Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/21

Rh which ceremony, law, religion, morality, have all tended, men have come slowly to understand that in the recognition of conduct and consequence as everlastingly united in the category of cause and effect lies in all questions of action the one valid, authoritative, and final court of appeal.

"Might till Right is ready," said Matthew Arnold, and in the civilization of the race the might of the outward authority—supernatural, political, social—has gone before and has prepared the way for the right of the inward authority we describe as moral. Men have been trained to the self-compulsion of the moral motive by enforced obedience to the external compulsions of ceremony, religion, law. The strong hand of the earthly despot, only gradually relaxed as the education for freedom went on; the binding power of tyrannic custom, following life into the minutest recesses of its daily routine; the drastic force of supernatural pleasures and pains, meted out by a personal but omniscient deity who exacted unquestioning allegiance and punished every infraction of his commands—all these elements were required as formative factors in the moral development of man-kind. The condition of heteronomy must in the nature of things precede the condition of autonomy, and we only pass from general principle to particular illustration when we say that the outward authorities above dealt with were inevitable prerequisites to the inner authority of morality in the order of the evolution of human life.

Yet it must be remembered that in an indistinct form the moral sanction proper very early began to emerge as an influence in social growth. Natural selection was from the beginning concerned in the picking out and perpetuation of certain qualities—egoistic and altruistic—making for the welfare and expansion of society; and unconsciously at the outset such qualities naturally came to be registered and emphasized in the ceremonial, religious, and legal codes. Among moral characteristics thus nurtured in the primitive stages of political consolidation may be mentioned loyalty, courage, obedience, without which no successful tribal warfare could be carried on, together with a rudimentary form of justice, veracity, and general sympathy, without which the group could never survive in the face of antagonistic tribes whose social feelings were more highly evolved. As the struggle for existence has all along been a struggle among groups as well as among individuals, a premium was laid from the very start upon whatever qualities, altruistic no less than egoistic, would make for social strength and efficiency. These qualities were early caught up in the life and feeling of each developing group; an ideal answering in its larger aspects to the fundamental needs of the tribe was thrown up; and the vague encouragement yielded by