Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/574

556, more cheating, more fraud, more overreaching, more adulteration, more sham, more outside pretension and inside falsity? Are they as true in political action to the state in which they have united and incorporated themselves? Is there as much genuine patriotism? Is there not more political corruption and neglect of political duty? These are certainly the questions which stagger the optimist most.

Here, then, we discover that the particulars of conduct between which the widest difference of progress in moral culture appears are precisely those that we have already separated by one of the broad differences that were found when we classified the relations to which human conduct is incident. It is natural to conjecture that the one difference may connect itself with the other. It becomes still more natural when we perceive that the characteristic difference which distinguishes the two sets of relationships in question has been widened by the process of civilization. On one side, the direct primary relations that exist between men, in their purely personal attitude toward one another, have been steadily pressed into greater intimacy and closeness, at every step of advance which has been made in the diffusion of knowledge and in the social organization of the race, while they have been more and more generalized in the same operation. On the other side, as the industrial, commercial, and political mechanism of society has acquired more complexity and greater extension, the indirect or secondary relations, which involve the fact of property, etc., have been all the time undergoing variation and multiplication, and have been shaped into forms of greater remoteness, as between the persons and the things that are concerned together in them. The effect in the one case has been to set out the relationships in question more clearly, to define them more distinctly, and to render them more easily recognizable as they widen; and it is within the sphere of this effect that we have the progress of moral culture most marked. In the other case the effect has been to obscure most of the relationships in question, and to render the clear perception of them more difficult as they lengthen out; and it is within the range of this effect that we find most doubtful evidences of moral growth in the process of civilization.

From this I shall now venture a generalization, to see whether it will be justified by further scrutiny of the moral history of mankind, and I offer it in the following propositions:

1. That moral notions, or notions of rightness in conduct, are formed in the mind by the perception of certain relations to which human conduct is incident; that they are exactly akin in nature, therefore, to mathematical notions, and have their genesis in the operation of the same faculties; that there is no more need, in consequence, of a special "moral sense" to account for them than there is need of a distinct mathematical sense to account for the perceptions and reasoning processes of arithmetic and geometry.