Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/17

Rh one of our writers is indeed a piece of merely rhetorical exaggeration, but the distinction between rectitude and propriety—between the criterion of the moral and the criterion of the social code—has none the less to be emphasized.

3. In the early stages of social evolution custom tends to harden into definite precept; hence the third pre-ethical standard of conduct—the legal or political standard. Guidance by custom is, as I have above implied, the primordial form of guidance in the low tribal group; but out of this arise gradually both the sacred law, or the command of the deified ancestor or chief, and the secular law, or the command of the living ruler. At the outset, indeed, no distinction between sacred and secular is to be made, the enactment of the chieftain, while he is still alive, passing insensibly into a religious enactment when, dying, he takes his place among the tribal gods. But differentiation presently begins, and it is with the secular side of the matter after such differentiation that we are now concerned. Law, then, emerges when the spontaneously evolved customs of a social group are gathered up and crystallized in the dictates of the strong man or chieftain, and when vaguely diffused social sentiment thus receives distinct formulation and powerful personal support.

It is evident that from the legal as from the theological point of view right and wrong are primarily associated with obedience and disobedience to external authority. Conformity to the particular requirements of the established body of laws implies allegiance, and allegiance is virtue; while insubordination constitutes the very essence of evil, the element which makes crime crime. The sanctions of the legal code are, therefore, once again extraneous sanctions; its restraints and incentives, penalties and rewards, imposed from the outside.

Thus, comparing the three principal pre-ethical codes with one another, we find them characterized by certain important points of similarity. In each case fortuitous and not necessary consequences of action have been taken as the basis of restraint; in each case outside compulsion has furnished the required impulses and deterrents; in each case, therefore, the sanctions have been almost entirely accidental and extraneous, and not to any adequate extent fundamental and essential.

And now we have only to place the moral code alongside of these pre-ethical codes in order to throw its radical and differential qualities into immediate and striking relief. For what is the code of morality strictly so called? It is the code under which actions are classified in virtue of their essential natures—that is, of their necessary bearings upon life. It formally postulates as the ultimate end of conduct that which, after all, we find implied in a more or less crude and confused fashion in all ethical