Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/329

313 of his will. A higher stage of development was reached when laws came to represent the more abstract will of the people. The modern era is characterized by the development of international law, and the tendency to recognize universal rights, which is concomitant with the efforts to establish a universal language, a universal religion, and a universal morality. The differentiation of civil, religious, and ethical laws is of comparatively recent origin. The first step was made by the use of writing, and the consequent distinction between written (civil) and unwritten laws; but the separation is by no means complete at the present day.

The purpose of this article is to make plain the salient features in the controversy concerning the relation of morality to religion. But, since religion may be merely a reverence for nature, as well as a belief in the supernatural, this latter definite phrase is used as less ambiguous than the general term 'religion.' In brief, then, what is historically the relation of morality to a belief in the supernatural? Morality neither takes its rise in, nor falls with, a belief in the supernatural. At first it is instinctive, and mere custom. Later it is rational, and a conformity to the useful. It would be, then, morally obligatory to propitiate the mighty spirits to which man, in his weakness, instinctively turns. When thus related to morality, belief in the supernatural affords morality both content and sanctions. When God ceases to be the God of fear, and the ethics of the Hebrew religion is developed into Christian ethics, the pleasant consciousness of having pleased God becomes the sanction, differing little from the purely ethical sanction of pleasure in doing good for its own sake. It is maintained by eminent writers of to-day that God is necessary in order to make sanctions sufficient. On the contrary, psychology demonstrates that altruism is a law unto itself.

From Aristotle to Adam Smith, political economy, in greater or less degree, formed a part of moral science. When, later, economics grew in importance, its connection with ethics was severed; and it is within the last twenty-five years that the relations between them have been renewed. Today, the language of Professor Marshall implies a utilitarian standard of ethics, yet he is still hampered by tradition,—he makes ethical distinctions and then overlooks them. In order to show in what way economics might resume its place as a moral science, the following classification is made. Ethics may be divided into two parts,—general ethics and particular ethics.