated dogmas, yet in beliefs that are
manifestly operative.

Doubtless, in modern days such beliefs have assumed qualified forms.
The satisfactions which ferocious gods were supposed to feel in
contemplating tortures, has been, in large measure, transformed into
the satisfaction felt by a deity in contemplating that self-infliction
of pain which is held to further eventual happiness. But clearly
those who entertain this modified view, are excluded from the class
whose position we are here considering. Restricting ourselves to this
class--supposing that from the savage who immolates victims to a
cannibal god, there are descendants among the civilized, who hold that
mankind were made for suffering, and that it is their duty to continue
living in misery for the delight of their maker, we can only recognize
the fact that devil-worshipers are not yet extinct.

Omitting people of this class, if there are any, as beyond or beneath
argument, we find that all others avowedly or tacitly hold that the
final justification for maintaining life can only be the reception from
it of a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling; and that
goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or
hinder life only on this supposition.

And here we are brought round to those primary meanings of the words
good and bad, which we passed over when considering their secondary
meanings. For on remembering that we call good and bad the things which
immediately produce agreeable and disagreeable sensations, and also
the sensations themselves--a good wine, a good appetite, a bad smell,
a bad headache--we see that by referring directly to pleasures and
pains, these meanings harmonize with those which indirectly refer to
pleasures and pains. If we call good the enjoyable state itself, as a
good laugh--if we call good the proximate cause of an enjoyable state,
as good music--if we call good any agent which conduces immediately or
remotely to an enjoyable state, as a good shop, a good teacher--if we
call good considered intrinsically, each act so adjusted to its end as
to further self-preservation and that surplus of enjoyment which makes
self-preservation desirable--if we call good every kind of conduct
which aids the lives of others, and do this under the belief that life
brings more happiness than misery; then it becomes undeniable that,
taking into account immediate and remote effects on all persons, the
good is universally the pleasurable.


§ 11. Sundry influences--moral, theological, and political--conspire
to make people disguise from themselves this truth. As in narrower
cases so in this widest case, they become so pre-occupied with the
means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the
end. Just as money, which is the means of satisfying wants, comes to
be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the
wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because
most conducive to happiness has come to be thought of as intrinsically
preferable, not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be),
but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate
end. And yet cross-examination quickly compels every one to confess
the true ultimate end. Just as the miser, asked to justify himself, is
obliged to allege the power of money to purchase desirable things, as
his reason for prizing it; so the moralist who thinks this conduct
intrinsically good and that intrinsically bad, if pushed home, has
no choice but to fall back on their pleasure-giving and pain-giving
effects. To prove this it needs but to observe how impossible it would
be to think of them as we do, if their effects were reversed.

Suppose that gashes and bruises caused agreeable sensations, and
brought in their train increased power of doing work and receiving
enjoyment; should we regard assault in the same manner as at present?
Or suppose that self-mutilation, say by cutting off a hand, was both
intrinsically pleasant and furthered performance of the processes by
which personal welfare and the welfare of dependents is achieved;
should we hold as now, that deliberate injury to one's own body is to
be reprobated? Or again, suppose that picking a man's pocket excited
in him joyful emotions, by brightening his prospects; would theft be
counted among crimes, as in existing law-books and moral codes? In
these extreme cases, no one can deny that what we call the badness of
actions is ascribed to them solely for the reason that they entail
pain, immediate or remote, and would not be so ascribed did they entail
pleasure.

If we examine our conceptions on their obverse side, this general
fact forces itself on our attention with equal distinctness. Imagine
that ministering to a sick person always increased the pains of
illness. Imagine that an orphan's relatives who took charge of it,
thereby necessarily brought miseries upon it. Imagine that liquidating
another man's pecuniary claims on you redounded to his disadvantage.
Imagine that crediting a man with noble behavior hindered his social
welfare and consequent gratification. What should we say to these
acts which now fall into the class we call praiseworthy? Should we not
contrariwise class them as blameworthy?

Using, then, as our tests, these most pronounced forms of good and bad
conduct, we find it unquestionable that our ideas of their goodness
and badness really originate from our consciousness of the certainty
or probability that they will produce pleasures or pains somewhere.
And this truth is brought out with equal clearness by examining the
standards of different moral schools; for analysis shows that every
one of them derives its authority from this ultimate standard. Ethical
systems are roughly distinguishable according as they take for their
cardinal ideas (1) the character of the agent; (2) the nature of
his motive; (3) the quality of his deeds; and (4) the results. Each
of these may be characterized as good or bad; and those who do not
estimate a mode of life by its effects on happiness, estimate it by
the implied goodness or badness in the agent, in his motive, or in
his deeds. We have perfection in the agent set up as a test by which
conduct is to be judged. Apart from the agent we have his feeling
considered as moral. And apart from the feeling we have his action
considered as virtuous.

Though the distinctions thus indicated have so little definiteness that
the words marking them are used interchangeably, yet there correspond
to them doctrines partially unlike one another; which we may here
conveniently examine separately, with the view of showing that all
their tests of goodness are derivative.


§ 12. It is strange that a notion so abstract as that of perfection,
or a certain ideal completeness of nature, should ever have been
thought one from which a system of guidance can be evolved; as it was
in a general way by Plato and more distinctly by Jonathan Edwardes.
Perfection is synonymous with goodness in the highest degree; and,
hence, to define good conduct in terms of perfection, is indirectly
to define good conduct in terms of itself. Naturally, therefore, it
happens that the notion of perfection like the notion of goodness can
be framed only in relation to ends.

We allege imperfection of any inanimate thing, as a tool, if it
lacks some part needful for effectual action, or if some part is so
shaped as not to fulfill its purpose in the best manner. Perfection
is alleged of a watch if it keeps exact time, however plain its case;
and imperfection is alleged of it because of inaccurate time-keeping,
however beautifully it is ornamented. Though we call things imperfect
if we detect in them any injuries or flaws, even when these do not
detract from efficiency; yet we do this because they imply that
inferior workmanship, or that wear and tear, with which inefficiency
is commonly joined in experience: absence of minor imperfections being
habitually associated with absence of major imperfections.

As applied to living things, the word perfection has the same meaning.
The idea of perfect shape in a race-horse is derived by generalization
from those observed traits of race-horses which have usually gone
along with attainment of the highest speed; and the idea of perfect
constitution in a race-horse similarly refers to the endurance which
enables him to continue that speed for the longest time. With men,
physically considered, it is the same: we are able to furnish no other
test of perfection than that of complete power in all the organs to
fulfill their respective functions. That our conception of perfect
balance among the internal parts, and of perfect proportion among
the external parts, originates thus, is made clear by observing that
imperfection of any viscus, as lungs, heart, or liver, is ascribed
for no other reason than inability to meet in full the demands which
the activities of the organism make on it; and on observing that the
conception of insufficient size, or of too great size, in a limb, is
derived from accumulated experiences respecting that ratio among the
limbs which furthers in the highest degree the performance of all
needful actions.

And of perfection in mental nature we have no other measure. If
imperfection of memory, of judgment, of temper, is alleged, it is
alleged because of inadequacy to the requirements of life; and to
imagine a perfect balance of the intellectual powers and of the
emotions, is to imagine that proportion among them which ensures an
entire discharge of each and every obligation as the occasion calls for
it.

So that the perfection of man considered as an agent, means the being
constituted for effecting complete adjustment of acts to ends of
every kind. And since, as shown above, the complete adjustment of
acts to ends is that which both secures and constitutes the life that
is most evolved, alike in breadth and length; while, as also shown,
the justification for whatever increases life is the reception from
life of more happiness than misery; it follows that conduciveness to
happiness is the ultimate test of perfection in a man's nature. To be
fully convinced of this it needs but to observe how the proposition
looks when inverted. It needs but to suppose that every approach toward
perfection involved greater misery to self, or others, or both, to
show by opposition that approach to perfection really means approach to
that which secures greater happiness.


§ 13. Pass we now from the view of those who make excellence of being
the standard to the view of those who make virtuousness of action
the standard. I do not here refer to moralists who, having decided
empirically or rationally, inductively or deductively, that acts of
certain kinds have the character we call virtuous, argue that such
acts are to be performed without regard to proximate consequences:
these have ample justification. But I refer to moralists who suppose
themselves to have conceptions of virtue as an end, underived from any
other end, who think that the idea of virtue is not resolvable into
simpler ideas.

This is the doctrine which appears to have been entertained by
Aristotle. I say, appears to have been, because his statements are far
from consistent with one another. Recognizing happiness as the supreme
end of human endeavor, it would at first sight seem that he cannot be
taken as typical of those who make virtue the supreme end. Yet he puts
himself in this category by seeking to define happiness in terms of
virtue, instead of defining virtue in terms of happiness. The imperfect
separation of words from things, which characterizes Greek speculation
in general, seems to have been the cause of this. In primitive thought
the name and the object named are associated in such wise that the
one is regarded as a part of the other--so much so, that knowing a
savage's name is considered by him as having some of his being, and a
consequent power to work evil on him. This belief in a real connection
between word and thing, continuing through lower stages of progress,
and long surviving in the tacit assumption that the meanings of words
are intrinsic, pervades the dialogues of Plato, and is traceable even
in Aristotle. For otherwise it is not easy to see why he should have
so incompletely disassociated the abstract idea of happiness from
particular forms of happiness.

Naturally where the divorcing of words as symbols, from things as
symbolized, is imperfect, there must be difficulty in giving to
abstract words a sufficiently abstract meaning. If in the first stages
of language the concrete name cannot be separated in thought from the
concrete object it belongs to, it is inferable that in the course of
forming successively higher grades of abstract names, there will have
to be resisted the tendency to interpret each more abstract name in
terms of some one class of the less abstract names it covers. Hence,
I think, the fact that Aristotle supposes happiness to be associated
with some one order of human activities, rather than with all orders of
human activities. Instead of including in it the pleasurable feelings
accompanying actions that constitute mere living, which actions he says
man has in common with vegetables; and instead of making it include
the mental states which the life of external perception yields, which
he says man has in common with animals at large, he excludes these
from his idea of happiness, and includes in it only the modes of
consciousness accompanying rational life. Asserting that the proper
work of man "consists in the active exercise of the mental capacities
conformably to reason," he concludes that "the supreme good of man
will consist in performing this work with excellence or virtue: herein
he will obtain happiness." And he finds confirmation for his view in
its correspondence with views previously enunciated; saying, "our
notion nearly agrees with theirs who place happiness in virtue; for we
say that it consists in the action of virtue; that is, not merely in
the possession, but in the use."

Now the implied belief that virtue can be defined otherwise than in
terms of happiness (for else the proposition is that happiness is
to be obtained by actions conducive to happiness) is allied to the
Platonic belief that there is an ideal or absolute good, which gives
to particular and relative goods their property of goodness; and
an argument analogous to that which Aristotle uses against Plato's
conception of good, may be used against his own conception of virtue.
As with good so with virtue--it is not singular but plural: in
Aristotle's own classification, virtue, when treated of at large, is
transformed into virtues. Those which he calls virtues must be so
called in consequence of some common character that is either intrinsic
or extrinsic. We may class things together either because they are made
alike by all having in themselves some peculiarity, as we do vertebrate
animals because they all have vertebral columns; or we may class them
together because of some community in their outer relations, as when we
group saws, knives, mallets, harrows, under the head of tools. Are the
virtues classed as such because of some intrinsic community of nature?
Then there must be identifiable a common trait in all the cardinal
virtues which Aristotle specifies, "Courage, Temperance, Liberality,
Magnanimity, Magnificence, Meekness, Amiability or Friendliness,
Truthfulness, Justice." What now is the trait possessed in common
by Magnificence and Meekness? and if any such common trait can be
disentangled, is it that which also constitutes the essential trait
in Truthfulness? The answer must be, No. The virtues, then, not being
classed as such because of an intrinsic community of character, must
be classed as such because of something extrinsic; and this something
can be nothing else than the happiness which Aristotle says consists in
the practice of them. They are united by their common relation to this
result; while they are not united by their inner natures.

Perhaps still more clearly may the inference be drawn thus: If virtue
is primordial and independent, no reason can be given why there should
be any correspondence between virtuous conduct and conduct that is
pleasure-giving in its total effects on self, or others, or both; and
if there is not a necessary correspondence, it is conceivable that
the conduct classed as virtuous should be pain-giving in its total
effects. That we may see the consequence of so conceiving it, let us
take the two virtues considered as typically such in ancient times
and in modern times--courage and chastity. By the hypothesis, then,
courage, displayed alike in self-defence and in defence of country,
is to be conceived as not only entailing pains incidentally, but as
being necessarily a cause of misery to the individual and to the
state; while, by implication, the absence of it redounds to personal
and general well-being. Similarly, by the hypothesis, we have to
conceive that irregular sexual relations are directly and indirectly
beneficial--that adultery is conducive to domestic harmony and the
careful rearing of children; while marital relations, in proportion
as they are persistent, generate discord between husband and wife and
entail on their offspring, suffering, disease and death. Unless it
is asserted that courage and chastity could still be thought of as
virtues though thus productive of misery, it must be admitted that
the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of
happiness-producing conduct; and that as this holds of all the virtues,
however otherwise unlike, it is from their conduciveness to happiness
that they come to be classed as virtues.


§ 14. When from those ethical estimates which take perfection of
nature, or virtuousness of action, as tests, we pass to those which
take for test rectitude of motive, we approach the intuitional theory
of morals; and we may conveniently deal with such estimates by a
criticism on this theory.

By the intuitional theory I here mean, not that which recognizes
as produced by the inherited effects of continued experiences, the
feelings of liking and aversion we have to acts of certain kinds; but
I mean the theory which regards such feelings as divinely given, and
as independent of results experienced by self or ancestors. "There
is, therefore," says Hutcheson, "as each one by close attention and
reflection may convince himself, a natural and immediate determination
to approve certain affections and actions consequent upon them;" and
since, in common with others of his time, he believes in the special
creation of man, and all other beings, this "natural sense of immediate
excellence" he considers as a supernaturally derived guide. Though
he says that the feelings and acts thus intuitively recognized as
good, "all agree in one general character, of tending to the happiness
of others;" yet he is obliged to conceive this as a pre-ordained
correspondence. Nevertheless, it may be shown that conduciveness to
happiness, here represented as an incidental trait of the acts which
receive these innate moral approvals, is really the test by which these
approvals are recognized as moral. The intuitionists place confidence
in these verdicts of conscience simply because they vaguely, if not
distinctly, perceive them to be consonant with the disclosures of that
ultimate test. Observe the proof.

By the hypothesis, the wrongness of murder is known by a moral
intuition which the human mind was originally constituted to yield; and
the hypothesis, therefore, negatives the admission that this sense of
its wrongness arises, immediately or remotely, from the consciousness
that murder involves deduction from happiness, directly and indirectly.
But if you ask an adherent of this doctrine to contrast his intuition
with that of the Fijian, who, considering murder an honorable action,
is restless until he has distinguished himself by killing some one;
and if you inquire of him in what way the civilized intuition is to
be justified in opposition to the intuition of the savage, no course
is open save that of showing how conformity to the one conduces to
well-being, while conformity to the other entails suffering, individual
and general. When asked why the moral sense which tells him that it is
wrong to take another man's goods, should be obeyed rather than the
moral sense of a Turcoman, who proves how meritorious he considers
theft to be by making pilgrimages to the tombs of noted robbers
to make offerings, the intuitionist can do nothing but urge that,
certainly under conditions like ours, if not also under conditions like
those of the Turcomans, disregard of men's claims to their property
not only inflicts immediate misery, but involves a social state
inconsistent with happiness. Or if, again, there is required from him
a justification for his feeling of repugnance to lying, in contrast
with the feeling of an Egyptian, who prides himself on skill in lying
(even thinking it praiseworthy to deceive without any further end
than that of practicing deception), he can do no more than point to
the social prosperity furthered by entire trust between man and man,
and the social disorganization that follows universal untruthfulness,
consequences that are necessarily conducive to agreeable feelings and
disagreeable feelings respectively.

The unavoidable conclusion is, then, that the intuitionist does not,
and cannot, ignore the ultimate derivations of right and wrong from
pleasure and pain. However much he may be guided, and rightly guided,
by the decisions of conscience respecting the characters of acts, he
has come to have confidence in these decisions because he perceives,
vaguely but positively, that conformity to them furthers the welfare
of himself and others, and that disregard of them entails in the long
run suffering on all. Require him to name any moral-sense judgment by
which he knows as right some kind of act that will bring a surplus of
pain, taking into account the totals in this life and in any assumed
other life, and you find him unable to name one: a fact proving that
underneath all these intuitions respecting the goodness or badness
of acts there lies the fundamental assumption that acts are good or
bad according as their aggregate effects increase men's happiness or
increase their misery.


§ 14. It is curious to see how the devil-worship of the savage,
surviving in various disguises among the civilized, and leaving as
one of its products that asceticism which in many forms and degrees
still prevails widely, is to be found influencing in marked ways men
who have apparently emancipated themselves, not only from primitive
superstitions but from more developed superstitions. Views of life and
conduct which originated with those who propitiated deified ancestors
by self-tortures enter even still into the ethical theories of many
persons who have years since cast away the theology of the past, and
suppose themselves to be no longer influenced by it.

In the writings of one who rejects dogmatic Christianity, together
with the Hebrew cult which preceded it, a career of conquest costing
tens of thousands of lives is narrated with a sympathy comparable to
that rejoicing which the Hebrew traditions show us over destruction
of enemies in the name of God. You may find, too, a delight in
contemplating the exercise of despotic power, joined with insistance
on the salutariness of a state in which the wills of slaves and
citizens are humbly subject to the wills of masters and rulers--a
sentiment also reminding us of that ancient Oriental life which
biblical narratives portray. Along with this worship of the strong
man--along with this justification of whatever force may be needed for
carrying out his ambition--along with this yearning for a form of
society in which supremacy of the few is unrestrained and the virtue
of the many consists in obedience to them, we not unnaturally find
repudiation of the ethical theory which takes, in some shape or other,
the greatest happiness as the end of conduct: we not unnaturally find
this utilitarian philosophy designated by the contemptuous title of
"pig-philosophy." And then, serving to show what comprehension there
has been of the philosophy so nicknamed, we are told that not happiness
but blessedness must be the end.

Obviously, the implication is that blessedness is not a kind of
happiness; and this implication at once suggests the question--What
mode of feeling is it? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is
necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or pleasurable.
Does it leave the possessor at the zero point of sentiency? Then it
leaves him just as he would be if he had not got it. Does it not leave
him at the zero point? Then it must leave him below zero or above zero.

Each of these possibilities may be conceived under two forms. That
to which the term blessedness is applied may be a particular state
of consciousness--one among the many states that occur; and on this
supposition we have to recognize it as a pleasurable state, an
indifferent state, or a painful state. Otherwise, blessedness is
a word not applicable to a particular state of consciousness, but
characterizes the aggregate of its states; and in this case the average
of the aggregate is to be conceived as one in which the pleasurable
predominates, or one in which the painful predominates, or one in which
pleasures and pains exactly cancel one another. Let us take in turn
these two imaginable applications of the word.

"Blessed are the merciful;" "Blessed are the peacemakers;" "Blessed is
he that considereth the poor;" are sayings which we may fairly take
as conveying the accepted meaning of blessedness. What now shall we
say of one who is, for the time being, blessed in performing an act
of mercy? Is his mental state pleasurable? If so the hypothesis is
abandoned: blessedness is a particular form of happiness. Is the state
indifferent or painful? In that case the blessed man is so devoid
of sympathy that relieving another from pain, or the fear of pain,
leaves him either wholly unmoved, or gives him an unpleasant emotion.
Again, if one who is blessed in making peace receives no gratification
from the act, then seeing men injure each other does not affect him
at all, or gives him a pleasure which is changed into a pain when he
prevents the injury. Once more, to say that the blessedness of one who
"considereth the poor" implies no agreeable feeling, is to say that his
consideration for the poor leaves him without feeling or entails on him
a disagreeable feeling. So that if blessedness is a particular mode of
consciousness temporarily existing as a concomitant of each kind of
beneficent action, those who deny that it is a pleasure, or constituent
of happiness, confess themselves either not pleased by the welfare of
others or displeased by it.

Otherwise understood, blessedness must, as we have seen, refer to the
totality of feelings experienced during the life of one who occupies
himself with the actions the word connotes. This also presents the
three possibilities--surplus of pleasures, surplus of pains, equality
of the two. If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the blessed
life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by
the relative amount, or the quality, of its pleasures: it is a life
which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end; and the
assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness, lapses. If
the blessed life is one in which the pleasures and the pains received
balance one another, so producing an average that is indifferent; or
if it is one in which the pleasures are outbalanced by the pains, then
the blessed life has the character which the pessimist alleges of life
at large, and therefore regards it as cursed. Annihilation is best, he
will argue, since if an average that is indifferent is the outcome of
the blessed life, annihilation at once achieves it; and if a surplus of
suffering is the outcome of this highest kind of life called blessed,
still more should life in general be ended.

A possible rejoinder must be named and disposed of. While it is
admitted that the particular kind of consciousness accompanying conduct
that is blessed, is pleasurable, it may be contended that pursuance
of this conduct and receipt of the pleasure, brings by the implied
self-denial, and persistent effort, and perhaps bodily injury, a
suffering that exceeds it in amount. And it may then be urged that
blessedness, characterized by this excess of aggregate pains over
aggregate pleasures, should nevertheless be pursued as an end, rather
than the happiness constituted by excess of pleasures over pains. But
now, defensible though this conception of blessedness may be when
limited to one individual, or some individuals, it becomes indefensible
when extended to all individuals; as it must be if blessedness is taken
for the end of conduct. To see this we need but ask for what purpose
are these pains in excess of pleasures to be borne. Blessedness being
the ideal state for all persons, and the self-sacrifices made by each
person in pursuance of this ideal state, having for their end to
help all other persons in achieving the like ideal state, it results
that the blessed though painful state of each, is to be acquired by
furthering the like blessed though painful states of others: the
blessed consciousness is to be constituted by the contemplation of
their consciousnesses in a condition of average suffering. Does any
one accept this inference? If not, his rejection of it involves the
admission that the motive for bearing pains in performing acts called
blessed, is not the obtaining for others like pains of blessedness, but
the obtaining of pleasures for others, and that thus pleasure somewhere
is the tacitly implied ultimate end.

In brief, then, blessedness has for its necessary condition of
existence, increased happiness, positive or negative, in some
consciousness or other, and disappears utterly if we assume that the
actions called blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in
others as well as in the actor.


§ 15. To make clear the meaning of the general argument set forth in
this chapter, its successive parts must be briefly summarized.

That which in the last chapter we found to be highly-evolved conduct,
is that which, in this chapter, we find to be what is called good
conduct; and the ideal goal to the natural evolution of conduct there
recognized we here recognize as the ideal standard of conduct ethically
considered.

The acts adjusted to ends which, while constituting the outer visible
life from moment to moment further the continuance of life, we saw
become, as evolution progresses, better adjusted, until finally they
make the life of each individual entire in length and breadth, at the
same time that they efficiently subserve the rearing of young, and do
both these, not only without hindering other individuals from doing
the like, but while giving aid to them in doing the like. And here
we see that goodness is asserted of such conduct under each of these
three aspects. Other things equal, well-adjusted, self-conserving acts
we call good; other things equal, we call good the acts that are well
adjusted for bringing up progeny capable of complete living; and other
things equal, we ascribe goodness to acts which further the complete
living of others.

This judging as good, conduct which conduces to life in each and all,
we found to involve the assumption that animate existence is desirable.
By the pessimist, conduct which subserves life cannot consistently
be called good: to call it good implies some form of optimism. We
saw, however, that pessimists and optimists both start with the
postulate that life is a blessing or a curse, according as the average
consciousness accompanying it is pleasurable or painful. And since
avowed or implied pessimists, and optimists of one or other shade,
taken together constitute all men, it results that this postulate
is universally accepted. Whence it follows that if we call good the
conduct conducive to life, we can do so only with the implication that
it is conducive to a surplus of pleasures over pains.

The truth that conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according
as its aggregate results, to self or others or both, are pleasurable
or painful, we found on examination to be involved in all the
current judgments on conduct: the proof being that reversing the
applications of the words creates absurdities. And we found that every
other proposed standard of conduct derives its authority from this
standard. Whether perfection of nature is the assigned proper aim, or
virtuousness of action, or rectitude of motive, we saw that definition
of the perfection, the virtue, the rectitude, inevitably brings us down
to happiness experienced in some form, at some time, by some person, as
the fundamental idea. Nor could we discover any intelligible conception
of blessedness, save one which implies a raising of consciousness,
individual or general, to a happier state; either by mitigating pains
or increasing pleasures.

Even with those who judge of conduct from the religious point of view,
rather than from the ethical point of view, it is the same. Men who
seek to propitiate God by inflicting pains on themselves, or refrain
from pleasures to avoid offending him, do so to escape greater ultimate
pains or to get greater ultimate pleasures. If by positive or negative
suffering here, they expected to achieve more suffering hereafter, they
would not do as they do. That which they now think duty they would not
think duty if it promised eternal misery instead of eternal happiness.
Nay, if there be any who believe that human beings were created to
be unhappy, and that they ought to continue living to display their
unhappiness for the satisfaction of their creator, such believers are
obliged to use this standard of judgment; for the pleasure of their
diabolical god is the end to be achieved.

So that no school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a
desirable state of feeling called by whatever name--gratification,
enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being
or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception. It is as much
a necessary form of moral intuition as space is a necessary form of
intellectual intuition.




CHAPTER IV.

WAYS OF JUDGING CONDUCT.


§ 17. Intellectual progress is by no one trait so adequately
characterized as by development of the idea of causation, since
development of this idea involves development of so many other ideas.
Before any way can be made, thought and language must have advanced
far enough to render properties or attributes thinkable as such,
apart from objects; which, in low stages of human intelligence, they
are not. Again, even the simplest notion of cause, as we understand
it, can be reached only after many like instances have been grouped
into a simple generalization; and through all ascending steps, higher
notions of causation imply wider notions of generality. Further, as
there must be clustered in the mind concrete causes of many kinds
before there can emerge the conception of cause, apart from particular
causes, it follows that progress in abstractness of thought is implied.
Concomitantly, there is implied the recognition of constant relations
among phenomena, generating ideas of uniformity of sequence and of
co-existence--the idea of natural law. These advances can go on only as
fast as perceptions and resulting thoughts are made definite by the use
of measures, serving to familiarize the mind with exact correspondence,
truth, certainty. And only when growing science accumulates examples
of quantitative relations, foreseen and verified, throughout a
widening range of phenomena, does causation come to be conceived as
necessary and universal. So that though all these cardinal conceptions
aid one another in developing, we may properly say that the conception
of causation especially depends for its development on the development
of the rest; and therefore is the best measure of intellectual
development at large.

How slowly, as a consequence of its dependence, the conception of
causation evolves, a glance at the evidence shows. We hear with
surprise of the savage who, falling down a precipice, ascribes the
failure of his foothold to a malicious demon; and we smile at the
kindred notion of the ancient Greek, that his death was prevented by
a goddess who unfastened for him the thong of the helmet by which his
enemy was dragging him. But daily, without surprise, we hear men who
describe themselves as saved from shipwreck by "divine interposition,"
who speak of having "providentially" missed a train which met with a
fatal disaster, and who called it a "mercy" to have escaped injury
from a falling chimney-pot--men who, in such cases, recognize physical
causation no more than do the uncivilized or semi-civilized. The Veddah
who thinks that failure to hit an animal with his arrow resulted
from inadequate invocation of an ancestral spirit, and the Christian
priest who says prayers over a sick man in the expectation that the
course of his disease will so be stayed, differ only in respect of the
agent from whom they expect supernatural aid and the phenomena to be
altered by him: the necessary relations among causes and effects are
tacitly ignored by the last as much as by the first. Deficient belief
in causation is, indeed, exemplified even in those whose discipline
has been specially fitted to generate this belief--even in men of
science. For a generation after geologists had become uniformitarians
in Geology, they remained catastrophists in Biology: while recognizing
none but natural agencies in the genesis of the earth's crust, they
ascribed to supernatural agency the genesis of the organisms on its
surface. Nay more--among those who are convinced that living things
in general have been evolved by the continued interaction of forces
everywhere operating, there are some who make an exception of man; or
who, if they admit that his body has been evolved in the same manner
as the bodies of other creatures, allege that his mind has been not
evolved but specially created. If, then, universal and necessary
causation is only now approaching full recognition, even by those whose
investigations are daily re-illustrating it, we may expect to find it
very little recognized among men at large, whose culture has not been
calculated to impress them with it; and we may expect to find it least
recognized by them in respect of those classes of phenomena amid which,
in consequence of their complexity, causation is most difficult to
trace--the psychical, the social, the moral.

Why do I here make these reflections on what seems an irrelevant
subject? I do it because on studying the various ethical theories I am
struck with the fact that they are all characterized either by entire
absence of the idea of causation, or by inadequate presence of it.
Whether theological, political, intuitional, or utilitarian, they all
display, if not in the same degree, still, each in a large degree, the
defects which result from this lack. We will consider them in the order
named.


§ 18. The school of morals properly to be considered as the still
extant representative of the most ancient school, is that which
recognizes no other rule of conduct than the alleged will of God. It
originates with the savage whose only restraint beyond fear of his
fellow man, is fear of an ancestral spirit; and whose notion of moral
duty as distinguished from his notion of social prudence, arises from
this fear. Here the ethical doctrine and the religious doctrine are
identical--have in no degree differentiated.

This primitive form of ethical doctrine, changed only by the gradual
dying out of multitudinous minor supernatural agents and accompanying
development of one universal supernatural agent, survives in great
strength down to our own day. Religious creeds, established and
dissenting, all embody the belief that right and wrong are right and
wrong simply in virtue of divine enactment. And this tacit assumption
has passed from systems of theology into systems of morality; or
rather let us say that moral systems in early stages of development,
little differentiated from the accompanying theological systems, have
participated in this assumption. We see this in the works of the
Stoics, as well as in the works of certain Christian moralists. Among
recent ones I may instance the _Essays on the Principles of Morality_,
by Jonathan Dymond, a Quaker, which makes "the authority of the Deity
the sole ground of duty, and His communicated will the only ultimate
standard of right and wrong." Nor is it by writers belonging to so
relatively unphilosophical a sect only that this view is held; it is
held with a difference by writers belonging to sects contrariwise
distinguished. For these assert that in the absence of belief in a
deity, there would be no moral guidance; and this amounts to asserting
that moral truths have no other origin than the will of God, which, if
not considered as revealed in sacred writings, must be considered as
revealed in conscience.

This assumption, when examined, proves to be suicidal. If there are
no other origins for right and wrong than this enunciated or intuited
divine will, then, as alleged, were there no knowledge of the divine
will, the acts now known as wrong would not be known as wrong. But if
men did not know such acts to be wrong because contrary to the divine
will, and so, in committing them, did not offend by disobedience;
and, if they could not otherwise know them to be wrong, then they
might commit them indifferently with the acts now classed as right:
the results, practically considered, would be the same. In so far as
secular matters are concerned, there would be no difference between
the two; for to say that in the affairs of life any evils would arise
from continuing to do the acts called wrong, and ceasing to do the
acts called right, is to say that these produce in themselves certain
mischievous consequences and certain beneficial consequences; which is
to say there is another source for moral rules than the revealed or
inferred divine will: they may be established by induction from these
observed consequences.

From this implication I see no escape. It must be either admitted or
denied that the acts called good and the acts called bad, naturally
conduce, the one to human well-being and the other to human ill-being.
Is it admitted? Then the admission amounts to an assertion that the
conduciveness is shown by experience; and this involves abandonment
of the doctrine that there is no origin for morals apart from divine
injunctions. Is it denied that acts classed as good and bad differ in
their effect? Then it is tacitly affirmed that human affairs would go
on just as well in ignorance of the distinction; and the alleged need
for commandments from God disappears.

And here we see how entirely wanting is the conception of cause. This
notion that such and such actions are made respectively good and bad
simply by divine injunction, is tantamount to the notion that such and
such actions have not in the nature of things such and such kinds of
effects. If there is not an unconsciousness of causation there is an
ignoring of it.


§ 19. Following Plato and Aristotle, who make State enactments the
sources of right and wrong; and following Hobbes, who holds that there
can be neither justice nor injustice till a regularly constituted
coercive power exists to issue and enforce commands; not a few modern
thinkers hold that there is no other origin for good and bad in conduct
than law. And this implies the belief that moral obligation originates
with acts of parliament, and can be changed this way or that way by
majorities. They ridicule the idea that men have any natural rights,
and allege that rights are wholly results of convention: the necessary
implication being that duties are so too. Before considering whether
this theory coheres with outside truths, let us observe how far it is
coherent within itself.

In pursuance of his argument that rights and duties originate with
established social arrangements, Hobbes says:

  "Where no covenant hath proceeded, there hath no right been
  transferred, and every man has a right to everything; and
  consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a covenant is made,
  then to break it is _unjust_; and the definitions of _injustice_
  is no other than _the not performance of covenant_. And whatsoever
  is not unjust, is _just_. Therefore, before the names of just and
  unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel
  men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of
  some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of
  their covenant."[A]

In this paragraph the essential propositions are: justice is
fulfillment of covenant; fulfillment of covenant implies a power
of enforcing it: "just and unjust _can_ have no place" unless men
are compelled to perform their covenants. But this is to say that
men _cannot_ perform their covenants without compulsion. Grant that
justice is performance of covenant. Now suppose it to be performed
voluntarily: there is justice. In such case, however, there is justice
in the absence of coercion; which is contrary to the hypothesis. The
only conceivable rejoinder is an absurd one--voluntary performance of
covenant is impossible. Assert this, and the doctrine that right and
wrong come into existence with the establishment of sovereignty is
defensible. Decline to assert it, and the doctrine vanishes.

From inner incongruities pass now to outer ones. The justification
for his doctrine of absolute civil authority as the source of rules
of conduct, Hobbes seeks in the miseries entailed by the chronic war
between man and man which must exist in the absence of society; holding
that under any kind of government a better life is possible than in
the state of nature. Now whether we accept the gratuitous and baseless
theory that men surrendered their liberties to a sovereign power of
some kind, with a view to the promised increase of satisfactions;
or whether we accept the rational theory, inductively based, that a
state of political subordination gradually became established through
experience of the increased satisfactions derived under it; it equally
remains obvious that the acts of the sovereign power have no other
warrant than their subservience to the purpose for which it came into
existence. The necessities which initiate government, themselves
prescribe the actions of government. If its actions do not respond to
the necessities, they are unwarranted. The authority of law is, then,
by the hypothesis, derived; and can never transcend the authority of
that from which it is derived. If general good, or welfare, or utility,
is the supreme end, and if State enactments are justified as means to
this supreme end, then, State enactments have such authority only as
arises from conduciveness to this supreme end. When they are right,
it is only because the original authority endorses them; and they are
wrong if they do not bear its endorsement. That is to say, conduct
cannot be made good or bad by law; but its goodness or badness is to
the last determined by its effects as naturally furthering, or not
furthering, the lives of citizens.

Still more when considered in the concrete, than when considered in
the abstract, do the views of Hobbes and his disciples prove to be
inconsistent. Joining in the general belief that without such security
for life as enables men to go fearlessly about their business, there
can be neither happiness nor prosperity, individual or general, they
agree that measures for preventing murder, manslaughter, assault,
etc., are requisite; and they advocate this or that penal system as
furnishing the best deterrents: so arguing, both in respect of the
evils and the remedies, that such and such causes will, by the nature
of things, produce such and such effects. They recognize as inferable
_à priori_, the truth that men will not lay by property unless they
can count with great probability on reaping advantages from it; that
consequently where robbery is unchecked, or where a rapacious ruler
appropriates whatever earnings his subjects do not effectually hide,
production will scarcely exceed immediate consumption; and that
necessarily there will be none of that accumulation of capital required
for social development, with all its aids to welfare. In neither case,
however, do they perceive that they are tacitly asserting the need
for certain restraints on conduct as deducible from the necessary
conditions to complete life in the social state; and are so making the
authority of law derivative and not original.

If it be said by any belonging to this school that certain moral
obligations, to be distinguished as cardinal, must be admitted to have
a basis deeper than legislation, and that it is for legislation not to
create but merely to enforce them--if, I say, admitting this, they go
on to allege a legislative origin for minor claims and duties; then
we have the implication that whereas some kinds of conduct do, in the
nature of things, tend to work out certain kinds of results, other
kinds of conduct do not, in the nature of things, tend to work out
certain kinds of results. While of these acts the naturally good or
bad consequences must be allowed, it may be denied of those acts that
they have naturally good or bad consequences. Only after asserting
this can it be consistently asserted that acts of the last class
are made right or wrong by law. For if such acts have any intrinsic
tendencies to produce beneficial or mischievous effects, then these
intrinsic tendencies furnish the warrant for legislative requirements
or interdicts; and to say that the requirements or interdicts make them
right or wrong is to say that they have no intrinsic tendencies to
produce beneficial or mischievous effects.

Here, then, we have another theory betraying deficient consciousness
of causation. An adequate consciousness of causation yields the
irresistible belief that from the most serious to the most trivial
actions of men in society, there must flow consequences which, quite
apart from legal agency, conduce to well-being or ill-being in greater
or smaller degrees. If murders are socially injurious whether forbidden
by law or not--if one man's appropriation of another's gains by force
brings special and general evils, whether it is or is not contrary
to a ruler's edicts--if non-fulfillment of contract, if cheating, if
adulteration, work mischiefs on a community in proportion as they are
common, quite irrespective of prohibitions; then, is it not manifest
that the like holds throughout all the details of men's behavior? Is
it not clear that when legislation insists on certain acts which have
naturally beneficial effects, and forbids others that have naturally
injurious effects, the acts are not made good or bad by legislation;
but the legislation derives its authority from the natural effects of
the acts? Non-recognition of this implies non-recognition of natural
causation.


§ 20. Nor is it otherwise with the pure intuitionists, who hold that
moral perceptions are innate in the original sense--thinkers whose view
is that men have been divinely endowed with moral faculties; not that
these have resulted from inherited modifications caused by accumulated
experiences.

To affirm that we know some things to be right and other things to be
wrong, by virtue of a supernaturally given conscience; and thus tacitly
to affirm that we do not otherwise know right from wrong; is tacitly to
deny any natural relations between acts and results. For if there exist
any such relations, then we may ascertain by induction, or deduction,
or both, what these are. And if it be admitted that because of such
natural relations, happiness is produced by this kind of conduct, which
is therefore to be approved, while misery is produced by that kind
of conduct, which is therefore to be condemned; then it is admitted
that the rightness or wrongness of actions are determinable, and must
finally be determined, by the goodness or badness of the effects that
flow from them; which is contrary to the hypothesis.

It may, indeed, be rejoined that effects are deliberately ignored
by this school; which teaches that courses recognized by moral
intuition as right, must be pursued without regard to consequences.
But on inquiry it turns out that the consequences to be disregarded
are particular consequences, and not general consequences. When,
for example, it is said that property lost by another ought to be
restored, irrespective of evil to the finder, who possibly may, by
restoring it, lose that which would have preserved him from starvation,
it is meant that in pursuance of the principle, the immediate and
special consequences must be disregarded, not the diffused and remote
consequences. By which we are shown that though the theory forbids
overt recognition of causation, there is an unavowed recognition of it.

And this implies the trait to which I am drawing attention. The
conception of natural causation is so imperfectly developed that there
is only an indistinct consciousness that throughout the whole of human
conduct necessary relations of causes and effects prevail, and that
from them are ultimately derived all moral rules, however much these
may be proximately derived from moral intuitions.


§ 21. Strange to say, even the utilitarian school, which, at first
sight, appears to be distinguished from the rest by recognizing natural
causation, is, if not so far from complete recognition of it, yet very
far.

Conduct, according to its theory, is to be estimated by observation
of results. When, in sufficiently numerous cases, it has been found
that behavior of this kind works evil while behavior of that kind
works good, these kinds of behavior are to be judged as wrong and
right respectively. Now though it seems that the origin of moral
rules in natural causes, is thus asserted by implication, it is but
partially asserted. The implication is simply that we are to ascertain
by induction that such and such mischiefs or benefits _do_ go along
with such and such acts; and are then to infer that the like relations
will hold in future. But acceptance of these generalizations and the
inferences from them does not amount to recognition of causation in
the full sense of the word. So long as only _some_ relation between
cause and effect in conduct is recognized, and not _the_ relation,
a completely scientific form of knowledge has not been reached. At
present, utilitarians pay no attention to this distinction. Even when
it is pointed out they disregard the fact that empirical utilitarianism
is but a transitional form to be passed through on the way to rational
utilitarianism.

In a letter to Mr. Mill, written some sixteen years ago, repudiating
the title anti-utilitarian, which he had applied to me (a letter
subsequently published in Mr. Bain's work on _Mental and Moral
Science_), I endeavored to make clear the difference above indicated;
and I must here quote certain passages from that letter.

  The view for which I contend is, that Morality, properly
  so-called--the science of right conduct--has for its object to
  determine _how_ and _why_ certain modes of conduct are detrimental,
  and certain other modes beneficial. These good and bad results cannot
  be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution
  of things; and I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science
  to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence,
  what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and
  what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions
  are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to
  irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery.

  Perhaps an analogy will most clearly show my meaning. During its
  early stages, planetary Astronomy consisted of nothing more than
  accumulated observations respecting the positions and motions of
  the sun and planets; from which accumulated observations it came
  by-and-by to be empirically predicted, with an approach to truth,
  that certain of the heavenly bodies would have certain positions at
  certain times. But the modern science of planetary Astronomy consists
  of deductions from the law of gravitation--deductions showing why
  the celestial bodies _necessarily_ occupy certain places at certain
  times. Now, the kind of relation which thus exists between ancient
  and modern Astronomy is analogous to the kind of relation which, I
  conceive, exists between the Expediency-Morality and Moral Science,
  properly so called. And the objection which I have to the current
  Utilitarianism is, that it recognizes no more developed form of
  Morality--does not see that it has reached but the initial stage of
  Moral Science.

Doubtless if utilitarians are asked whether it can be by mere chance
that this kind of action works evil and that works good, they will
answer--No: they will admit that such sequences are parts of a
necessary order among phenomena. But though this truth is beyond
question; and though if there are causal relations between acts and
their results, rules of conduct can become scientific only when they
are deduced from these causal relations; there continues to be entire
satisfaction with that form of utilitarianism in which these causal
relations are practically ignored. It is supposed that in future, as
now, utility is to be determined only by observation of results: and
that there is no possibility of knowing, by deduction from fundamental
principles, what conduct _must_ be detrimental and what conduct _must_
be beneficial.


§ 22. To make more specific that conception of ethical science here
indicated, let me present it under a concrete aspect, beginning with a
simple illustration and complicating this illustration by successive
steps.

If, by tying its main artery, we stop most of the blood going to
a limb, then, for as long as the limb performs its function, those
parts which are called into play must be wasted faster than they
are repaired: whence eventual disablement. The relation between due
receipt of nutritive matters through its arteries, and due discharge
of its duties by the limb is a part of the physical order. If, instead
of cutting off the supply to a particular limb, we bleed the patient
largely, so drafting away the materials needed for repairing not one
limb but all limbs, and not limbs only but viscera, there results both
a muscular debility and an enfeeblement of the vital functions. Here,
again, cause and effect are necessarily related. The mischief that
results from great depletion, results apart from any divine command, or
political enactment, or moral intuition. Now advance a step. Suppose
the man to be prevented from taking in enough of the solid and liquid
food containing those substances continually abstracted from his blood
in repairing his tissues: suppose he has cancer of the esophagus and
cannot swallow--what happens? By this indirect depletion, as by direct
depletion, he is inevitably made incapable of performing the actions
of one in health. In this case, as in the other cases, the connection
between cause and effect is one that cannot be established, or altered,
by any authority external to the phenomena themselves. Again, let
us say that instead of being stopped after passing his mouth, that
which he would swallow is stopped before reaching his mouth; so that
day after day the man is required to waste his tissues in getting
food, and day after day the food he has got to meet this waste, he is
forcibly prevented from eating. As before, the progress toward death
by starvation is inevitable--the connection between acts and effects
is independent of any alleged theological or political authority. And
similarly if, being forced by the whip to labor, no adequate return
in food is supplied to him, there are equally certain evils, equally
independent of sacred or secular enactment.

Pass now to those actions more commonly thought of as the occasions
for rules of conduct. Let us assume the man to be continually robbed
of that which was given him in exchange for his labor, and by which he
was to make up for nervo-muscular expenditure and renew his powers.
No less than before is the connection between conduct and consequence
rooted in the constitution of things; unchangeable by State-made law,
and not needing establishment by empirical generalization. If the
action by which the man is affected is a stage further away from the
results, or produces results of a less decisive kind, still we see the
same basis for morality in the physical order. Imagine that payment
for his services is made partly in bad coin; or that it is delayed
beyond the date agreed upon; or that what he buys to eat is adulterated
with innutritive matter. Manifestly, by any of these deeds which we
condemn as unjust, and which are punished by law, there is, as before,
an interference with the normal adjustment of physiological repair
to physiological waste. Nor is it otherwise when we pass to kinds of
conduct still more remotely operative. If he is hindered from enforcing
his claim, if class-predominance prevents him from proceeding, or if
a bribed judge gives a verdict contrary to evidence, or if a witness
swears falsely, have not these deeds, though they affect him more
indirectly, the same original cause for their wrongness?

Even with actions which work diffused and indefinite mischiefs it
is the same. Suppose that the man, instead of being dealt with
fraudulently, is calumniated. There is, as before, a hinderance to the
carrying on of life-sustaining activities; for the loss of character
detrimentally affects his business. Nor is this all. The mental
depression caused partially incapacitates him for energetic activity,
and perhaps brings on ill-health. So that maliciously or carelessly
propagating false statements tends both to diminish his life and to
diminish his ability to maintain life. Hence its flagitiousness.

Moreover, if we trace to their ultimate ramifications the effects
wrought by any of these acts which morality called intuitive
reprobates--if we ask what results not to the individual himself only,
but also to his belongings--if we observe how impoverishment hinders
the rearing of his children, by entailing under-feeding or inadequate
clothing, resulting perhaps in the death of some and the constitutional
injury of others; we see that by the necessary connections of things
these acts, besides tending primarily to lower the life of the
individual aggressed upon, tend, secondarily, to lower the lives of all
his family, and thirdly, to lower the life of society at large; which
is damaged by whatever damages its units.

A more distinct meaning will now be seen in the statement that the
utilitarianism which recognizes only the principles of conduct reached
by induction, is but preparatory to the utilitarianism which deduces
these principles from the processes of life as carried on under
established conditions of existence.


§22. Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset,
that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special
tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general
defect--they neglect ultimate causal connections. Of course I do not
mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but
I mean that they recognize them only incidentally. They do not erect
into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes
and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statement of
them.

Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently
generalizes these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage
at which its empirical generalizations are included in a rational
generalization, does it become developed science. Astronomy has already
passed through its successive stages: first collections of facts; then
inductions from them; and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as
corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space.
Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared,
have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological
changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted
that Geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes
are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in
the cooling and solidifying earth, exposed to the sun's heat and the
action of the moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and
is still, exhibiting a like series of steps; the evolution of organic
forms at large is being affiliated on physical actions in operations
from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents are
coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed
of matters that are affected by certain forces and disengage other
forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling
ignored everything like cause, save in recognizing those effects of
habits which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs;
but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as
correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that
is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes:
the implication being that Psychology becomes a science as fast as
these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate
principles. Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by
stray ideas about social organization, scattered through the masses of
worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognized
by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from
time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalizations, are
now beginning to assume the character of generalizations made coherent
by derivation from causes lying in human nature placed under given
conditions. Clearly then, Ethics, which is a science dealing with the
conduct of associated human beings, regarded under one of its aspects,
has to undergo a like transformation; and, at present undeveloped,
can be considered a developed science only when it has undergone this
transformation.

A preparation in the simpler sciences is pre-supposed. Ethics has a
physical aspect; since it treats of human activities which, in common
with all expenditures or energy, conform to the law of the persistence
of energy: moral principles must conform to physical necessities. It
has a biological aspect; since it concerns certain effects, inner and
outer, individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the
highest type of animal. It has a psychological aspect; for its subject
matter is an aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and
guided by intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect; for these
actions, some of them directly and all of them indirectly, affect
associated beings.

What is the implication? Belonging under one aspect to each of these
sciences--physical, biological, psychological, sociological--it can
find its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths
which are common to all of them. Already we have concluded in a general
way that conduct at large, including the conduct Ethics deals with, is
to be fully understood only as an aspect of evolving life; and now we
are brought to this conclusion in a more special way.


§ 23. Here, then, we have to enter on the consideration of moral
phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding
that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has
wrought out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved--if the
solar system as a whole, the earth as a part of it, the life in general
which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism--if
the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in
common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest--if
one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary
implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest
creatures with which Morality is concerned, also conform.

The preceding volumes have prepared the way for dealing with morals
as thus conceived. Utilizing the conclusions they contain, let
us now observe what data are furnished by these. We will take in
succession--the physical view, the biological view, the psychological
view, and the sociological view.




CHAPTER V.

THE PHYSICAL VIEW.


§ 24. Every moment we pass instantly from men's perceived actions to
the motives implied by them; and so are led to formulate these actions
in mental terms rather than in bodily terms. Thoughts and feelings are
referred to when we speak of any one's deeds with praise or blame; not
those outer manifestations which reveal the thoughts and feelings.
Hence we become oblivious of the truth that conduct as actually
experienced consists of changes recognized by touch, sight and hearing.

This habit of contemplating only the psychical face of conduct, is so
confirmed that an effort is required to contemplate only the physical
face. Undeniable as it is that another's behavior to us is made up of
movements of his body and limbs, of his facial muscles, and of his
vocal apparatus, it yet seems paradoxical to say that these are the
only elements of conduct really known by us, while the elements of
conduct which we exclusively think of as constituting it, are not known
but inferred.

Here, however, ignoring for the time being the inferred elements in
conduct, we have to deal with the perceived elements--we have to
observe its traits considered as a set of combined motions. Taking
the evolution point of view, and remembering that while an aggregate
evolves, not only the matter composing it, but also the motion of that
matter, passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite
coherent heterogeneity, we have now to ask whether conduct as it rises
to its higher forms, displays in increasing degrees these characters;
and whether it does not display them in the greatest degree when it
reaches that highest form which we call moral.


§ 25. It will be convenient to deal first with the trait of increasing
coherence. The conduct of lowly-organized creatures is broadly
contrasted with the conduct of highly-organized creatures in having
its successive portions feebly connected. The random movements which
animalcule makes have severally no reference to movements made a
moment before; nor do they affect in specific ways the movements made
immediately after. To-day's wanderings of a fish in search of food,
though perhaps showing by their adjustments to catching different
kinds of prey at different hours, a slightly-determined order, are
unrelated to the wanderings of yesterday and to-morrow. But such more
developed creatures as birds, show us in the building of nests, the
sitting on eggs, the rearing of chicks, and the aiding of them after
they fly, sets of motions which form a dependent series, extending over
a considerable period. And on observing the complexity of the acts
performed in fetching and fixing the fibres of the nest or in catching
and bringing to the young each portion of food, we discover in the
combined motions, lateral cohesion as well as longitudinal cohesion.

Man, even in his lowest state, displays in his conduct far more
coherent combinations of motions. By the elaborate manipulations gone
through in making weapons that are to serve for the chase next year,
or in building canoes and wigwams for permanent uses--by acts of
aggression and defense which are connected with injuries long since
received or committed, the savage exhibits an aggregate of motions
which, in some of its parts, holds together over great periods.
Moreover, if we consider the many movements implied by the transactions
of each day, in the wood, on the water, in the camp, in the family, we
see that this coherent aggregate of movements is composed of many minor
aggregates that are severally coherent within themselves and with one
another.

In civilized man this trait of developed conduct becomes more
conspicuous still. Be his business what it may, its processes involve
relatively numerous dependent motions; and day by day it is so carried
on as to show connections between present motions and motions long gone
by, as well as motions anticipated in the distant future. Besides the
many doings, related to one another, which the farmer goes through in
looking after his cattle, directing his laborers, keeping an eye on his
dairy, buying his implements, selling his produce, etc., the business
of getting his lease involves numerous combined movements on which the
movements of subsequent years depend; and in manuring his fields with a
view to larger returns, or putting down drains with the like motive, he
is performing acts which are parts of a coherent combination relatively
extensive. That the like holds of the shopkeeper, manufacturer,
banker, is manifest; and this increased coherence of conduct among the
civilized will strike us even more when we remember how its parts
are often continued in a connected arrangement through life, for the
purpose of making a fortune, founding a family, gaining a seat in
Parliament.

Now mark that a greater coherence among its component motions broadly
distinguishes the conduct we call moral from the conduct we call
immoral. The application of the word dissolute to the last, and of the
word self-restrained to the first, implies this--implies that conduct
of the lower kind, constituted of disorderly acts, has its parts
relatively loose in their relations with one another; while conduct
of the higher kind, habitually following a fixed order, so gains a
characteristic unity and coherence. In proportion as the conduct is
what we call moral, it exhibits comparatively settled connections
between antecedents and consequents; for the doing right implies that
under given conditions the combined motions constituting conduct
will follow in a way that can be specified. Contrariwise, in the
conduct of one whose principles are not high, the sequences of motions
are doubtful. He may pay the money or he may not; he may keep his
appointment or he may fail; he may tell the truth or he may lie. The
words trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, as used to characterize
the two respectively, sufficiently imply that the actions of the one
can be foreknown while those of the other cannot; and this implies that
the successive movements composing the one bear more constant relations
to one another than do those composing the other--are more coherent.


§ 26. Indefiniteness accompanies incoherence in conduct that is little
evolved; and throughout the ascending stages of evolving conduct there
is an increasingly definite co-ordination of the motions constituting
it.

Such changes of form as the rudest protozoa show us, are utterly
vague--admit of no precise description; and though in higher kinds the
movements of the parts are more definable, yet the movement of the
whole in respect of direction is indeterminate: there is no adjustment
of it to this or the other point in space. In such coelenterate animals
as polypes we see the parts moving in ways which lack precision; and in
one of the locomotive forms, as a medusa, the course taken, otherwise
at random, can be described only as one which carries it toward the
light, where degrees of light and darkness are present. Among annulose
creatures the contrast between the track of a worm, turning this way or
that at hazard, and the definite course taken by a bee in its flight
from flower to flower or back to the hive, shows us the same thing;
the bee's acts in building cells and feeding larvæ further exhibiting
precision in the simultaneous movements as well as in the successive
movements. Though the motions made by a fish in pursuing its prey have
considerable definiteness, yet they are of a simple kind, and are
in this respect contrasted with the many definite motions of body,
head, and limbs gone through by a carnivorous mammal in the course of
waylaying, running down, and seizing a herbivore; and further, the fish
shows us none of those definitely adjusted sets of motions which in the
mammal subserve the rearing of young.

Much greater definiteness, if not in the combined movements forming
single acts, still in the adjustments of many combined acts to various
purposes, characterizes human conduct, even in its lowest stages. In
making and using weapons and in the maneuverings of savage warfare,
numerous movements, all precise in their adaptations to proximate ends,
are arranged for the achievement of remote ends, with a precision not
paralleled among lower creatures. The lives of civilized men exhibit
this trait far more conspicuously. Each industrial art exemplifies
the effects of movements which are severally definite; and which are
definitely arranged in simultaneous and successive order. Business
transactions of every kind are characterized by exact relations between
the sets of motions constituting acts, and the purposes fulfilled,
in time, place, and quantity. Further, the daily routine of each
person shows us in its periods and amounts of activity, of rest, of
relaxation, a measured arrangement which is not shown us by the doings
of the wandering savage, who has no fixed times for hunting, sleeping,
feeding, or any one kind of action.

Moral conduct differs from immoral conduct in the same manner and in a
like degree. The conscientious man is exact in all his transactions.
He supplies a precise weight for a specified sum; he gives a definite
quality in fulfillment of understanding; he pays the full amount he
bargained to do. In times as well as in quantities, his acts answer
completely to anticipations. If he has made a business contract he
is to the day; if an appointment he is to the minute. Similarly in
respect of truth: his statements correspond accurately with the facts.
It is thus too in his family life. He maintains marital relations that
are definite in contrast with the relations that result from breach
of the marriage contract; and as a father, fitting his behavior with
care to the nature of each child and to the occasion; he avoids the
too much and the too little of praise or blame, reward or penalty.
Nor is it otherwise in his miscellaneous acts. To say that he deals
equitably with those he employs, whether they behave well or ill, is
to say that he adjusts his acts to their deserts; and to say that he
is judicious in his charities, is to say that he portions out his aid
with discrimination instead of distributing it indiscriminately to
good and bad, as do those who have no adequate sense of their social
responsibilities.

That progress toward rectitude of conduct is progress toward
duly-proportioned conduct, and that duly-proportioned conduct is
relatively definite, we may see from another point of view. One of
the traits of conduct we call immoral, is excess; while moderation
habitually characterizes moral conduct. Now excesses imply extreme
divergences of actions from some medium, while maintenance of the
medium is implied by moderation; whence it follows that actions of the
last kind can be defined more nearly than those of the first. Clearly
conduct which, being unrestrained, runs into great and incalculable
oscillations, therein differs from restrained conduct of which, by
implication, the oscillations fall within narrower limits. And falling
within narrower limits necessitates relative definiteness of movements.


§ 27. That throughout the ascending forms of life, along with
increasing heterogeneity of structure and function, there goes
increasing heterogeneity of conduct--increasing diversity in the sets
of external motions and combined sets of such motions--needs not be
shown in detail. Nor need it be shown that becoming relatively great
in the motions constituting the conduct of the uncivilized man, this
heterogeneity has become still greater in those which the civilized man
goes through. We may pass at once to that further degree of the like
contrast which we see on ascending from the conduct of the immoral to
that of the moral.

Instead of recognizing this contrast, most readers will be inclined to
identify a moral life with a life little varied in its activities. But
here we come upon a defect in the current conception of morality. This
comparative uniformity in the aggregate of motions, which goes along
with morality as commonly conceived, is not only not moral but is the
reverse of moral. The better a man fulfills every requirement of life,
alike as regards his own body and mind, as regards the bodies and minds
of those dependent on him, and as regards the bodies and minds of his
fellow-citizens, the more varied do his activities become. The more
fully he does all these things, the more heterogeneous must be his
movements.

One who satisfies personal needs only, goes through other things equal,
less multiform processes than one who also administers to the needs
of wife and children. Supposing there are no other differences, the
addition of family relations necessarily renders the actions of the
man who fulfills the duties of husband and parent, more heterogeneous
than those of the man who has no such duties to fulfill, or, having
them, does not fulfill them; and to say that his actions are more
heterogeneous is to say that there is a greater heterogeneity in
the combined motions he goes through. The like holds of social
obligations. These, in proportion as a citizen duly performs them,
complicate his movements considerably. If he is helpful to inferiors
dependent on him, if he takes a part in political agitation, if he aids
in diffusing knowledge, he, in each of these ways, adds to his kinds of
activity--makes his sets of movements more multiform; so differing from
the man who is the slave of one desire or group of desires.

Though it is unusual to consider as having a moral aspect, those
activities which culture involves, yet to the few who hold that due
exercise of all the higher faculties, intellectual and æsthetic,
must be included in the conception of complete life, here identified
with the ideally moral life, it will be manifest that a further
heterogeneity is implied by them. For each of such activities,
constituted by that play of these faculties which is eventually
added to their life-subserving uses, adds to the multiformity of the
aggregated motions.

Briefly, then, if the conduct is the best possible on every occasion,
it follows that as the occasions are endlessly varied the acts will
be endlessly varied to suit--the heterogeneity in the combinations of
motions will be extreme.


§ 28. Evolution in conduct considered under its moral aspect, is, like
all other evolution, toward equilibrium. I do not mean that it is
toward the equilibrium reached at death, though this is, of course, the
final state which the evolution of the highest man has in common with
all lower evolution; but I mean that it is toward a moving equilibrium.

We have seen that maintaining life, expressed in physical terms, is
maintaining a balanced combination of internal actions in face of
external forces tending to overthrow it; and we have seen that advance
toward a higher life, has been an acquirement of ability to maintain
the balance for a longer period, by the successive additions of
organic appliances which by their actions counteract, more and more
fully, the disturbing forces. Here, then, we are led to the conclusion
that the life called moral is one in which this maintenance of the
moving equilibrium reaches completeness, or approaches most nearly to
completeness.

This truth is clearly disclosed on observing how those physiological
rhythms which vaguely show themselves when organization begins, become
more regular, as well as more various in their kinds, as organization
advances. Periodicity is but feebly marked in the actions, inner
and outer, of the rudest types. Where life is low there is passive
dependence on the accidents of the environment; and this entails
great irregularities in the vital processes. The taking in of food by
a polype is at intervals now short, now very long, as circumstances
determine; and the utilization of it is by a slow dispersion of
the absorbed part through the tissues, aided only by the irregular
movements of the creature's body; while, such æration as is effected
is similarly without a trace of rhythm. Much higher up we still find
very imperfect periodicities; as in the inferior molluscs which, though
possessed of vascular systems, have no proper circulation, but merely
a slow movement of the crude blood, now in one direction through the
vessels and then, after a pause, in the opposite direction. Only
with well-developed structures do there come a rhythmical pulse and
a rhythm of the respiratory actions. And then in birds and mammals,
along with great rapidity and regularity in these essential rhythms,
and along with a consequently great vital activity and therefore great
expenditure, comparative regularity in the rhythm of the alimentary
actions is established, as well as in the rhythm of activity and rest;
since the rapid waste to which rapid pulsation and respiration are
instrumental, necessitates tolerably regular supplies of nutriment, as
well as recurring intervals of sleep during which repair may overtake
waste. And from these stages the moving equilibrium characterized
by such interdependent rhythms, is continually made better by the
counteracting of more and more of those actions which tend to perturb
it.

So is it as we ascend from savage to civilized and from the lowest
among the civilized to the highest. The rhythm of external actions
required to maintain the rhythm of internal actions becomes at once
more complicated and more complete, making them into a better moving
equilibrium. The irregularities which their conditions of existence
entail on primitive men, continually cause wide deviations from the
mean state of the moving equilibrium--wide oscillations; which imply
imperfection of it for the time being, and bring about its premature
overthrow. In such civilized men as we call ill conducted, frequent
perturbations of the moving equilibrium are caused by those excesses
characterizing a career in which the periodicities are much broken; and
a common result is that the rhythm of the internal actions being often
deranged, the moving equilibrium, rendered by so much imperfect, is
generally shortened in duration. While one in whom the internal rhythms
are best maintained is one by whom the external actions required to
fulfill all needs and duties, severally performed on the recurring
occasions, conduce to a moving equilibrium that is at once involved and
prolonged.

Of course the implication is that the man who thus reaches the limit
of evolution, exists in a society congruous with his nature, is a man
among men similarly constituted, who are severally in harmony with that
social environment which they have formed. This is, indeed, the only
possibility. For the production of the highest type of man can go on
only _pari passu_ with the production of the highest type of society.
The implied conditions are those before described as accompanying the
most evolved conduct--conditions under which each can fulfill all his
needs and rear the due number of progeny, not only without hindering
others from doing the like, but while aiding them in doing the like.
And evidently, considered under its physical aspect, the conduct of the
individual so constituted, and associated with like individuals, is one
in which all the actions, that is the combined motions of all kinds,
have become such as duly to meet every daily process, every ordinary
occurrence, and every contingency in his environment. Complete life in
a complete society is but another name for complete equilibrium between
the co-ordinated activities of each social unit and those of the
aggregate of units.


§ 29. Even to readers of preceding volumes, and still more to other
readers, there will seem a strangeness, or even an absurdity, in this
presentation of moral conduct in physical terms. It has been needful
to make it, however. If that re-distribution of matter and motion
constituting evolution goes on in all aggregates, its laws must be
fulfilled in the most developed being as in every other thing; and his
actions, when decomposed into motions, must exemplify its laws. This
we find that they do. There is an entire correspondence between moral
evolution and evolution as physically defined.

Conduct, as actually known to us in perception, and not as interpreted
into the accompanying feelings and ideas, consists of combined motions.
On ascending through the various grades of animate creatures, we
find these combined motions characterized by increasing coherence,
increasing definiteness considered singly and in their co-ordinated
groups, and increasing heterogeneity; and in advancing from lower to
higher types of man, as well as in advancing from the less moral to
the more moral type of man, these traits of evolving conduct become
more marked still. Further, we see that the increasing coherence,
definiteness, and heterogeneity, of the combined motions, are
instrumental to the better maintenance of a moving equilibrium. Where
the evolution is small this is very imperfect and soon cut short;
with advancing evolution, bringing greater power and intelligence, it
becomes more steady and longer continued in face of adverse actions; in
the human race at large it is comparatively regular and enduring; and
its regularity and enduringness are greatest in the highest.




CHAPTER VI.

THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW.


§ 30. The truth that the ideally moral man is one in whom the moving
equilibrium is perfect, or approaches nearest to perfection, becomes,
when translated into physiological language, the truth that he is one
in whom the functions of all kinds are duly fulfilled. Each function
has some relation, direct or indirect, to the needs of life: the fact
of its existence as a result of evolution, being itself a proof that it
has been entailed, immediately or remotely, by the adjustment of inner
actions to outer actions. Consequently, non-fulfillment of it in normal
proportion is non-fulfillment of a requisite to complete life. If there
is defective discharge of the function, the organism experiences some
detrimental result caused by the inadequacy. If the discharge is in
excess, there is entailed a reaction upon the other functions, which in
some way diminishes their efficiencies.

It is true that during full vigor, while the momentum of the organic
actions is great, the disorder caused by moderate excess or defect of
any one function, soon disappears--the balance is re-established. But
it is none the less true that always some disorder results from excess
or defect, that it influences every function, bodily and mental, and
that it constitutes a lowering of the life for the time being.

Beyond the temporary falling short of complete life implied by
undue or inadequate discharge of a function there is entailed, as
an ultimate result, decreased length of life. If some function is
habitually performed in excess of the requirement, or in defect of
the requirement; and if, as a consequence, there is an often repeated
perturbation of the functions at large, there results some chronic
derangement in the balance of the functions. Necessarily reacting on
the structures, and registering in them its accumulated effects, this
derangement works a general deterioration; and when the vital energies
begin to decline, the moving equilibrium, further from perfection than
it would else have been, is sooner overthrown: death is more or less
premature.

Hence the moral man is one whose functions--many and varied in their
kinds, as we have seen--are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted to
the conditions of existence.


§ 31. Strange as the conclusion looks, it is nevertheless a conclusion
to be here drawn, that the performance of every function is, in a
sense, a moral obligation.

It is usually thought that morality requires us only to restrain such
vital activities as, in our present state, are often pushed to excess,
or such as conflict with average welfare, special or general; but
it also requires us to carry on these vital activities up to their
normal limits. All the animal functions, in common with all the higher
functions, have, as thus understood, their imperativeness. While
recognizing the fact that in our state of transition, characterized
by very imperfect adaptation of constitution of conditions, moral
obligations of supreme kinds often necessitate conduct which is
physically injurious; we must also recognize the fact that, considered
apart from other effects, it is immoral so to treat the body as in any
way to diminish the fullness or vigor of its vitality.

Hence results one test of actions. There may in every case be put the
questions--Does the action tend to maintenance of complete life for
the time being? and does it tend to prolongation of life to its full
extent? To answer yes or no to either of these questions, is implicitly
to class the action as right or wrong in respect of its immediate
bearings, whatever it may be in respect of its remote bearings.

The seeming paradoxicalness of this statement results from the
tendency, so difficult of avoidance, to judge a conclusion which
presupposes an ideal humanity, by its applicability to humanity as
now existing. The foregoing conclusion refers to that highest conduct
in which, as we have seen, the evolution of conduct terminates--that
conduct in which the making of all adjustments of acts to ends
subserving complete individual life, together with all those subserving
maintenance of offspring and preparation of them for maturity, not only
consist with the making of like adjustments by others, but furthers
it. And this conception of conduct in its ultimate form implies
the conception of a nature having such conduct for its spontaneous
outcome--the product of its normal activities. So understanding the
matter, it becomes manifest that under such conditions any falling
short of function, as well as any excess of function, implies deviation
from the best conduct or from perfectly moral conduct.


§ 32. Thus far in treating of conduct from the biological point
of view, we have considered its constituent actions under their
physiological aspects only; leaving out of sight their psychological
aspects. We have recognized the bodily changes and have ignored the
accompanying mental changes. And at first sight it seems needful for
us here to do this; since taking account of states of consciousness
apparently implies an inclusion of the psychological view in the
biological view.

This is not so however. As was pointed out in the _Principles of
Psychology_, §§ 52, 53, we enter upon psychology proper only when
we begin to treat of mental states and their relations considered
as referring to external agents and their relations. While we
concern ourselves exclusively with modes of mind as correlatives of
nervous changes, we are treating of what was there distinguished as
æstho-physiology. We pass to psychology only when we consider the
correspondence between the connections among subjective states and the
connections among objective actions. Here, then, without transgressing
the limits of our immediate topic, we may deal with feelings and
functions in their mutual dependencies.

We cannot omit doing this; because the psychical changes which
accompany many of the physical changes in the organism are biological
factors in two ways. Those feelings, classed as sensations, which,
directly initiated in the bodily framework, go along with certain
states of the vital organs and more conspicuously with certain states
of the external organs, now serve mainly as guides to the performance
of functions, but partly as stimuli, and now serve mainly as stimuli,
but in a smaller degree as guides. Visual sensations which, as
co-ordinated, enable us to direct our movements, also, if vivid, raise
the rate of respiration; while sensations of cold and heat, greatly
depressing or raising the vital actions, serve also for purposes of
discrimination. So, too, the feelings classed as emotions, which are
not localizable in the bodily framework, act in more general ways,
alike as guides and stimuli--having influences over the performance
of functions more potent even than have most sensations. Fear, at the
same time that it urges flight and evolves the forces spent in it,
also affects the heart and the alimentary canal; while joy, prompting
persistence in the actions bringing it, simultaneously exalts the
visceral processes.

Hence, in treating of conduct under its biological aspect, we are
compelled to consider that interaction of feelings and functions which
is essential to animal life in all its more developed forms.


§ 33. In the _Principles of Psychology_, § 124, it was shown that
necessarily, throughout the animate world at large, "pains are the
correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are
the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare;" since "it is
an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of Evolution, that races
of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other
conditions." The argument was as follows:

  If we substitute for the word Pleasure the equivalent phrase--a
  feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there,
  and if we substitute for the word Pain the equivalent phrase--a
  feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out;
  we see at once that if the states of consciousness which a creature
  endeavors to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and
  if the states of consciousness which it endeavors to expel are the
  correlatives of beneficial actions, it must quickly disappear through
  persistence in the injurious, and avoidance of the beneficial. In
  other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which,
  on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with
  activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable
  and habitually avoided feelings went along with activities directly
  or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been,
  other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals
  among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were
  the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.

Fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in
living things, even before consciousness arises; and after the rise
of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than
to become better established. At the very outset, life is maintained
by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts
which impede it; and whenever sentiency make its appearance as an
accompaniment, its forms must be such that in the one case the produced
feeling is of a kind that will be sought--pleasure, and in the other
case is of a kind that will be shunned--pain. Observe the necessity of
these relations as exhibited in the concrete.

A plant which envelops a buried bone with a plexus of rootlets, or
a potato which directs its blanched shoots toward a grating through
which light comes into the cellar, shows us that the changes which
outer agents themselves set up in its tissues are changes which aid the
utilization of these agents. If we ask what would happen if a plant's
roots grew not toward the place where there was moisture, but away from
it, or if its leaves, enabled by light to assimilate, nevertheless
bent themselves toward the darkness, we see that death would result
in the absence of the existing adjustments. This general relation is
still better shown in an insectivorous plant, such as the _Dionoea
muscipula_, which keeps its trap closed round animal matter, but not
round other matter. Here it is manifest that the stimulus arising from
the first part of the absorbed substance itself sets up those actions
by which the mass of the substance is utilized for the plant's benefit.

When we pass from vegetal organisms to unconscious animal organisms, we
see a like connection between proclivity and advantage. On observing
how the tentacles of a polype attach themselves to, and begin to close
round, a living creature, or some animal substance, while they are
indifferent to the touch of other substance, we are similarly shown
that diffusion of some of the nutritive juices into the tentacles,
which is an incipient assimilation, causes the motions effecting
prehension. And it is obvious that life would cease were these
relations reversed.

Nor is it otherwise with this fundamental connection between contact
with food and taking in of food, among conscious creatures, up to the
very highest. Tasting a substance implies the passage of its molecules
through the mucous membrane of the tongue and palate; and this
absorption, when it occurs with a substance serving for food, is but
a commencement of the absorption carried on throughout the alimentary
canal. Moreover, the sensation accompanying this absorption, when it
is of the kind produced by food, initiates at the place where it is
strongest, in front of the pharynx, an automatic act of swallowing, in
a manner rudely analogous to that in which the stimulus of absorption
in a polype's tentacles initiates prehension.

If from these processes and relations that imply contact between a
creature's surface and the substance it takes in, we turn to those set
up by diffused particles of the substance, constituting to conscious
creatures its odor, we meet a kindred general truth. Just as, after
contact, some molecules of a mass of food are absorbed by the part
touched, and excite the act of prehension, so are absorbed such of its
molecules as, spreading through the water, reach the organism; and,
being absorbed by it, excite those actions by which contact with the
mass is effected. If the physical stimulation caused by the dispersed
particles is not accompanied by consciousness, still the motor changes
set up must conduce to survival of the organism, if they are such as
end in contact; and there must be relative innutrition and mortality
of organisms in which the produced contractions do not bring about
this result. Nor can it be questioned that whenever and wherever the
physical stimulation has a concomitant sentiency, this must be such as
consists with, and conduces to, movement toward the nutritive matter:
it must be not a repulsive but an attractive sentiency. And this which
holds with the lowest consciousness, must hold throughout; as we see it
do in all such superior creatures as are drawn to their food by odor.

Besides those movements which cause locomotion those which effect
seizure must no less certainly become thus adjusted. The molecular
changes caused by absorption of nutritive matter from organic substance
in contact, or from adjacent organic substance, initiate motions
which are indefinite where the organization is low, and which become
more definite with the advance of organization. At the outset, while
the undifferentiated protoplasm is everywhere absorbent and everywhere
contractile, the changes of form initiated by the physical stimulation
of adjacent nutritive matter are vague, and ineffectually adapted
to utilization of it; but gradually, along with the specialization
into parts that are contractile and parts that are absorbent, these
motions become better adapted; for necessarily individuals in which
they are least adapted disappear faster than those in which they are
most adapted. Recognizing this necessity we have here especially to
recognize a further necessity. The relation between these stimulations
and adjusted contractions must be such that increase of the one causes
increase of the other; since the directions of the discharges being
once established, greater stimulation causes greater contraction, and
the greater contraction causing closer contact with the stimulating
agent, causes increase of stimulus and is thereby itself further
increased. And now we reach the corollary which more particularly
concerns us. Clearly as fast as an accompanying sentiency arises, this
cannot be one that is disagreeable, prompting desistance, but must be
one that is agreeable, prompting persistence. The pleasurable sensation
must be itself the stimulus to the contraction by which the pleasurable
sensation is maintained and increased; or must be so bound up with
the stimulus that the two increase together. And this relation which
we see is directly established in the case of a fundamental function,
must be indirectly established with all other functions; since
non-establishment of it in any particular case implies, in so far,
unfitness to the conditions of existence.

In two ways then, it is demonstrable that there exists a primordial
connection between pleasure-giving acts and continuance or increase
of life, and, by implication, between pain-giving acts and decrease
or loss of life. On the one hand, setting out with the lowest living
things, we see that the beneficial act and the act which there is
a tendency to perform, are originally two sides of the same; and
cannot be disconnected without fatal results. On the other hand, if
we contemplate developed creatures as now existing, we see that each
individual and species is from day to day kept alive by pursuit of the
agreeable and avoidance of the disagreeable.

Thus approaching the facts from a different side, analysis brings us
down to another face of that ultimate truth disclosed by analysis in a
preceding chapter. We found it was no more possible to frame ethical
conceptions from which the consciousness of pleasure, of some kind,
at some time, to some being, is absent, than it is possible to frame
the conception of an object from which the consciousness of space is
absent. And now we see that this necessity of thought originates in the
very nature of sentient existence. Sentient existence can evolve only
on condition that pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts.


§ 34. Notwithstanding explanations already made, the naked enunciation
of this as an ultimate truth, underlying all estimations of right and
wrong, will in many, if not in most, cause astonishment. Having in
view certain beneficial results that are preceded by disagreeable
states of consciousness, such as those commonly accompanying labor; and
having in view the injurious results that follow the receipt of certain
gratifications, such as those which excess in drinking produces; the
majority tacitly or avowedly believe that the bearing of pains is on
the whole beneficial, and that the receipt of pleasures is on the whole
detrimental. The exceptions so fill their minds as to exclude the rule.

When asked, they are obliged to admit that the pains accompanying
wounds, bruises, sprains, are the concomitants of evils, alike to
the sufferer and to those around him; and that the anticipations
of such pains serve as deterrents from careless or dangerous acts.
They cannot deny that the tortures of burning or scalding, and the
miseries which intense cold, starvation, and thirst produce, are
indissolubly connected with permanent or temporary mischiefs, tending
to incapacitate one who bears them for doing things that should be
done, either for his own welfare or the welfare of others. The agony of
incipient suffocation they are compelled to recognize as a safeguard
to life, and must allow that avoidance of it is conducive to all that
life can bring or achieve. Nor will they refuse to own that one who is
chained in a cold, damp dungeon, in darkness and silence, is injured in
health and efficiency, alike by the positive pains thus inflicted on
him and by the accompanying negative pains due to absence of light, of
freedom, of companionship.

Conversely, they do not doubt that notwithstanding occasional excesses
the pleasure which accompanies the taking of food goes along with
physical benefit; and that the benefit is the greater the keener the
satisfaction of appetite. They have no choice but to acknowledge that
the instincts and sentiments which so overpoweringly prompt marriage,
and those which find their gratification in the fostering of offspring,
work out an immense surplus of benefit after deducting all evils. Nor
dare they question that the pleasure taken in accumulating property,
leaves a large balance of advantage, private and public, after making
all drawbacks. Yet many and conspicuous as are the cases in which
pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, serve as incentives to
proper acts and deterrents from improper acts, these pass unnoticed;
and notice is taken only of those cases in which men are directly or
indirectly misled by them. The well-working in essential matters is
ignored; and the ill-working in unessential matters is alone recognized.

Is it replied that the more intense pains and pleasures, which have
immediate reference to bodily needs, guide us rightly; while the weaker
pains and pleasures, not immediately connected with the maintenance
of life, guide us wrongly? Then the implication is that the system of
guidance by pleasures and pains, which has answered with all types
of creatures below the human, fails with the human. Or rather, the
admission being that with mankind it succeeds in so far as fulfillment
of certain imperative wants goes, it fails in respect of wants that are
not imperative. Those who think this are required, in the first place,
to show us how the line is to be drawn between the two; and then to
show us why the system which succeeds in the lower will not succeed in
the higher.


§ 35. Doubtless, however, after all that has been said, there will
be raised afresh the same difficulty--there will be instanced the
mischievous pleasures and the beneficent pains. The drunkard, the
gambler, the thief, who severally pursue gratifications, will be
named in proof that the pursuit of gratifications misleads; while the
self-sacrificing relative, the worker who perseveres through weariness,
the honest man who stints himself to pay his way, will be named in
proof that disagreeable modes of consciousness accompany acts that are
really beneficial. But after recalling the fact pointed out in § 20,
that this objection does not tell against guidance by pleasures and
pains at large, since it merely implies that special and proximate
pleasures and pains must be disregarded out of consideration for
remote and diffused pleasures and pains; and, after admitting that in
mankind, as at present constituted, guidance by proximate pleasures and
pains fails throughout a wide range of cases; I go on to set forth the
interpretation Biology gives of these anomalies, as being not necessary
and permanent, but incidental and temporary.

Already, while showing that among inferior creatures, pleasures and
pains have all along guided the conduct by which life has been evolved
and maintained, I have pointed out that since the conditions of
existence for each species have been occasionally changing, there have
been occasionally arising partial misadjustments of the feelings to
the requirements, necessitating readjustments. This general cause of
derangement, operating on all sentient beings, has been operating on
human beings in a manner unusually decided, persistent, and involved.
It needs but to contrast the mode of life followed by primitive men,
wandering in the forests and living on wild food, with the mode of
life followed by rustics, artisans, traders, and professional men in a
civilized community, to see that the constitution, bodily and mental,
well-adjusted to the one, is ill-adjusted to the other. It needs but
to observe the emotions kept awake in each savage tribe, chronically
hostile to neighboring tribes, and then to observe the emotions which
peaceful production and exchange bring into play, to see that the
two are not only unlike, but opposed. And it needs but to note how,
during social evolution, the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the
militant activities carried on by coercive co-operation have been at
variance with the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the industrial
activities, carried on by voluntary co-operation, to see that there has
ever been within each society, and still continues, a conflict between
the two moral natures adjusted to these two unlike modes of life.
Manifestly, then, this readjustment of constitution to conditions,
involving readjustment of pleasures and pains for guidance, which all
creatures from time to time undergo, has been in the human race during
civilization especially difficult, not only because of the greatness
of the change from small nomadic groups to vast settled societies, and
from predatory habits to peaceful habits, but also because the old life
of enmity between societies has been maintained along with the new life
of amity within each society. While there co-exist two ways of life
so radically opposed as the militant and the industrial, human nature
cannot become properly adapted to either.

That hence results such failure of guidance by pleasures and pains as
is daily exhibited, we discover on observing in what parts of conduct
the failure is most conspicuous. As above shown, the pleasurable and
painful sensations are fairly well adjusted to the peremptory physical
requirements: the benefits of conforming to the sensations which prompt
us in respect of nutrition, respiration, maintenance of temperature,
etc., immensely exceed the incidental evils, and such misadjustments
as occur may be ascribed to the change from the outdoor life of the
primitive man to the indoor life which the civilized man is often
compelled to lead. It is the emotional pleasures and pains which are
in so considerable a degree out of adjustment to the needs of life as
carried on in society, and it is of these that the readjustment is made
in the way above shown, so tardy because so difficult.

From the biological point of view, then, we see that the connections
between pleasure and beneficial action and between pain and detrimental
action, which arose when sentient existence began, and have continued
among animate creatures up to man, are generally displayed in him also
throughout the lower and more completely organized part of his nature;
and must be more and more fully displayed throughout the higher part of
his nature, as fast as his adaptation to the conditions of social life
increases.


§ 36. Biology has a further judgment to pass on the relations of
pleasures and pains to welfare. Beyond the connections between acts
beneficial to the organism and the pleasures accompanying performance
of them, and between acts detrimental to the organism and the pains
causing desistance from them, there are connections between pleasure
in general and physiological exaltation, and between pain in general
and physiological depression. Every pleasure increases vitality; every
pain decreases vitality. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every
pain lowers the tide of life. Let us consider, first, the pains.

By the general mischiefs that result from submission to pains, I do
not mean those arising from the diffused effects of local organic
lesions, such as follow an aneurism caused by intense effort spite of
protesting sensations, or such as follow the varicose veins brought on
by continued disregard of fatigue in the legs, or such as follow the
atrophy set up in muscles that are persistently exerted when extremely
weary; but I mean the general mischiefs caused by that constitutional
disturbance which pain forthwith sets up. These are conspicuous when
the pains are acute, whether they be sensational or emotional.

Bodily agony long borne produces death by exhaustion. More frequently,
arresting the action of the heart for a time, it causes that temporary
death we call fainting. On other occasions vomiting is a consequence.
And where such manifest derangements do not result, we still, in the
pallor and trembling, trace the general prostration. Beyond the actual
loss of life caused by subjection to intense cold there are depressions
of vitality less marked caused by cold less extreme--temporary
enfeeblement following too long an immersion in icy water; enervation
and pining away consequent on inadequate clothing. Similarly is it with
submission to great heat: we have lassitude reaching occasionally to
exhaustion; we have, in weak persons, fainting, succeeded by temporary
debilitation; and in steaming tropical jungles Europeans contract
fevers which, when not fatal, often entail life-long incapacities.
Consider, again, the evils that follow violent exertion continued in
spite of painful feelings--now a fatigue which destroys appetite or
arrests digestion if food is taken, implying failure of the reparative
processes when they are most needed; and now a prostration of the
heart, here lasting for a time and there, where the transgression has
been repeated day after day, made permanent: reducing the rest of life
to a lower level.

No less conspicuous are the depressing effects of emotional pains.
There are occasional cases of death from grief; and in other cases
the mental suffering which a calamity causes, like bodily suffering,
shows its effects by syncope. Often a piece of bad news is succeeded
by sickness; and continued anxiety will produce loss of appetite,
perpetual indigestion and diminished strength. Excessive fear, whether
aroused by physical or moral danger, will, in like manner, arrest for
a time the processes of nutrition; and, not unfrequently, in pregnant
women brings on miscarriage; while, in less extreme cases, the cold
perspiration and unsteady hands indicate a general lowering of the
vital activities, entailing partial incapacity of body or mind or both.
How greatly emotional pain deranges the visceral actions is shown us by
the fact that incessant worry is not unfrequently followed by jaundice.
And here, indeed, the relation between cause and effect happens to
have been proved by direct experiment. Making such arrangements that
the bile-duct of a dog delivered its product outside the body, Claude
Bernard observed that so long as he petted the dog and kept him in good
spirits, secretion went on at its normal rate; but on speaking angrily,
and for a time so treating him as to produce depression, the flow of
bile was arrested.

Should it be said that evil results of such kinds are proved to occur
only when the pains, bodily or mental, are great, the reply is that
in healthy persons the injurious perturbations caused by small pains,
though not easily traced, are still produced; and that in those whose
vital powers are much reduced by illness, slight physical irritations
and trifling moral annoyances, often cause relapses.

Quite opposite are the constitutional effects of pleasure. It
sometimes, though rarely, happens that in feeble persons intense
pleasure--pleasure that is almost pain--gives a nervous shock that is
mischievous; but it does not do this in those who are undebilitated by
voluntary or enforced submission to actions injurious to the organism.
In the normal order, pleasures, great and small, are stimulants to the
processes by which life is maintained.

Among the sensations may be instanced those produced by bright light.
Sunshine is enlivening in comparison with gloom--even a gleam excites a
wave of pleasure; and experiments have shown that sunshine raises the
rate of respiration: raised respiration being an index of raised vital
activities in general. A warmth that is agreeable in degree favors the
heart's action, and furthers the various functions to which this is
instrumental. Though those who are in full vigor and fitly clothed can
maintain their temperature in winter, and can digest additional food
to make up for the loss of heat, it is otherwise with the feeble; and,
as vigor declines, the beneficence of warmth becomes conspicuous. That
benefits accompany the agreeable sensations produced by fresh air, and
the agreeable sensations that accompany muscular action after due rest,
and the agreeable sensations caused by rest after exertion cannot be
questioned. Receipt of these pleasures conduces to the maintenance of
the body in fit condition for all the purposes of life.

More manifest still are the physiological benefits of emotional
pleasures. Every power, bodily and mental, is increased by "good
spirits," which is our name for a general emotional satisfaction. The
truth that the fundamental vital actions--those of nutrition--are
furthered by laughter-moving conversation, or rather by the pleasurable
feeling causing laughter, is one of old standing; and every dyspeptic
knows that in exhilarating company, a large and varied dinner,
including not very digestible things, may be eaten with impunity,
and, indeed, with benefit, while a small, carefully chosen dinner of
simple things, eaten in solitude, will be followed by indigestion. This
striking effect on the alimentary system is accompanied by effects,
equally certain though less manifest, on the circulation and the
respiration. Again, one who, released from daily labors and anxieties,
receives delights from fine scenery or is enlivened by the novelties he
sees abroad, comes back showing by toned-up face and vivacious manner,
the greater energy with which he is prepared to pursue his avocation.
Invalids especially, on whose narrowed margin of vitality the influence
of conditions is most visible, habitually show the benefits derived
from agreeable states of feeling. A lively social circle, the call of
an old friend, or even removal to a brighter room, will, by the induced
cheerfulness, much improve the physical state. In brief, as every
medical man knows, there is no such tonic as happiness.

These diffused physiological effects of pleasures and pains, which are
joined with the local or special physiological effects, are, indeed,
obviously inevitable. We have seen (_Principles of Psychology_,
§§ 123-125) that while craving, or negative pain, accompanies the
under-activity of an organ, and while positive pain accompanies its
over-activity, pleasure accompanies its normal activity. We have seen
that by evolution no other relations could be established; since,
through all inferior types of creatures, if defect or excess of
function produced no disagreeable sentiency, and medium function no
agreeable sentiency, there would be nothing to insure a proportioned
performance of function. And as it is one of the laws of nervous
action that each stimulus, beyond a direct discharge to the particular
organ acted on, indirectly causes a general discharge throughout the
nervous system (_Prin. of Psy._, §§ 21, 39), it results that the rest
of the organs, all influenced as they are by the nervous system,
participate in the stimulation. So that beyond the aid, more slowly
shown, which the organs yield to one another through the physiological
division of labor, there is the aid, more quickly shown, which mutual
excitation gives. While there is a benefit to be presently felt by the
whole organism from the due performance of each function, there is an
immediate benefit from the exaltation of its functions at large caused
by the accompanying pleasure; and from pains, whether of excess or
defect, there also come these double effects, immediate and remote.


§ 37. Non-recognition of these general truths vitiates moral
speculation at large. From the estimates of right and wrong habitually
framed, these physiological effects wrought on the actor by his
feelings are entirely omitted. It is tacitly assumed that pleasures
and pains have no reactions on the body of the recipient, affecting
his fitness for the duties of life. The only reactions recognized
are those on character; respecting which the current supposition is,
that acceptance of pleasures is detrimental and submission to pains
beneficial. The notion, remotely descended from the ghost-theory of
the savage, that mind and body are independent, has, among its various
implications, this belief that states of consciousness are in no wise
related to bodily states. "You have had your gratification--it is
past; and you are as you were before," says the moralist to one. And
to another he says, "You have borne the suffering--it is over; and
there the matter ends." Both statements are false. Leaving out of view
indirect results, the direct results are that the one has moved a step
away from death and the other has moved a step toward death.

Leaving out of view, I say, the indirect results. It is these indirect
results, here for the moment left out of view, which the moralist has
exclusively in view, being so occupied by them that he ignores the
direct results. The gratification, perhaps purchased at undue cost,
perhaps enjoyed when work should have been done, perhaps snatched
from the rightful claimant, is considered only in relation to remote
injurious effects, and no set-off is made for immediate beneficial
effects. Conversely, from positive and negative pains, borne now in the
pursuit of some future advantage, now in discharge of responsibilities,
now in performing a generous act, the distant good is alone dwelt on
and the proximate evil ignored. Consequences, pleasurable and painful,
experienced by the actor forthwith, are of no importance; and they
become of importance only when anticipated as occurring hereafter to
the actor or to other persons. And further, future evils borne by the
actor are considered of no account if they result from self-denial,
and are emphasized only when they result from self-gratification.
Obviously, estimates so framed are erroneous; and obviously, the
pervading judgments of conduct based on such estimates must be
distorted. Mark the anomalies of opinion produced.

If, as the sequence of a malady contracted in pursuit of illegitimate
gratification, an attack of iritis injures vision, the mischief
is to be counted among those entailed by immoral conduct; but if,
regardless of protesting sensations, the eyes are used in study too
soon after ophthalmia, and there follows blindness for years or for
life, entailing not only personal unhappiness, but a burden on others,
moralists are silent. The broken leg which a drunkard's accident causes
counts among those miseries brought on self and family by intemperance,
which form the ground for reprobating it; but if anxiety to fulfill
duties prompts the continued use of a sprained knee spite of the pain,
and brings on a chronic lameness involving lack of exercise, consequent
ill-health, inefficiency, anxiety, and unhappiness, it is supposed that
ethics has no verdict to give in the matter. A student who is plucked
because he has spent in amusement the time and money that should have
gone in study, is blamed for thus making parents unhappy and preparing
for himself a miserable future; but another who, thinking exclusively
of claims on him, reads night after night with hot or aching head, and,
breaking down, cannot take his degree, but returns home shattered in
health and unable to support himself, is named with pity only, as not
subject to any moral judgment; or rather, the moral judgment passed is
wholly favorable.

Thus recognizing the evils caused by some kinds of conduct only, men
at large, and moralists as exponents of their beliefs, ignore the
suffering and death daily caused around them by disregard of that
guidance which has established itself in the course of evolution. Led
by the tacit assumption common to Pagan stoics and Christian ascetics,
that we are so diabolically organized that pleasures are injurious and
pains beneficial, people on all sides yield examples of lives blasted
by persisting in actions against which their sensations rebel. Here is
one who, drenched to the skin and sitting in a cold wind, pooh-hoohs
his shiverings and gets rheumatic fever, with subsequent heart-disease,
which makes worthless the short life remaining to him. Here is another
who, disregarding painful feelings, works too soon after a debilitating
illness, and establishes disordered health that lasts for the rest of
his days, and makes him useless to himself and others. Now the account
is of a youth who, persisting in gymnastic feats spite of scarcely
bearable straining, bursts a blood-vessel, and, long laid on the shelf,
is permanently damaged; while now it is of a man in middle life who,
pushing muscular effort to painful excess, suddenly brings on hernia.
In this family is a case of aphasia, spreading paralysis and death,
caused by eating too little and doing too much; in that, softening of
the brain has been brought on by ceaseless mental efforts against
which the feelings hourly protested; and in others, less serious brain
affections have been contracted by over-study continued regardless
of discomfort and the cravings for fresh air and exercise.[B] Even
without accumulating special examples, the truth is forced on us by the
visible traits of classes. The careworn man of business too long at
his office, the cadaverous barrister pouring half the night over his
briefs, the feeble factory hands and unhealthy seamstresses passing
long hours in bad air, the anæmic, flat-chested school-girls, bending
over many lessons and forbidden boisterous play, no less than Sheffield
grinders who die of suffocating dust, and peasants crippled with
rheumatism due to exposure, show us the wide spread miseries caused
by persevering in actions repugnant to the sensations and neglecting
actions which the sensations prompt. Nay, the evidence is still more
extensive and conspicuous. What are the puny malformed children, seen
in poverty-stricken districts, but children whose appetites for food
and desires for warmth have not been adequately satisfied? What are
populations stinted in growth and prematurely aged, such as parts of
France show us, but populations injured by work in excess and food in
defect: the one implying positive pain, the other negative pain? What
is the implication of that greater mortality which occurs among people
who are weakened by privations, unless it is that bodily miseries
conduce to fatal illnesses? Or once more, what must we infer from
the frightful amount of disease and death suffered by armies in the
field, fed on scanty and bad provisions, lying on damp ground, exposed
to extremes of heat and cold, inadequately sheltered from rain, and
subject to exhausting efforts; unless it be the terrible mischiefs
caused by continuously subjecting the body to treatment which the
feelings protest against?

It matters not to the argument whether the actions entailing such
effects are voluntary or involuntary. It matters not from the
biological point of view whether the motives prompting them are high or
low. The vital functions accept no apologies on the ground that neglect
of them was unavoidable, or that the reason for neglect was noble. The
direct and indirect sufferings caused by non-conformity to the laws
of life are the same whatever induces the non-conformity; and cannot
be omitted in any rational estimate of conduct. If the purpose of
ethical inquiry is to establish rules of right living; and if the rules
of right living are those of which the total results, individual and
general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness;
then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognize only
the remote results.


§ 38. Here might be urged the necessity for preluding the study of
moral science by the study of biological science. Here might be dwelt
on the error men make in thinking they can understand those special
phenomena of human life with which Ethics deals, while paying little or
no attention to the general phenomena of human life, and while utterly
ignoring the phenomena of life at large. And, doubtless, there would be
truth in the inference that such acquaintance with the world of living
things, as discloses the part which pleasures and pains have played in
organic evolution, would help to rectify these one-sided conceptions of
moralists. It cannot be held, however, that lack of this knowledge is
the sole cause, or the main cause, of their one-sidedness. For facts of
the kind above instanced, which, duly attended to, would prevent such
distortions of moral theory, are facts which it needs no biological
inquiries to learn, but which are daily thrust before the eyes of all.
The truth is, rather, that the general consciousness is so possessed by
sentiments and ideas at variance with the conclusions necessitated by
familiar evidence that the evidence gets no attention. These adverse
sentiments and ideas have several roots.

There is the theological root. As before shown, from the worship of
cannibal ancestors who delighted in witnessing tortures, there resulted
the primitive conception of deities who were propitiated by the bearing
of pains, and, consequently, angered by the receipt of pleasures.
Through the religions of the semi-civilized, in which this conception
of the divine nature remains conspicuous, it has persisted, in
progressively modified forms, down to our own times; and still colors
the beliefs, both of those who adhere to the current creed and of those
who nominally reject it.

There is another root in the primitive and still-surviving militancy.
While social antagonisms continue to generate war, which consists in
endeavors to inflict pain and death while submitting to the risks of
pain and death, and which necessarily involves great privations, it is
needful that physical suffering, whether considered in itself or in
the evils it bequeaths, should be thought little of, and that among
pleasures recognized as most worthy should be those which victory
brings.

Nor does partially developed industrialism fail to furnish a root.
With social evolution, which implies transition from the life of
wandering hunters to the life of settled peoples engaged in labor,
and which therefore entails activities widely unlike those to which
the aboriginal constitution is adapted, there comes an under-exercise
of faculties for which the social state affords no scope, and an
overtaxing of faculties required for the social state; the one implying
denial of certain pleasures and the other submission to certain pains.
Hence, along with that growth of population which makes the struggle
for existence intense, bearing of pains and sacrifice of pleasures is
daily necessitated.

Now always and everywhere, there arises among men a theory conforming
to their practice. The savage nature, originating the conception of a
savage deity, evolves a theory of supernatural control sufficiently
stringent and cruel to influence his conduct. With submission to
despotic government severe enough in its restraints to keep in order
barbarous natures, there grows up a theory of divine right to rule, and
the duty of absolute submission. Where war is made the business of life
by the existence of warlike neighbors, virtues which are required for
war come to be regarded as supreme virtues; while, contrariwise, when
industrialism has grown predominant, the violence and the deception
which warriors glory in come to be held criminal. In like manner,
then, there arises a tolerable adjustment of the actually accepted
(not the nominally accepted) theory of right living, to living as it
is daily carried on. If the life is one that necessitates habitual
denial of pleasures and bearing of pains, there grows up an answering
ethical system under which the receipt of pleasures is tacitly
disapproved and the bearing of pains avowedly approved. The mischiefs
entailed by pleasures in excess are dwelt on, while the benefits which
normal pleasures bring are ignored; and the good results achieved by
submission to pains are fully set forth, while the evils are overlooked.

But while recognizing the desirableness of, and indeed the necessity
for, systems of ethics adapted, like religious systems and political
systems, to their respective times and places, we have here to regard
the first as, like the others, transitional. We must infer that like a
purer creed and a better government, a truer ethics belongs to a more
advanced social state.

Led, _à priori_, to conclude that distortions must exist, we are
enabled to recognize as such the distortions we find: answering in
nature, as these do, to expectation. And there is forced on us the
truth that a scientific morality arises only as fast as the one-sided
conceptions adapted to transitory conditions are developed into
both-sided conceptions. The science of right living has to take account
of all consequences in so far as they affect happiness, personally or
socially, directly or indirectly; and by as much as it ignores any
class of consequences, by so much does it fail to be science.


§ 39. Like the physical view, then, the biological view corresponds
with the view gained by looking at conduct in general from the
standpoint of Evolution.

That which was physically defined as a moving equilibrium, we define
biologically as a balance of functions. The implication of such a
balance is that the several functions, in their kinds, amounts, and
combinations, are adjusted to the several activities which maintain and
constitute complete life; and to be so adjusted is to have reached the
goal toward which the evolution of conduct continually tends.

Passing to the feelings which accompany the performance of functions,
we see that of necessity during the evolution of organic life,
pleasures have become the concomitants of normal amounts of functions,
while pains, positive and negative, have become the concomitants
of excesses and defects of functions. And though in every species
derangements of these relations are often caused by changes of
conditions, they ever re-establish themselves: disappearance of the
species being the alternative.

Mankind, inheriting from creatures of lower kinds, such adjustments
between feelings and functions as concern fundamental bodily
requirements; and daily forced by peremptory feelings to do the things
which maintain life and avoid those which bring immediate death; has
been subject to a change of conditions unusually great and involved.
This has considerably deranged the guidance by sensations, and has
deranged in a

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46129