Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/432

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

The Elements and Evolution of Morality. How can one know his duty in the extraordinary confusion of moral ideas which characterizes our time? Are patriotism, the family, private property, tolerance, to be praised or condemned ? In the presence of these and many other such problems, conscience hesitates and is troubled, and skepticism increases. This uncertainty of practice has its principal cause in the confusion and anarchy which prevail in the realm of speculative morals. There is increasing, and on the whole, commendable, effort to find a scientific basis for morals. There has certainly been some progress : the old theological problem of the nature of absolute good is nearly abandoned ; morality appears as a fact, as a natural fact, which is to be determined, not from a priori conditions, but from a study of origins and development a problem capable of being solved solely by means of experimental method.

But this fact, instead of being taken in its entirety as it is given by experience, has been mutilated and misapplied at pleasure to suit the needs of some gratuitous hypotheses. This is a fault from which the moralists of the sociological school have not escaped, not even Herbert Spencer.

The sociologists declare that morality, a natural fact, is at the same time a social fact. They certainly would be correct if by that they meant only that morality has been built up only through the existence of society, of which it is in some measure a product ; and that moral progress is intimately bound up with social progress (that it conditions social progress, so to speak, as much as social progress conditions the moral progress). But they are far from the truth when they seem to identify morality with sociality, moral progress with progress in social organization. This identification is based upon the general analogy between societies and organisms. As through evolution in the animal series we come to consciousness in the individual, so, according to the analogy, we reach a sort of social consciousness in society. According to the sociologists, morality is only sociality, the product of a social sense, belonging entirely to the sentiment of solidarity ; and moral progress is only the internal or subjective side of the progress in social organization. Individual morality is snuffed out or, at least, entirely sub- ordinated to social morality in which it has its source. Such is the doctrine the sociologists present to us as a true and adequate expression of the facts. I do not wish to take time to point out the danger to practice and to education in identifying the moral with the vague notion of solidarity. But is it a fact that individual morals have their principle and source in social morals? Does not the history of mankind show, on the contrary, that the desire of personal perfection may be entirely independent of all incentive from the social order? Does it not teach that progress in individual morals has often been in advance of, and pre- pared the way for, progress in social morals, as is seen in the typical case of Buddhism and later in Stoicism preceded by ascetic practices bridling selfish desires, and cultivating the principles of charity and universal benevolence? Is the sociologists' theory true to experience or is it as like to a metaphysical entity as is the pretended social sense ? For my part I see in the unquestionable develop- ment of solidarity only a double progress in the order of sensibility and of intelli- gence which amounts to a more and more comprehensive sympathy, and a more and more exact conception of social relations. But, further, the biological analogy on which the sociologists' theory of morals rests has been shown not to hold. Sociology finds before it a multitude of facts of a special order, having their com- mon condition in the existence of man in society, and that can be called social facts ; such are economic, political, scientific, aesthetic, religious, and moral facts. These facts, differing widely, sociology should observe in their relations, should

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