Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/44

32 of native egoism. If we wished to go back still further we might attribute the moral sense to a Creator, the egoistic nature to a Fall or to bad institutions. Or if we had taken Hume and Adam Smith, Kant and Utilitarianism to heart we might have sought to ground moral sense in sympathy, conscience in practical reason, and altruism in association and been satisfied therewith. Yet this has not been the case. Partly because of the general influence of Darwin in replacing mere description by causal analysis, partly by a far more intelligent account of what savage conduct means to the savage, partly by a better psychology we have abandoned largely the old categories as inept. Although we are still largely in the descriptive stage so far as our study of the history of morality is concerned we have at least gained two working conceptions which change our whole perspective. These are:

First, group life.

Second, the moral as an intimate, inseparable part of the whole process of preserving, controlling, and valuing—hence not to be understood in isolation as moral sense, or as practical reason, or under any similar category. These working conceptions have made possible more adequate views of custom, of the origins of right and duty, of the psychology of the self. They enter into the question in which is focused the relation between moral origins and moral standards: Is it true, as Sumner claims, that "the mores can make anything right"? This may be compared with the biological claim: Fitness to survive or promote survival makes anything right.

Group life is a radical conception. It reverses much in the former way of considering men's relations. It makes obsolete many of the older problems. It makes imperative a different psychology. It does not in itself answer many ethical questions, but it shows where to look. Finding sub-human prototypes in various species of colony or gregarious habit it requires us to drop space limits as the all important definition for a moral individual and suggests that we consider him as he actually lives, his interests, his range of imagination and feeling. It seeks the actual content when the person talks in terms of 'we' and