Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/560

556 fuller life and to inner content; and he can not fail to desire to see the social order conform to this type so far as possible.

The ethics of the New Testament is generally and rightly thought to attain its climax in the injunction: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." One is nevertheless compelled to ask whether love can, in fact, be the subject of a command or an injunction. Love, is it not the freest and most personal thing there is? The natural philosopher must recognize the existence of an incompatibility here and change the content of this conception as science has changed the concept of law. A natural law is not a prescript, but a transcript, a simple statement of how things actually are. So, in the ethics of science, the doctrine of the conduct of man toward man must have, not the character of a juridical law, but of a natural one, one which shall inform us, which shall instruct us, as men among men, how we can live a peaceable, efficient and happy life. And if, perchance, on this path we meet love, it will come to us not as a thing prescribed, but as an incident and as the most natural, inevitable thing in the world. The road that leads from an insight to a sentiment is often long, but education helps, self-education in case of the more competent; for the rest, education of the children's school type. But by opening our eyes we can find love already present without either command or education. First of all, self-love, in every living being. Not by the most exacting ethics will self-love be objected to, so long as each individual is isolated from the others. But under these conditions there can be no ethics, in the widest sense. When the life lines of two beings cross one another, conflict begins. It is the conflict for existence, in which there is no ethical content whatever. On the contrary, it is the direct source of that which we call evil in the world. Simultaneously therewith good also begins to appear.

Deep is the riddle that comes with life, for with life comes the function of reproduction, so that through the activity of each individual a second enters the field, which is to the first a competitor and an enemy. To ensure perpetuation of the species, each being of the species must, through its offspring, contribute to the keenness of the competition which he himself must contend against. A strange situation!

Further, the functions involved in the perpetuation of the kind are bound up with a complex of instincts and feelings that exceed in power all others, even the love of life. In the simplest organism, consisting of a single cell, reproduction takes place by division of the cell. There are now two beings where there was one before, but it is impossible to say which is parent and which the offspring. If they were self-conscious, we may well imagine that they would learn only by experience that they had become two. Something of this sentiment of identity is to be seen in the feelings of the mother toward the young, in the higher