Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/547

 UTILITARIAN ECONOMICS 533

zero line a given society should be placed. One is the economic test. The old economics doubtless reflected a large amount of truth and was more or less adapted to the time in which it was formulated. That science was almost exclusively based on the consideration of man as an animal, or, at best, as a "covetous animal," i. e., an animal with some idea of the value of prop- erty. The fact that the Malthusian law has proved to hold throughout animal life shows that the man at least about whom Malthus was talking was only an advanced kind of animal. And it seems probable that the modern revolt against the old political economy is due as much to the fact that there has been a change in man himself as to any discovery by recent writers that the older writers were wrong. Certainly the old economics was wholly adapted to a pain economy, or a general state of society in which fear was the principal motive and life, not hap- piness, the principal aim. We may, therefore, infer that such was the state of society in Europe down to the close of the eighteenth century. A fortiori, all antecedent history must belong to a pain economy.

Another test is the ethical code. Almost the only ethics we have is what may properly be called negative. It is based on restraint and condemns nearly all activities that have happiness, and especially pleasure, for their object. It is safe to infer that there is good reason for this. In a pain economy the ethical code must necessarily be negative. It must lay chief emphasis upon those things which must not be done. All but two of the ten commandments are negative in form in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, 1 showing that it was then regarded as dangerous to pursue pleasure for its own sake. For where every energy is taxed to its utmost to maintain existence, any relaxation is unsafe. All must be perpetually on guard, and there must be mg on one's post. Pursuit of pleasure means neglect <>t duty, and the terms pleasure and duty are the later homologues of the primary equivalents, feeling and function. It is the antithesis ccn the creature and the cosm<>x U-t \\vrn the individual

20: 1-17; Deut. 5:7-21.