Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/515

497 weak infants to death because the practice was indispensable to the permanence and well-being of their military type of society. For the same reason savage tribes practice female infanticide today, and lying is not a vice in military societies of the more primitive type. We in Christendom make efforts to preserve and protect the lives of the weak, the incurably ailing, the mentally unsound, because our social type is the result of a compromise between the 'struggle for existence' type and the type engendered by primitive Christianity as an ethics of universal sympathy. Nietzsche would tell us that the latter type was originated and enforced by the many weak to keep the stronger few in subjection.

It is evident that our current notions of justice, honesty, personal integrity, chastity in and out of the marriage relation, etc., have reference to the well-being of a type of social organization into whose composition there have entered in its long evolution many diverging strains of biological impulse, of persisting social types inherited from Greece, Rome, Judæa, primitive Germanic society, etc. And the evolution of our type of morality has been modified from time to time by physical environment, and above all by the alteration of economic and intellectual conditions. Leslie Stephen somewhere says that if lying were beneficial to society then lying would be a virtue. It was a virtue in militant societies of more primitive type. From this standpoint one may explain stealing, scalp-taking, infanticide, and sexual promiscuity, under certain social conditions as virtues. It is only the full extension of this method when some writers maintain that the one remaining task for a scientific ethics is to trace the genesis of ethical feelings and ideas in the individual, and to interpret their values in terms of the actual social structure in its historical evolution and its present functioning. And, in the execution of this work, which we may call the 'sociology of ethics,' of course the social psychological concepts of 'imitation,' 'suggestion,' etc., will play a most important role. The awakening of the individual mind to a consciousness of obligation can be explained psycho-genetically in terms of suggestion and imitation working