Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/102

Rh ethics. It is said that, the future aside, evolution has made us what we now are, and, in particular, has formed our society, and us for society. Hence not only is our welfare in fact best served by a wise altruism, but this fact is plain to us in our very organization and instincts. Therefore while throughout our aim is our happiness, our nature has been so organized by generations of social evolution as to make pretty certain that our happiness is already dependent on our good character as social beings. Therefore the doctrine of evolution shows that selfishness must itself become even in our day altruistic if it would be successful.

Is this aspect of evolution any more ethical than the other? That is, does it show us, not the means, but the moral End? We must deny that it does. To be sure, if we never actually felt any conflict between egoism and altruism as dispositions, then indeed for us just that ethical problem would not exist. But we do feel a conflict. And since for us our selfishness is not altruistic in aim, it is quite useless to try to make the warring impulses one by declaring that a perfectly enlightened selfishness, even in our own society, would be altruistic, not indeed in aim, but in consequences. For, in the first place, that would actually be a false statement for our present social condition; since it is still quite possible for a clever selfish man to live very comfortably, by somehow legally wronging and oppressing others. And, in the second place, if the statement were true, it would be ethically worthless. For if good treatment of others is uniformly the behavior that is, selfishly viewed, the