Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/50

Rh people was a necessary condition to happy social life. A reputation for fearlessness, for prowess, for military skill, for a certain kind of cunning, for perfect willingness to take your weaker enemy’s property; all this was a part of the necessary adjustment to one’s environment. Was all this then for that society true morality? If morality were the body of rules governing successful adjustment to the social environment, then morality would be relative to the environment, and would vary with it. So even now such rules vary with one’s social position. Ministers of religion are considered to be best adjusted to the environment if they are outwardly meek, save when defending their creeds against heretics. But politicians are best adjusted when they are aggressive and merciless. A poet or artist is best adjusted if he has a reputation for very ideal and impersonal aims, and he can then even afford to leave his debts unpaid; but a business man must be very concrete in behavior, severely definite in his dealings with his fellows. And so runs the world away. Find your place, and farm it cleverly, for that is the whole duty of man.

“Such would be,” say our idealists, “the consequences of looking simply to reality for a definition of the moral code. There would no longer be a difference between morality and cleverness. Practical skill in the art of living is what survives in this world: and if it is survival, or tendency to survival, that distinguishes a true from a false moral code, then universal cleverness as a moral code would on the whole tend to survive, with its adherents.”