The Human Origin of Morals/Chapter II

The reader who is inclined to smile at the philosophers, or to wonder how the deepest thinkers of the race could wander so far astray, must face the problem as it confronted them.

Unquestionably there was in the mind of practically all men an imperious sense of moral law. Men might defy it, but they did not deny it. And it did not come from revelation, since it was just as strong amongst civilized peoples beyond the range of Christianity, or before the Christian Era. It was a great reality, and it had to be explained.

But until the idea of evolution arose again, there was no possibility of explaining it, at least fully. Some of the Greeks and the Deists could see how closely this law was related to the social interests of man. Justice, truthfulness, and self-control are obviously desirable social qualities. But there were parts of the law, like sexual purity, that seemed to have no social significance; and it was not at all clear how even the law of justice, however useful it was, came into existence. So the law was taken as a great fact, existing in the scheme of things apart from man, and "intued" by him through a special faculty which he called his "conscience."

The entire situation was changed when the truth of evolution was proved. Some writers are fond of saying that evolution describes processes, but does not explain anything. You have here a good illustration of the foolishness of that gibe at science.

Evolution said that the human race had been evolving, from the savage to the civilized level, during at least some hundreds of thousands of years. This meant two things, as far as the great problem of the origin of moral law was concerned. It meant, first, that the law may have arisen amongst, or been formulated by, human beings themselves long before the historic civilizations arose. This would explain how the ancient civilizations simply found themselves in possession of the moral code, and could therefore not suppose that it was drawn up by men. If they themselves had not formulated it, who had?

We quite understand their difficulty. But the difficulty would have disappeared ages ago if the theory of evolution sketched by the first Greek scientists had been retained and developed. Then the Greeks might have learned how all their religious and moral and political ideals had been gradually forged in the workshop of experience, by a long line of developing ancestors. Evolution lit up the whole problem, and nearly every other problem.

Secondly, evolution said that the lower races of men in the world today represent the, various phases of evolution through which the race has passed. Take a simple illustration from the roses on a bush. The rose in full bloom or decay certainly passed through the stages of bud and half-opened flower which you see on the bush. So the race passed at one time through the successive stages represented by the Veddah, the Australian, the Bantu, the Polynesian, and so on. Circumstances drove one branch of the race onward and kept other branches behind, at various stages of development.

If this is true, we ought to find every stage in the evolution of moral ideas and conscience in the innumerable "savage" tribes scattered over the earth.

Here again, you see, the philosophers were at a great disadvantage. They had not the slightest reason to suppose that savages could throw any light on the difficult problem they were examining. Not even the wisest of them could be expected to look in that direction. In fact, very little was known about savage tribes, still less about their ideas. Books were in circulation among the learned Greeks describing how the entrance, to the lower regions was about the Rhine valley of today, and how dog-headed men and all sorts of monstrosities lived where we now find tribes whose ideas are of the greatest value to us.

So we do not smile at the older philosophers and their "theories of morality." We may be pardoned, however, for smiling at some of their modern successors, who repeat the old mysticism as if science had not altered the whole situation.

Take Professor Eucken, of Jena University, whose works on morality and religion have a large circulation in England and America. Professor Osborn in one of his works mentions Eucken as one of the German scientists who have returned to a religious view of life! Eucken knows nothing whatever about science. He is a professor of philosophy. He is one of the most popular writers of the advanced or Modernist religious school.

Now, Eucken's teachings about morality—I translated two of his books, and so I am familiar with his views—show very clearly why many philosophers and their religious readers cling to the old mystic theory, and reject the evolutionary theory, of morality.

Let us first glance at two earlier thinkers, both so famous as moralists that we can hardly omit them from a book on morality. One was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Kant. He was tremendously impressed with the imperiousness of conscience. It does not, he says, tell you to do this or avoid that if certain consequences follow your act. It dictates absolutely or "categorically." He therefore, invented the famous phrase "the categorical imperative." God must be behind it, Kant said. And the answer is that there are no "ifs" about the moral impulse simply because men had, largely under the influence of religion, actually forgotten that it was their own race which laid down the law, and why it laid down the law! It had become a peremptory command, enforced by education.

The second moralist is Emerson who, though he does not see a personal God behind the moral law—these "inner senses" never tell two men the same thing—thinks it quite as categorical as Kant did. It is an eternal and commanding law, and so on. That is the chief weakness of Emerson's fine writings. Carlyle has the same weakness. There is no such categorical and eternal law. There are simply rules of conduct, obviously of a social significance, which society impresses upon every child, man, and woman; and there is a good deal of uncertainty about them.

Rudolph Euchen makes the same mistake. He starts, he says, from "the facts of the moral life." You soon see that he means only the facts of his own very strict moral life and delicate conscience. Of the phenomena of moral consciousness in the race at large he knows nothing. Of the revolt of sincere modern thinkers against moral codes he can give no sensible explanation. He lives in a hot-house, and then thinks he can tell us the normal temperature in which the rest of us live. And this applies to the Felix Adlers and other ethical philosophers who tell America what to think about moral law. I ought to add that the English philosopher, Professor Carveth Read, has written a much more sensible book (Natural and Social Morals) on the lines of Evolution.

Evolution has made all this mysticism superfluous; and it is the only explanation of moral law in which you can put any confidence, because it is the only theory which takes into account all the facts of the moral life.

Since the days of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer our knowledge of savage ideas has grown enormously. In such a work as Professor E.A. Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (2 vols.), which is the greatest recent scientific study of ethics, you have the moral ideas and practices of all the, backward fragments of the human race. I am going to differ a little from Professor Westermarck's theory, as I told him, but the way in which he brings together all the facts about men's moral ideas is the only way to get a sound theory of morality.

All the fine theories of the philosophers break down before this vast collection of facts. There is no intuition whatever of an august and eternal law; and the less God is brought into connection with these pitiful blunders and often monstrous perversions of the moral sense the better. What we see is just man's mind in possession of the idea that his conduct must be regulated by law, and clumsily working out the correct application of that idea as his intelligence grows and his social life becomes more complex. It is not a question of the mind of the savage imperfectly seeing the law. It is a plain case of the ideas of the savage reflecting and changing with his environment and the interests of his priests.

The philosophers do not even explain, or candidly confront, all the facts of the moral life of civilized people. One of the most striking features of normal moral ideas is that the approval or censure of an act is overwhelmingly proportionate to the social value or social injury of the act. Wherever religion or superstition has perverted the conscience, you get very extraordinary notions of sin: amongst the different castes of Hindus, for instance, and amongst savages. You get mortally serious rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, excreting, wearing hats, and so on. But in proportion as men rise toward a rational order—an order prescribed by rational consideration only, not by blind subservience to tradition—the ideas of the moral and immoral come to coincide more and more with human and social interests.

Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. And so on. It would be a remarkable coincidence if this mystic law of the philosophers and the theologians, existing before man existed, and surviving when he disappears, just happened to agree so well with the social interests of the observers of the law themselves!

We shall see this more fully later, but I may give here an interesting and little known illustration. Dante's famous poem The Divine Comedy is always described as the most intensely Christian work ever written. In point of fact, the first (and technically best) part of it, "Hell," is frightfully pagan and heterodox. I do not mean that any pagan ever dreamed of lakes of burning sulphur and drafts of molten lead; but the classification of sinners, or of the respective gravities of their sins, was largely borrowed by Dante from pagan moralists like Cicero.

People who imagine that Rationalism is just a passing phase of our time are strangely ignorant. It arose in every civilization, when the height of mental development wag reached; and it was bludgeoned into silence by new priesthoods when the reaction came. It began again early in the Middle Ages. Dante was at first one of a large group of Rationalists at Florence, and in the first part of his Comedy he has not quite shaken off their beneficent influence. He ignores the church-classification of sins. Sex-sinners and proud men have not the worst torments in his horrible charnel-house. Sinners against the social body are the most unfortunate.

But all this will become clearer. For the moment I am only pressing the social nature of moral law because it is essential to the evolutionary theory of it.

Strange human groups have arisen throughout the ages. 'There is almost no conceivable vagary that has pot at some time broken upon the imagination of man and been carried out in his life. We shall not at all expect the steady evolution of social law in harmony with social interests as we know them today. Moreover, superstitions, tabus, fetishisms, religions, and all kinds of uncouth ideas of what is sacred have naturally invaded and perverted man's conceptions of moral law. But through the whole confusion, chronicled in literature or embodied in the backward tribes of today, we plainly trace the faltering rise of that human rule of conduct which philosophers, never looking back upon its humble origins, have mistaken for an eternal and superhuman reality.