Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/116

100 most elemental of appetites, sleep the most reconstitutive, that of sex the most preservative, these are but subservient to the progressive development of life, the functionings of the organs of outside relations. We are fundamentally emotional, and volitional beings. The emotions of affection are distinctly altruistic. In the intensifying and refining of altruistic sentiments, and in their extension, ethical progress finds its expression. Social life is the medium through which, and in which, moral existence becomes established. Both our affective and our volitional life has to do with the functioning of our outside organs. The possibility of ethical conduct is wholly grounded in the biological fact of power of self-movement of animals, and in this power of self-movement is to be found the key to the vexed problems of volitional freedom. Biology leads us to recognize that the ethical end is the preservation, enhancement, and enjoyment of the inherited wealth and worth of life, which wealth and worth has its existence in social sentiments organically developed in human beings, and finding their satisfaction in reciprocity within an ethically rationalized social medium. The progressive realization of this ethical end brings its own reward, and needs no sanction beyond its own becoming. The moral imperative is grounded biologically; for this view of the solidarity of past, present, and future existence imposes upon us the duty of holding our vital endowment in trust.

The writer discusses the origin, not the validity of ethical systems, regarding these as two widely different questions. Men being what they are, no moral code can be effective which does not inspire in those who are asked to obey it emotions of reverence; and the capacity of any code to excite this, or any other elevated emotion, cannot be wholly independent of the origin from which those who accept that code suppose it to emanate. The naturalistic and moral sentiments and rules are found in but a few things that feel, while feeling is an attribute of but few things that live, and life is but a petty episode in the history of the Universe. If morals should vanish, the Universe would be almost the same as now. Morality is on a par with appetite here. Biology not only does not supply us with any ground of distinction, but it shows us that the sentiments clinging to duty and sacrifice are but a device of nature to trick us into the