Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/440

422 that a sympathetic community will be more likely to survive than a more selfish aggregate; for the difficulty is to understand how natural selection can develop a sympathetic community if it tends to eliminate the individuals who first show traces of sympathy. In a general way this difficulty holds for any one who derives sympathy from the action of natural selection; for the question is whether natural selection alone can give rise to a sympathetic community, not whether it will preserve such a community when it has once been developed.

Leaving this question, which has so much significance for our general view of the world, we may now follow Mr. Sutherland's account of the expansion of sympathy into general social feeling. When parental sympathy has come into existence "the selective principle begins to lay new stress upon it, and slowly to divert it into the more indirectly preservative influence of conjugal sympathy" (Vol. I, p. 160). "The fundamental sympathies toward wife and child are still, even in the finest races of men, the deepest and strongest; but it was impossible that the nervous organism of animals could have grown susceptible to influences so delicate yet so powerful without giving rise to a more general capacity of sympathy spreading out to brothers and sisters, blood relations, and neighbors" (Vol. I, p. 291). The elaboration of this general position occupies the remainder of the first volume. On the foundation thus laid the author proceeds in the second volume to construct his view of ethics. Sympathy is a natural form of morality. The man who never fails of kindliness in his relations as father, husband, friend, and citizen is a good man. There are three higher stages he may yet attain: the morality of duty, that of self-respect, and that which springs from an ideal of the beauty of goodness. These of themselves are "weak and pretentious things" when they lack their natural basis—a true and warm-hearted sympathy—but on the other hand they supply in different ways the regulating force which sympathy requires; for the morality of sympathy is somewhat inconsistent, changing much with varying emotions and lacking the fixity of more developed feeling. The first advance from the stage of natural morality is marked by the emergence of the sense of duty. This arises when the sympathy of a race has found expression in maxims or in laws, while all the weight of public opinion has been invoked to enforce that conduct which is in accordance with the average sympathy. Under these circumstances the individual comes to look, not only inwardly for what his own sympathy dictates, but outwardly also to what the average sympathy of his race demands. The sanction of duty thus becomes external, and morality assumes a new