Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/19

Rh The moral motive, therefore, arises not by contemplation of the gratification given by a certain line of conduct to God, or by recollection of superimposed pleasures, secular or supernatural, present or future; or by any reference to the social habits or conventions with which the said line of conduct may or may not accord. Such moral motive has nothing to do with obedience to the revealed will of God, or with the extraneous conceptions of heaven and hell, or with punishment or reward from earthly rulers, or with the favor or disfavor of public opinion. It arises from the vivid ideal representation of the relation between action and life. The compulsion of morality, therefore, is inner and not outer compulsion, its authority inner and not outer authority, its restraints those arising from the connection of cause and effect, its sanctions natural, not supernatural, essential and not fortuitous. The foundations of the moral code thus belong to the very nature of sentient life itself, and its dictates therefore possess a validity, a reach, a significance, a sacredness, to which no others can conceivably lay claim.

And here, perhaps, to prevent possibility of misconception, something should be said about the relation of the moral to the cosmic process. Briefly, then, I accept in the main the position adopted by the late Prof. Huxley in his Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. That there is a fundamental distinction between the "state of Nature" brought about by uninterrupted cosmic forces, and the "state of art," produced with partial success by the rational power of man, working sometimes with but often athwart those forces, and that reason and sympathy—the latter constituting by all odds the most important element in the social tissue—have brought entirely new dynamic factors into play upon the arena of life, are propositions from which I see no way of escape. It can not be too frequently asserted that what we call the order of Nature is not an ethical order at all—that the laws of Nature, as such, have nothing to do with morality. The ethical element begins, I think, faintly to emerge with the relation of sentiency to those laws, though the establishment of a moral order depends entirely upon the "artificial" factors introduced by the consciousness of man. It is, of course, true that these "artificial" factors are themselves products of cosmic processes, and that the order out of which they have grown itself imposes limitations of the severest, and often the narrowest, kind to man's intelligent reaction against it.

Nevertheless, for the sake of clearness, the contrast of the "natural" and the "artificial," of the workings of Nature apart