Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/34

28 Established opinions of various ages have permitted and supported every crime under the sun. If those opinions be bad, no degree of conscientiousness or of enthusiasm for virtue, however well-intended, can make an individual's attitude good or right. There is ground for the hope that the intelligence, young as it is, is already sufficiently manifest in social affairs that any effort to thwart it is going, sooner or later, to react disastrously upon whatever person, people, or institution tries to do so.

A new ethical principle is growing up with the spread of the scientific attitude and method which emphasizes the fact that relations of society today are not in the main individual, for it is permeated through and through with corporate relations of many kinds. Science is coming to have little use for the ideas of guilt and punishment such as underlie the common abuse of the insanity plea. As Dr. R. A. Millikan has suggested, in time individuals will be called upon to sacrifice and suffer for the good of society without society's having to show that they deserve to suffer. In this new ethic the service of all mankind is the universal good. Furthermore, in considering the greatest good of the greatest number, full consideration and rights must be accorded to generations yet unborn. We cannot justify the position of the man who refuses to do anything for posterity on the ground that posterity has done nothing for him. Our supreme obligation to the race is to do what we can to further its progress.

The advance in science and civilization may well be checked by the present level of intelligence; but there lies hope for continual advancement in knowledge and improvement in culture in the biological probability that the human species has not reached its limit with respect to intellectual ability. In fact, the biologist, in the light of man's past, sees his future optimistically as presenting almost unlimited possibilities. Man has the means of consciously determining his own future. That future is, for weal or woe, in his own hands and is his own responsibility.

Professor Scott Holland of England has remarked: "To say that a man cannot be made good by an act of Parliament is such an obvious truth that people forget what an outrageous lie it is." In this paradoxical statement he is calling pointed attention to the fact that what matters is the relationship of any governmental social scheme to man's capacities and desires. Both human nature and human nurture are potent and subject to improvement. But our attention to the externalities of the human situation has been too exclusive and hence the statement of a recent critic: "The most alarming symptom of our sick civilization is that the one searing question which needs immediate answer is virtually never asked. What is the matter with man? All the social doctors are fussing with the irrelevant secondary symptoms of an undiagnosed human degeneracy—the breakdown of free institutions, the disruption of decent human relations, the inadequacy of economic systems. Our