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CHAPTER I.

CONDUCT IN GENERAL.↩

§ 1. The doctrine that correlatives imply one another–that a father cannot be thought of without thinking of a child, and that there can be no consciousness of superior without a consciousness of inferior–has for one of its common examples the necessary connection between the conceptions of whole and part. Beyond the primary truth that no idea of a whole can be framed without a nascent idea of parts constituting it, and that no idea of a part can be framed without a nascent idea of some whole to which it belongs, there is the secondary truth that there can be no correct idea of a part without a correct idea of the correlative whole. There are several ways in which inadequate knowledge of the one involves inadequate knowledge of the other.

If the part is conceived without any reference to the whole, it becomes itself a whole–an independent entity; and its relations to existence in general are misapprehended. Further, the size of the part as compared with the size of the whole, must be misapprehended unless the whole is not only recognized as including it, but is figured in its total extent. And agam, the position which the part occupies in relation to other parts, cannot be rightly conceived unless there is some conception of the whole in its distribution as well as in its amount.

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Still more when part and whole, instead of being statically related only are dynamically related, must there be a general understanding of the whole before the part can be understood. By a savage who has never seen a vehicle, no idea can be formed of the use and action of a wheel. To the unsymmetrically pierced disk of an eccentric, no place or purpose can be ascribed by a rustic unacquainted with machinery Even a mechanician, if he has never looked into a piano, will, if shown a damper, be unable to conceive its function or relative value.

Most of all, however, where the whole is organic, does complete comprehension of a part imply extensive comprehension of the whole. Suppose a being ignorant of the human body to find a detached arm. If not misconceived by him as a supposed whole, instead of being conceived as a part, still its relations to other parts, and its structure, would be wholly inexplicable. Admitting that the cooperation of its bones and muscles might be divined, yet no thought could be framed of the share taken by the arm in the actions of the unknown whole it belonged to; nor could any interpretation be put upon the nerves and vessels ramifying through it, which severally refer to certain central organs. A theory of the structure of the arm implies a theory of the structure of the body at large.

And this truth holds not of material aggregates only but of immaterial aggregates–aggregated motions, deeds, thoughts, words. The moon’s movements cannot be fully interpreted without taking into account the movements of the solar system at large. The process of loading a gun is meaningless until the subsequent actions performed with the gun are known. A fragment of a sentence, if not unintelligible, is wrongly interpreted in the absence of the remainder. Cut off its beginning and end, and the rest of a demonstration proves nothing. Evidence given by a plaintiff often misleads until the evidence which the defendant produces is joined with it.

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§ 2. Conduct is a whole; and, in a sense, it is an organic whole–an aggregate of interdependent actions performed by an organism. That division or aspect of conduct with which ethics deals, is a part of this organic whole–a part having its components inextricably bound up with the rest. As currently conceived, stirring the fire, or reading a newspaper, or eating a meal, are acts with which morality has no concern. Opening the window to air the room, putting on an overcoat when the weather is cold, are thought of as having no ethical significance. These, however, are all portions of conduct. The behavior we call good and the behavior we call bad, are included, along with the behavior we call indifferent, under the conception of behavior at large. The whole of which ethics forms a part, is the whole constituted by the theory of conduct in general; and this whole must be understood before the part can be understood. Let us consider this proposition more closely.

And first, how shall we define conduct? It is not coextensive with the aggregate of actions, though it is nearly so. Such actions as those of an epileptic in a fit, are not included in our conception of conduct: the conception excludes purposeless actions. And in recognizing this exclusion, we simultaneously recognize all that is included. The definition of conduct which emerges is either–acts adjusted to ends, or else–the adjustment of acts to ends; according as we contemplate the formed body of acts, or think of the form alone. And conduct in its full acceptation must be taken as comprehending all adjustments of acts to ends, from the simplest to the most complex, whatever their special natures and whether considered separately or in their totality.

Conduct in general being thus distinguished from the somewhat larger whole constituted by actions in general, let us next ask what distinction is habitually made between the conduct on which ethical judgments are passed and the remainder of conduct. As already said, a large part of [I-6] ordinary conduct is indifferent. Shall I walk to the waterfall today? Or shall I ramble along the seashore? Here the ends are ethically indifferent. If I go to the waterfall, shall I go over the moor or take the path through the wood? Here the means are ethically indifferent. And from hour to hour most of the things we do are not to be judged as either good or bad in respect of either ends or means. No less clear is it that the transition from indifferent acts to acts which are good or bad is gradual. If a friend who is with me has explored the seashore but has not seen the waterfall, the choice of one or other end is no longer ethically indifferent. And if, the waterfall being fixed on as our goal, the way over the moor is too long for his strength, while the shorter way through the wood is not, the choice of means is no longer ethically indifferent. Again, if a probable result of making the one excursion rather than the other, is that I shall not be back in time to keep an appointment, or if taking the longer route entails this risk while taking the shorter does not, the decision in favor of one or other end or means acquires in another way an ethical character; and if the appointment is one of some importance, or one of great importance, or one of life-and-death importance, to self or others, the ethical character becomes pronounced. These instances will sufficiently suggest the truth that conduct with which morality is not concerned, passes into conduct which is moral or immoral, by small degrees and in countless ways.

But the conduct that has to be conceived scientifically before we can scientifically conceive those modes of conduct which are the objects of ethical judgments, is a conduct immensely wider in range than that just indicated. Complete comprehension of conduct is not to be obtained by contemplating the conduct of human beings only: we have to regard this as a part of universal conduct–conduct as exhibited by all living creatures. For evidently this comes within our definition–acts adjusted to ends. The[I-7] conduct of the higher animals as compared with that of man, and the conduct of the lower animals as compared with that of the higher, mainly differ in this, that the adjustments of acts to ends are relatively simple and relatively incomplete. And as in other cases, so in this case, we must interpret the more developed by the less developed. Just as, fully to understand the part of conduct which ethics deals with, we must study human conduct as a whole; so, fully to understand human conduct as a whole, we must study it as a part of that large whole constituted by the conduct of animate beings in general.

Nor is even this whole conceived with the needful fullness, so long as we think only of the conduct at present displayed around us. We have to include in our conception the less-developed conduct out of which this has arisen in course of time. We have to regard the conduct now shown us by creatures of all orders, as an outcome of the conduct which has brought life of every kind to its present height. And this is tantamount to saying that our preparatory step must be to study the evolution of conduct.

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CHAPTER II.

THE EVOLUTION OF CONDUCT.↩

§ 3. We have become quite familiar with the idea of an evolution of structures throughout the ascending types of animals. To a considerable degree we have become familiar with the thought that an evolution of functions has gone on pari passu with the evolution of structures. Now advancing a step, we have to frame a conception of the evolution of conduct, as correlated with this evolution of structures and functions.

These three subjects are to be definitely distinguished. Obviously the facts comparative morphology sets forth, form a whole which, though it cannot be treated in general or in detail without taking into account facts belonging to comparative physiology is essentially independent. No less clear is it that we may devote our attention exclusively to that progressive differentiation of functions, and combination of functions, which accompanies the development of structures–may say no more about the characters and connections of organs than is implied in describing their separate and joint actions. And the subject of conduct lies outside the subject of functions, if not as far as this lies outside the subject of structures, still, far enough to make it substantially separate. For those functions which are already variously compounded to achieve what we regard as single bodily acts, are endlessly re-compounded[I-9] to achieve that coordination of bodily acts which is known as conduct.

We are concerned with functions in the true sense, while we think of them as processes carried on within the body; and, without exceeding the limits of physiology we may treat of their adjusted combinations, so long as these are regarded as parts of the vital consensus. If we observe how the lungs aerate the blood which the heart sends to them; how heart and lungs together supply aerated blood to the stomach, and so enable it to do its work; how these cooperate with sundry secreting and excreting glands to further digestion and to remove waste matter; and how all of them join to keep the brain in a fit condition for carrying on those actions which indirectly conduce to maintenance of the life at large; we are dealing with functions. Even when considering how parts that act directly on the environment–legs, arms, wings–perform their duties, we are still concerned with functions in that aspect of them constituting physiology so long as we restrict our attention to internal processes, and to internal combinations of them. But we enter on the subject of conduct when we begin to study such combinations among the actions of sensory and motor organs as are externally manifested. Suppose that instead of observing those contractions of muscles by which the optic axes are converged and the foci of the eyes adjusted (which is a portion of physiology), and that instead of observing the cooperation of other nerves, muscles, and bones, by which a hand is moved to a particular place and the fingers closed (which is also a portion of physiology), we observe a weapon being seized by a hand under guidance of the eyes. We now pass from the thought of combined internal functions to the thought of combined external motions. Doubtless if we could trace the cerebral processes which accompany these, we should find an inner physiological coordination corresponding with the outer coordination of actions. But this admission is consistent with the[I-10] assertion, that when we ignore the internal combination and attend only to the external combination, we pass from a portion of physiology to a portion of conduct. For though it may be objected that the external combination instanced, is too simple to be rightly included under the name conduct, yet a moment’s thought shows that it is joined with what we call conduct by insensible gradations. Suppose the weapon seized is used to ward off a blow. Suppose a counterblow is given. Suppose the aggressor runs and is chased. Suppose there comes a struggle and a handing him over to the police. Suppose there follow the many and varied acts constituting a prosecution. Obviously the initial adjustment of an act to an end, inseparable from the rest, must be included with them under the same general head; and obviously from this initial simple adjustment, having intrinsically no moral character, we pass by degrees to the most complex adjustments and to those on which moral judgments are passed.

Hence, excluding all internal coordinations, our subject here is the aggregate of all external coordinations; and this aggregate includes not only the simplest as well as the most complex performed by human beings, but also those performed by all inferior beings considered as less or more evolved.

§ 4. Already the question–What constitutes advance in the evolution of conduct, as we trace it up from the lowest types of living creatures to the highest? has been answered by implication. A few examples will now bring the answer into conspicuous relief.

We saw that conduct is distinguished from the totality of actions by excluding purposeless actions; but during evolution this distinction arises by degrees. In the very lowest creatures most of the movements from moment to moment made, have not more recognizable aims than have the struggles of an epileptic. An infusorium swims randomly [I-11] about, determined in its course not by a perceived object to be pursued or escaped, but, apparently by varying stimuli in its medium; and its acts, unadjusted in any appreciable way to ends, lead it now into contact with some nutritive substance which it absorbs, and now into the neighborhood of some creature by which it is swallowed and digested. Lacking those developed senses and motor powers which higher animals possess, ninety-nine in the hundred of these minute animals, severally living but for a few hours, disappear either by innutrition or by destruction. The conduct is constituted of actions so little adjusted to ends, that life continues only as long as the accidents of the environment are favorable. But when, among aquatic creatures, we observe one which, though still low in type, is much higher than the infusorium–say a rotifer–we see how, along with larger size, more developed structures, and greater power of combining functions, there goes an advance in conduct. We see how by its whirling cilia it sucks in as food these small animals moving around; how by its prehensile tail it fixes itself to some object; how by withdrawing its outer organs and contracting its body it preserves itself from this or that injury from time to time threatened; and how thus, by better adjusting its own actions, it becomes less dependent on the actions going on around, and so preserves itself for a longer period.

A superior subkingdom, as the Mollusca, still better exemplifies this contrast. When -e compare a low mollusc, such as a floating ascidian, with a high mollusc, such as a cephalopod, we are again shown that greater organic evolution is accompanied by more evolved conduct. At the mercy of every marine creature large enough to swallow it, and drifted about by currents which may chance to keep it at sea or may chance to leave it fatally stranded, the ascidian displays but little adjustment of acts to ends in comparison with the cephalopod; which, now crawling over the beach, now exploring the rocky crevices, now swimming [I-12] through the open water, now darting after a fish, now hiding itself from some larger animal in a cloud of ink, and using its suckered arms at one time for anchoring itself and at another for holding fast its prey; selects, and combines, and proportions, its movements from minute to minute, so as to evade dangers which threaten, while utilizing chances of food which offer; so showing us varied activities which, in achieving special ends, achieve the general end of securing continuance of the activities.

Among vertebrate animals we similarly trace up, along with advance in structures and functions, this advance in conduct. A fish roaming about at hazard in search of something to eat, able to detect it by smell or sight only within short distances, and now and again rushing away in alarm on the approach of a bigger fish, makes adjustments of acts to ends that are relatively few and simple in their kinds; and shows us, as a consequence, how small is the average duration of life. So few survive to maturity that, to make up for destruction of unhatched young and small fry and half-grown individuals, a million ova have to be spawned by a codfish that two may reach the spawning age. Conversely by a highly evolved mammal, such as an elephant, those general actions performed in common with the fish are far better adjusted to their ends. By sight as well, probably as by odor, it detects food at relatively great distances; and when, at intervals, there arises a need for escape, relatively great speed is attained. But the chief difference arises from the addition of new sets of adjustments. We have combined actions which facilitate nutrition–the breaking off of succulent and fruit-bearing branches, the selecting of edible growths throughout a comparatively wide reach; and, in case of danger, safety can be achieved not by flight only but, if necessary, by defense or attack: bringing into combined use tusks, trunk, and ponderous feet. Further, we see various subsidiary acts adjusted to subsidiary ends–now the going into a river for coolness, and using the [I-13] trunk as a means of projecting water over the body; now the employment of a bough for sweeping away flies from the back; now the making of signal sounds to alarm the herd, and adapting the actions to such sounds when made by others. Evidently the effect of this more highly evolved conduct is to secure the balance of the organic actions throughout far longer periods.

And now, on studying the doings of the highest of mammals, mankind, we not only find that the adjustments of acts to ends are both more numerous and better than among lower mammals; but we find the same thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of lower races. If we take any one of the major ends achieved, we see greater completeness of achievement by civilized than by savage; and we also see an achievement of relatively numerous minor ends subserving major ends. Is it in nutrition? The food is obtained more regularly in response to appetite; it is far higher in quality; it is free from dirt; it is greater in variety; it is better prepared. Is it in warmth? The characters of the fabrics and forms of the articles used for clothing, and the adaptations of them to requirements from day to day and hour to hour, are much superior. Is it in dwelling? Between the shelter of boughs and grass which the lowest savage builds, and the mansion of the civilized man, the contrast in aspect is not more extreme than is the contrast in number and efficiency of the adjustments of acts to ends betrayed in their respective constructions. And when with the ordinary activities of the savage we compare the ordinary civilized activities–as the business of the trader, which involves multiplied and complex transactions extending over long periods, or as professional avocations, prepared for by elaborate studies and daily carried on in endlessly varied forms, or as political discussions and agitations, directed now to the carrying of this measure and now to the defeating of that–we see sets of adjustments of acts to ends, not only immensely exceeding [I-14] those seen among lower races of men in variety and intricacy but sets to which lower races of men present nothing analogous. And along with this greater elaboration of life produced by the pursuit of more numerous ends, there goes that increased duration of life which constitutes the supreme end.

And here is suggested the need for supplementing this conception of evolving conduct. For besides being an improving adjustment of acts to ends, such as furthers prolongation of life, it is such as furthers increased amount of life. Reconsideration of the examples above given, will show that length of life is not by itself a measure of evolution of conduct; but that quantity of life must be taken into account. An oyster, adapted by its structure to the diffused food contained in the water it draws in, and shielded by its shell from nearly all dangers, may live longer than a cuttlefish, which has such superior powers of dealing with numerous contingencies; but then, the sum of vital activities during any given interval is far less in the oyster than in the cuttlefish. So a worm, ordinarily sheltered from most enemies by the earth it burrows through, which also supplies a sufficiency of its poor food, may have greater longevity than many of its annulose relatives, the insects; but one of these during its existence as larva and imago, may experience a greater quantity of the changes which constitute life. Nor is it otherwise when we compare the more evolved with the less evolved among mankind. The difference between the average lengths of the lives of savage and civilized, is no true measure of the difference between the totalities of their two lives, considered as aggregates of thought, feeling, and action. Hence, estimating life by multiplying its length into its breadth, we must say that the augmentation of it which accompanies evolution of conduct, results from increase of both factors. The more multiplied and varied adjustments of acts to ends, by which the more developed creature from hour to hour fulfills more numerous [I-15] requirements, severally add to the activities that are carried on abreast, and severally help to make greater the period through which such simultaneous activities endure. Each further evolution of conduct widens the aggregate of actions while conducing to elongation of it.

§ 5. Turn we now to a further aspect of the phenomena, separate from, but necessarily associated with, the last. Thus far we have considered only those adjustments of acts to ends which have for their final purpose complete individual life. Now we have to consider those adjustments which have for their final purpose the life of the species.

Self-preservation in each generation has all along depended on the preservation of offspring by preceding generations. And in proportion as evolution of the conduct subserving individual life is high, implying high organization, there must previously have been a highly evolved conduct subserving nurture of the young. Throughout the ascending grades of the animal kingdom, this second kind of conduct presents stages of advance like those which we have observed in the first. Low down, where structures and functions are little developed, and the power of adjusting acts to ends but slight, there is no conduct, properly so named, furthering salvation of the species. Race-maintaining conduct, like self-maintaining conduct, arises gradually out of that which cannot be called conduct: adjusted actions are preceded by unadjusted ones. Protozoa spontaneously divide and subdivide, in consequence of physical changes over which they have no control; or, at other times, after a period of quiescence, break up into minute portions which severally grow into new individuals. In neither case can conduct be alleged. Higher up, the process is that of ripening, at intervals, germ cells and sperm cells, which, on occasion, are sent forth into the surrounding water and left to their fate: perhaps one in ten thousand surviving to maturity. Here, again, we see only development and dispersion [I-16] going on apart from parental care. Types above these, as fish which choose fit places in which to deposit their ova, or as the higher crustaceans which carry masses of ova about until they are hatched, exhibit adjustments of acts to ends which we may properly call conduct; though it is of the simplest kind. Where, as among certain fish, the male keeps guard over the eggs, driving away intruders, there is an additional adjustment of acts to ends; and the applicability of the name conduct is more decided. Passing at once to creatures far superior, such as birds which, building nests and sitting on their eggs, feed their broods for considerable periods, and give them aid after they can fly; or such as mammals which, suckling their young for a time, continue afterwards to bring them food or protect them while they feed, until they reach ages at which they can provide for themselves; we are shown how this conduct which furthers race maintenance evolves hand-in-hand with the conduct which furthers self-maintenance. That better organization which makes possible the last, makes possible the first also. Mankind exhibit a great progress of like nature. Compared with brutes, the savage, higher in his self-maintaining conduct, is higher too in his race-maintaining conduct. A larger number of the wants of offspring are provided for; and parental care, enduring longer, extends to the disciplining of offspring in arts and habits which fit them for their conditions of existence. Conduct of this order, equally with conduct of the first order, we see becoming evolved in a still greater degree as we ascend from savage to civilized. The adjustments of acts to ends in the rearing of children become far more elaborate, alike in number of ends met, variety of means used, and efficiency of their adaptations; and the aid and oversight are continued throughout a much greater part of early life.

In tracing up the evolution of conduct, so that we may frame a true conception of conduct in general, we have thus to recognize these two kinds as mutually dependent. Speaking [I-17] generally neither can evolve without evolution of the other; and the highest evolutions of the two must be reached simultaneously.

§ 6. To conclude, however, that on reaching a perfect adjustment of acts to ends subserving individual life and the rearing of offspring, the evolution of conduct becomes complete, is to conclude erroneously. Or rather, I should say it is an error to suppose that either of these kinds of conduct can assume its highest form, without its highest form being assumed by a third kind of conduct yet to be named.

The multitudinous creatures of all kinds which fill the earth, cannot live wholly apart from one another, but are more or less in presence of one another–are interfered with by one another. In large measure the adjustments of acts to ends which we have been considering, are components of that "struggle for existence" carried on both between members of the same species and between members of different species; and, very generally a successful adjustment made by one creature involves an unsuccessful adjustment made by another creature, either of the same kind or of a different kind. That the carnivore may live herbivores must die; and that its young may be reared the young of weaker creatures must be orphaned. Maintenance of the hawk and its brood involves the deaths of many small birds; and that small birds may multiply their progeny must be fed with innumerable sacrificed worms and larvae. Competition among members of the same species has allied, though less conspicuous, results. The stronger often carries off by force the prey which the weaker has caught. Monopolizing certain hunting grounds, the more ferocious drive others of their kind into less favorable places. With plant-eating animals, too, the like holds: the better food is secured by the more vigorous individuals, while the less vigorous and worse fed, succumb either directly from innutrition or indirectly from resulting inability to escape enemies. That is to say among creatures whose lives are carried on antagonistically each of the two kinds of conduct delineated above, must remain imperfectly evolved. Even in such few kinds of them as have little to fear from enemies or competitors, as lions or tigers, there is still inevitable failure in the adjustments of acts to ends towards the close of life. Death by starvation from inability to catch prey shows a falling short of conduct from its ideal.

This imperfectly evolved conduct introduces us to antithesis to conduct that is perfectly evolved. Contemplating these adjustments of acts to ends which miss completeness because they cannot be made by one creature without other creatures being prevented from making them, raises the thought of adjustments such that each creature may make them without preventing them from being made by other creatures. That the highest form of conduct must be so distinguished, is an inevitable implication; for while the form of conduct is such that adjustments of acts to ends by some necessitate non-adjustments by others, there remains room for modifications which bring conduct into a form avoiding this, and so making the totality of life greater.

From the abstract let us pass to the concrete. Recognizing men as the beings whose conduct is most evolved, let us ask under what conditions their conduct, in all three aspects of its evolution, reaches its limit. Clearly while the lives led are entirely predatory, as those of savages, the adjustments of acts to ends fall short of this highest form of conduct in every way Individual life, ill carried on from hour to hour, is prematurely cut short; the fostering of offspring often fails, and is incomplete when it does not fail; and in so far as the ends of self-maintenance and race maintenance are met, they are met by destruction of other beings, of different kind or of like kind. In social groups formed by compounding and recompounding primitive hordes, conduct remains imperfectly evolved in proportion as there continue antagonisms between the groups and antagonisms between members of the same group–two traits necessarily associated; since the nature which prompts international aggression prompts aggression of individuals on one another. Hence the limit of evolution can be reached by conduct only in permanently peaceful societies. That perfect adjustment of acts to ends in maintaining individual life and rearing new individuals, which is effected by each without hindering others from effecting like perfect adjustments, is, in its very definition, shown to constitute a kind of conduct that can be approached only as war decreases and dies out.

A gap in this outline must now be filled up. There remains a further advance not yet even hinted. For beyond so behaving that each achieves his ends without preventing others from achieving their ends, the members of a society may give mutual help in the achievement of ends. And if, either indirectly by industrial cooperation, or directly by volunteered aid, fellow citizens can make easier for one another the adjustments of acts to ends, then their conduct assumes a still higher phase of evolution; since whatever facilitates the making of adjustments by each, increases the totality of the adjustments made, and serves to render the lives of all more complete.

§ 7. The reader who recalls certain passages in First Principles, in the Principles of Biology, and in the Principles of Psychology, will perceive above a restatement, in another form, of generalizations set forth in those works. Especially will he be reminded of the proposition that life is "the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences"; and still more of that abridged and less specific formula, in which life is said to be "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations."

The presentation of the facts here made, differs from the presentations before made, mainly by ignoring the inner part of the correspondence and attending exclusively to that outer part constituted of visible actions. But the two are in harmony; and the reader who wishes further to prepare himself for dealing with our present topic from the evolution point of view may advantageously join to the foregoing more special aspect of the phenomena, the more general aspects before delineated.

After this passing remark, I recur to the main proposition set forth in these two chapters, which has, I think, been fully justified. Guided by the truth that as the conduct with which ethics deals is part of conduct at large, conduct at large must be generally understood before this part can be specially understood; and guided by the further truth that to understand conduct at large we must understand the evolution of conduct; we have been led to see that ethics has for its subject matter, that form which universal conduct assumes during the last stages of its evolution. We have also concluded that these last stages in the evolution of conduct are those displayed by the highest type of being, when he is forced, by increase of numbers, to live more and more in presence of his fellows. And there has followed the corollary that conduct

gains ethical sanction in proportion as the activities, becoming less and less militant and more and more industrial, are such as do not necessitate mutual injury or hindrance, but consist with, and are furthered by cooperation and mutual aid.

These implications of the evolution hypothesis, we shall now see harmonize with the leading moral ideas men have otherwise reached.

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CHAPTER III.

GOOD AND BAD CONDUCT.↩

§ 8. By comparing its meanings in different connections and observing what they have in common, we learn the essential meaning of a word; and the essential meaning of a word that is variously applied, may best be learnt by comparing with one another those applications of it which diverge most widely. Let us thus ascertain what good and bad mean.

In which cases do we distinguish as good, a knife, a gun, a house? And what trait leads us to speak of a bad umbrella or a bad pair of boots? The characters here predicated by the words good and bad, are not intrinsic characters; for apart from human wants, such things have neither merits nor demerits. We call these articles good or bad according as they are well or ill adapted to achieve prescribed ends. The good knife is one which will cut; the good gun is one which carries far and true; the good house is one which duly yields the shelter, comfort, and accommodation sought for. Conversely the badness alleged of the umbrella or the pair of boots, refers to their failures in fulfilling the ends of keeping off the rain and comfortably protecting the feet, with due regard to appearances. So is it when we pass from inanimate objects to inanimate actions. We call a day bad in which storms prevent us from satisfying certain of our desires. A good season is the expression used when the weather has favored the production of valuable crops. If from lifeless things and actions we pass to living ones, we similarly find that these words in their current applications refer to efficient subservience. The goodness or badness of a pointer or a hunter, of a sheep or an ox, ignoring all other attributes of these creatures, refers in the one case to the fitness of their actions for effecting the ends men use them for, and in the other case to the qualities of their flesh as adapting it to support human life. And those doings of men which, morally considered, are indifferent, we class as good or bad according to their success or failure. A good jump is a jump which, remoter ends ignored, well achieves the immediate purpose of a jump; and a stroke at billiards is called good when the movements are skillfully adjusted to the requirements. Oppositely the badness of a walk that is shuffling and an utterance that is indistinct, is alleged because of the relative nonadaptations of the acts to the ends.

Thus recognizing the meanings of good and bad as otherwise used, we shall understand better their meanings as used in characterizing conduct under its ethical aspects. Here, too, observation shows that we apply them according as the adjustments of acts to ends are, or are not, efficient. This truth is somewhat disguised. The entanglement of social relations is such, that men’s actions often simultaneously affect the welfares of self, of offspring, and of fellow citizens. Hence results confusion in judging of actions as good or bad; since actions well fitted to achieve ends of one order, may prevent ends of the other orders from being achieved. Nevertheless, when we disentangle the three orders of ends, and consider each separately it becomes clear that the conduct which achieves each kind of end is regarded as relatively good; and is regarded as relatively bad if it fails to achieve it.

Take first the primary set of adjustments–those subserving individual life. Apart from approval or disapproval of his ulterior aims, a man who fights is said to make a good defense, if his defense is well adapted for self-preservation; and, the judgments on other aspects of his conduct remaining the same, he brings down on himself an unfavorable verdict, in so far as his immediate acts are concerned, if these are futile. The goodness ascribed to a man of business, as such, is measured by the activity and ability with which he buys and sells to advantage; and may coexist with a hard treatment of dependents which is reprobated. Though in repeatedly lending money to a friend who sinks one loan after another, a man is doing that which, considered in itself is held praiseworthy; yet, if he does it to the extent of bringing on his own ruin, he is held blameworthy for a self-sacrifice carried too far. And thus is it with the opinions we express from hour to hour on those acts of people around which bear on their health and personal welfare. "You should not have done that," is the reproof given to one who crosses the street amid a dangerous rush of vehicles. "You ought to have changed your clothes," is said to another who has taken cold after getting wet. "You were right to take a receipt"; "you were wrong to invest without advice"; are common criticisms. All such approving and disapproving utterances make the tacit assertion that, other things equal, conduct is right or wrong according as its special acts, well or ill adjusted to special ends, do or do not further the general end of self-preservation.

These ethical judgments we pass on self-regarding acts are ordinarily little emphasized; partly because the promptings of the self-regarding desires, generally strong enough, do not need moral enforcement, and partly because the promptings of the other-regarding desires, less strong, and often overridden, do need moral enforcement. Hence results a contrast. On turning to that second class of adjustments of acts to ends which subserve the rearing of offspring, we no longer find any obscurity in the application of the words good and bad to them, according as they are efficient or inefficient. The expressions good nursing and bad nursing, whether they refer to the supply of food, the quality and amount of clothing, or the due ministration to infantine wants from hour to hour, tacitly recognize as special ends which ought to be fulfilled, the furthering of the vital functions, with a view to the general end of continued life and growth. A mother is called good who, ministering to all the physical needs of her children, also adjusts her behavior in ways conducive to their mental health; and a bad father is one who either does not provide the necessaries of life for his family or otherwise acts in a manner injurious to their bodies or minds. Similarly of the education given to them, or provided for them. Goodness or badness is affirmed of it (often with little consistency however) according as its methods are so adapted to physical and psychical requirements, as to further the children’s lives for the time being, while preparing them for carrying on complete and prolonged adult life.

Most emphatic, however, are the applications of the words good and bad to conduct throughout that third division of it comprising the deeds by which men affect one another. In maintaining their own lives and fostering their offspring, men’s adjustments of acts to ends are so apt to hinder the kindred adjustments of other men, that insistence on the needful limitations has to be perpetual; and the mischiefs caused by men’s interferences with one another’s lifesubserving actions are so great, that the interdicts have to be peremptory. Hence the fact that the words good and bad have come to be specially associated with acts which further the complete living of others and acts which obstruct their complete living. Goodness, standing by itself, suggests, above all other things, the conduct of one who aids the sick in reacquiring normal vitality assists the unfortunate to recover the means of maintaining themselves, defends those who are threatened with harm in person, property or reputation, and aids whatever promises to improve the living of all his fellows. Contrariwise, badness brings to mind, as its leading correlative, the conduct of one who, in carrying on his own life, damages the lives of others by injuring their bodies, destroying their possessions, defrauding them, calumniating them.

Always, then, acts are called good or bad, according as they are well or ill adjusted to ends; and whatever inconsistency there is in our uses of the words, arises from inconsistency of the ends. Here, however, the study of conduct in general, and of the evolution of conduct, have prepared us to harmonize these interpretations. The foregoing exposition shows that the conduct to which we apply the name good, is the relatively more evolved conduct; and that bad is the name we apply to conduct which is relatively less evolved. We saw that evolution, tending ever towards self-preservation, reaches its limit when individual life is the greatest, both in length and breadth; and now we see that, leaving other ends aside, we regard as good the conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad the conduct tending to self-destruction. It was shown that along with increasing power of maintaining individual life, which evolution brings, there goes increasing power of perpetuating the species by fostering progeny and that in this direction evolution reaches its limit when the needful number of young, preserved to maturity are then fit for a life that is complete in fullness and duration; and here it turns out that parental conduct is called good or bad as it approaches or falls short of this ideal result. Lastly we inferred that establishment of an associated state, both makes possible and requires a form of conduct such that life may be completed in each and in his offspring, not only without preventing completion of it in others, but with furtherance of it in others; and we have found above, that this is the form of conduct most emphatically termed good. Moreover, just as we there saw that evolution becomes the highest possible when the conduct simultaneously achieves the greatest totality of life in self, in offspring, and in fellow men; so here we see that the conduct called good rises to the conduct conceived as best, when it fulfills all three classes of ends at the same time.

§ 9. Is there any postulate involved in these judgments on conduct? Is there any assumption made in calling good the acts conducive to life, in self or others, and bad those which directly or indirectly tend towards death, special or general? Yes; an assumption of extreme significance has been made–an assumption underlying all moral estimates.

The question to be definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion, is the question of late much agitated–Is life worth living? Shall we take the pessimist view? or shall we take the optimist view? or shall we, after weighing pessimistic and optimistic arguments, conclude that the balance is in favor of a qualified optimism?

On the answer to this question depends entirely every decision concerning the goodness or badness of conduct. By those who think life is not a benefit but a misfortune, conduct which prolongs it is to be blamed rather than praised: the ending of an undesirable existence being the thing to be wished, that which causes the ending of it must be applauded; while actions furthering its continuance, either in self or others, must be reprobated. Those who, on the other hand, take an optimistic view or who, if not pure optimists, yet hold that in life the good exceeds the evil, are committed to opposite estimates; and must regard as conduct to be approved that which fosters life in self and others, and as conduct to be disapproved that which injures or endangers life in self or others.

The ultimate question, therefore, is–Has evolution been a mistake; and especially that evolution which improves the adjustment of acts to ends in ascending stages of organization? If it is held that there had better not have been any animate existence at all, and that the sooner it comes to an end the better; then one set of conclusions with respect to conduct emerges. If, contrariwise, it is held that there is a balance in favor of animate existence, and if, still further, it is held that in the future this balance may be increased; then the opposite set of conclusions emerges. Even should it be alleged that the worth of life is not to be judged by its intrinsic character, but rather by its extrinsic sequences–by certain results to be anticipated when life has passed–the ultimate issue reappears in a new shape. For though the accompanying creed may negative a deliberate shortening of life that is miserable, it cannot justify a gratuitous lengthening of such life. Legislation conducive to increased longevity would, on the pessimistic view remain blamable; while it would be praiseworthy on the optimistic view.

But now have these irreconcilable opinions anything in common? Men being divisible into two schools differing on this ultimate question, the inquiry arises–Is there anything which their radically opposed views alike take for granted? In the optimistic proposition, tacitly made when using the words good and bad after the ordinary manner; and in the pessimistic proposition overtly made, which implies that the words good and bad should be used in the reverse senses; does examination disclose any joint proposition–any proposition which, contained in both of them, may be held more certain than either–any universally asserted proposition?

§ 10. Yes, there is one postulate in which pessimists and optimists agree. Both their arguments assume it to be self-evident that life is good or bad, according as it does, or does not, bring a surplus of agreeable feeling. The pessimist says he condemns life because it results in more pain than pleasure. The optimist defends life in the belief that it brings more pleasure than pain. Each makes the kind of sentiency which accompanies life the test. They agree that the justification for life as a state of being, turns on this issue–whether the average consciousness rises above indifference-point into pleasurable feeling or falls below it into painful feeling. The implication common to their antagonist views is, that conduct should conduce to preservation of the individual, of the family and of the society only supposing that life brings more happiness than misery.

Changing the venue cannot alter the verdict. If either the pessimist, while saying that the pains of life predominate, or the optimist, while saying that the pleasures predominate, urges that the pains borne here are to be compensated by pleasures received hereafter; and that so life, whether or not justified in its immediate results, is justified in its ultimate results; the implication remains the same. The decision is still reached by balancing pleasures against pains. Animate existence would be judged by both a curse, if to a surplus of misery borne here, were added a surplus of misery to be borne hereafter. And for either to regard animate existence as a blessing, if here its pains were held to exceed its pleasures, he must hold that hereafter its pleasures will exceed its pains. Thus there is no escape from the admission that in calling good the conduct which subserves life, and bad the conduct which hinders or destroys it, and in so implying that life is a blessing and not a curse, we are inevitably asserting that conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful.

One theory only is imaginable in pursuance of which other interpretations of good and bad can be given. This theory is that men were created with the intention that they should be sources of misery to themselves; and that they are bound to continue living that their creator may have the satisfaction of contemplating their misery. Though this is not a theory avowedly entertained by many–though it is not formulated by any in this distinct way; yet not a few do accept it under a disguised form. Inferior creeds are pervaded by the belief that the sight of suffering is pleasing to the gods. Derived from bloodthirsty ancestors, such gods are naturally conceived as gratified by the infliction of pain: when living they delighted in torturing other beings; and witnessing torture is supposed still to give them delight. The implied conceptions long survive. It needs but to name Indian fakirs who hang on hooks and Eastern dervishes who gash themselves, to show that in societies considerably advanced, are still to be found many who think that submission to anguish brings divine favor. And without enlarging on fasts and penances, it will be clear that there has existed, and still exists, among Christian peoples, the belief that the Deity whom Jephthah thought to propitiate by sacrificing his daughter, may be propitiated by self-inflicted pains. Further, the conception accompanying this, that acts pleasing to self are offensive to God, has survived along with it, and still widely prevails; if not in formulated dogmas, yet in beliefs that are manifestly operative.

Doubtless, in modern days such beliefs have assumed qualified forms. The satisfaction which ferocious gods were supposed to feel in contemplating tortures, has been, in large measure, transformed into the satisfaction felt by a deity in contemplating that self-infliction of pain which is held to further eventual happiness. But clearly those who entertain this modified view are excluded from the class whose position we are here considering. Restricting ourselves to this class–supposing that from the savage who immolates victims to a cannibal god, there are descendants among the civilized, who hold that mankind were made for suffering, and that it is their duty to continue living in misery for the delight of their maker, we can only recognize the fact that devil-worshippers are not yet extinct.

Omitting people of this class, if there are any as beyond or beneath argument, we find that all others avowedly or tacitly hold that the final justification for maintaining life, can only be the reception from it of a surplus of pleasurable feeling over painful feeling; and that goodness or badness can be ascribed to acts which subserve life or hinder life, only on this supposition.

And here we are brought round to those primary meanings of the words good and bad, which we passed over when considering their secondary meanings. For on remembering that we call good and bad the things which immediately produce agreeable and disagreeable sensations, and also the sensations themselves–a good wine, a good appetite, a bad smell, a bad headache–we see that by referring directly to pleasures and pains, these meanings harmonize with those which indirectly refer to pleasures and pains. If we call good the enjoyable state itself, as a good laugh–if we call good the proximate cause of an enjoyable state, as good music–if we call good any agent which conduces immediately or remotely to an enjoyable state, as a good shop, a good teacher–if we call good considered intrinsically each act so adjusted to its end as to further self-preservation and that surplus of enjoyment which makes self-preservation desirable–if we call good every kind of conduct which aids the lives of others, and do this under the belief that life brings more happiness than misery; then it becomes undeniable that, taking into account immediate and remote effects on all persons, the good is universally the pleasurable.

§ 11. Sundry influences–moral, theological, and political–conspire to make people disguise from themselves this truth. As in narrower cases so in this widest case, they become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be) but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end. And yet cross-examination quickly compels everyone to confess the true ultimate end. Just as the miser, asked to justify himself, is obliged to allege the power of money to purchase desirable things, as his reason for prizing it; so the moralist who thinks this conduct intrinsically good and that intrinsically bad, if pushed home, has no choice but to fall back on their pleasure-giving and pain-giving effects. To prove this it needs but to observe how impossible it would be to think of them as we do, if their effects were reversed.

Suppose that gashes and bruises caused agreeable sensations, and brought in their train increased power of doing work and receiving enjoyment; should we regard assault in the same manner as at present? Or suppose that self-mutilation, say by cutting off a hand, was both intrinsically pleasant and furthered performance of the processes by which personal welfare and the welfare of dependents is achieved; should we hold as now that deliberate injury to one s own body is to be reprobated? Or again, suppose that picking a man’s pocket excited in him joyful emotions, by brightening his prospects; would theft be counted among crimes, as in existing lawbooks and moral codes? In these extreme cases, no one can deny that what we call the badness of actions is ascribed to them solely for the reason that they entail pain, immediate or remote, and would not be so ascribed did they entail pleasure.

If we examine our conceptions on their obverse side, this general fact forces itself on our attention with equal distinctness. Imagine that ministering to a sick person always increased the pains of illness. Imagine that an orphan’s relatives who took charge of it, thereby necessarily brought miseries upon it. Imagine that liquidating another man’s pecuniary claims on you redounded to his disadvantage. Imagine that crediting a man with noble behavior hindered his social welfare and consequent gratification. What should we say to these acts which now fall into the class we call praiseworthy? Should we not contrariwise class them as blameworthy?

Using, then, as our tests, these most pronounced forms of good and bad conduct, we find it unquestionable that our ideas of their goodness and badness really originate from our consciousness of the certainty or probability that they will produce pleasures or pains somewhere. And this truth is brought out with equal clearness by examining the standards of different moral schools; for analysis shows that every one of them derives its authority from this ultimate standard. Ethical systems are roughly distinguishable according as they take for their cardinal ideas (1) the character of the agent; (2) the nature of his motive; (3) the quality of his deeds; and (4) the results. Each of these may be characterized as good or bad; and those who do not estimate a mode of life by its effects on happiness, estimate it by the implied goodness or badness in the agent, in his motive, or in his deeds. We have perfection in the agent set up as a test by which conduct is to be judged. Apart from the agent we have his feeling considered as moral. And apart from the feeling we have his action considered as virtuous.

Though the distinctions thus indicated have so little definiteness that the words marking them are used interchangeably yet there correspond to them doctrines partially unlike one another; which we may here conveniently examine separately with the view of showing that all their tests of goodness are derivative.

§ 12. It is strange that a notion so abstract as that of perfection, or a certain ideal completeness of nature, should ever have been thought one from which a system of guidance can be evolved; as it was in a general way by Plato and more distinctly by Jonathan Edwards. Perfection is synonymous with goodness in the highest degree; and hence to define good conduct in terms of perfection, is indirectly to define good conduct in terms of itself. Naturally therefore, it happens that the notion of perfection like the notion of goodness can be framed only in relation to ends.

We allege imperfection of any inanimate thing, as a tool, if it lacks some part needful for effectual action, or if some part is so shaped as not to fulfill its purpose in the best manner. Perfection is alleged of a watch if it keeps exact time, however plain its case; and imperfection is alleged of it because of inaccurate timekeeping, however beautifully it is ornamented. Though we call things imperfect if we detect in them any injuries or flaws, even when these do not detract from efficiency; yet we do this because they imply that inferior workmanship, or that wear and tear, with which inefficiency is commonly joined in experience: absence of minor imperfections being habitually associated with absence of major imperfections.

As applied to living things, the word perfection has the same meaning. The idea of perfect shape in a race horse is derived by generalization from those observed traits of race horses which have usually gone along with attainment of the highest speed; and the idea of perfect constitution in a race horse similarly refers to the endurance which enables him to continue that speed for the longest time. With men, physically considered, it is the same: we are able to furnish no other test of perfection, than that of complete power in all the organs to fulfill their respective functions. That our conception of perfect balance among the internal parts, and of perfect proportion among the external parts, originates thus, is made clear by observing that imperfection of any viscus, as lungs, heart, or liver, is ascribed for no other reason than inability to meet in full the demands which the activities of the organism make on it; and on observing that the conception of insufficient size, or of too great size, in a limb, is derived from accumulated experiences respecting that ratio among the limbs which furthers in the highest degree the performance of all needful actions.

And of perfection in mental nature we have no other measure. If imperfection of memory of judgment, of temper, is alleged, it is alleged because of inadequacy to the requirements of life; and to imagine a perfect balance of the intellectual powers and of the emotions, is to imagine that proportion among them which ensures an entire discharge of each and every obligation as the occasion calls for it.

So that the perfection of man considered as an agent, means the being constituted for effecting complete adjustment of acts to ends of every kind. And since, as shown above, the complete adjustment of acts to ends is that which both secures and constitutes the life that is most evolved, alike in breadth and length; while, as also shown, the justification for whatever increases life is the reception from life of more happiness than misery; it follows that conduciveness to happiness is the ultimate test of perfection in a man’s nature. To be fully convinced of this it needs but to observe how the proposition looks when inverted. It needs but to suppose that every approach towards perfection involved greater misery to self, or others, or both, to show by opposition that approach to perfection really means approach to that which secures greater happiness.

§ 13. Pass we now from the view of those who make excellence of being the standard, to the view of those who make virtuousness of action the standard. I do not here refer to moralists who, having decided empirically or rationally inductively or deductively that acts of certain kinds have the character we call virtuous, argue that such acts are to be performed without regard to proximate consequences: these have ample justification. But I refer to moralists who suppose themselves to have conceptions of virtue as an end, underived from any other end–who think that the idea of virtue is not resolvable into simpler ideas.

This is the doctrine which appears to have been entertained by Aristotle. I say appears to have been, because his statements are far from consistent with one another. Recognizing happiness as the supreme end of human endeavor, it would at first sight seem that he cannot be taken as typical of those who make virtue the supreme end. Yet he puts himself in this category by seeking to define happiness in terms of virtue, instead of defining virtue in terms of happiness. The imperfect separation of words from things, which characterizes Greek speculation in general, seems to have been the cause of this. In primitive thought the name and the object named, are associated in such wise that the one is regarded as a part of the other–so much so, that knowing a savage’s name is considered by him as having some of his being, and a consequent power to work evil on him. This belief in a real connection between word and thing, continuing through lower stages of progress, and long surviving in the tacit assumption that the meanings of words are intrinsic, pervades the dialogues of Plato, and is traceable even in Aristotle. For otherwise it is not easy to see why he should have so incompletely dissociated the abstract idea of happiness from particular forms of happiness. Naturally where the divorcing of words as symbols, from things as symbolized, is imperfect, there must be difficulty in giving to abstract words a sufficiently abstract meaning. If in the first stages of language the concrete name cannot be separated in thought from the concrete object it belongs to, it is inferable that in the course of forming successively higher grades of abstract names, there will have to be resisted the tendency to interpret each more abstract name in terms of some one class of the less abstract names it covers. Hence, I think, the fact that Aristotle supposes happiness to be associated with some one order of human activities, rather than with all orders of human activities. Instead of including in it the pleasurable feelings accompanying actions that constitute mere living, which actions he says man has in common with vegetables; and instead of making it include the mental states which the life of external perception yields, which he says man has in common with animals at large; he excludes these from his idea of happiness, and includes in it only the modes of consciousness accompanying rational life. Asserting that the proper work of man consists in the active exercise of the mental capacities conformably to reason," he concludes that "the supreme good of man will consist in performing this work with excellence or virtue: herein he will obtain happiness." And he finds confirmation for his view in its correspondence with views previously enunciated, saying–"our notion nearly agrees with theirs who place happiness in virtue; for we say that it consists in the action of virtue; that is, not merely in the possession, but in the use."

Now the implied belief that virtue can be defined otherwise than in terms of happiness (for else the proposition is that happiness is to be obtained by actions conducive to happiness) is allied to the Platonic belief that there is an ideal or absolute good, which gives to particular and relative goods their property of goodness; and an argument analogous to that which Aristotle uses against Plato’s conception of good, may be used against his own conception of virtue. As with good so with virtue–it is not singular but plural: in Aristotle’s own classification, virtue, when treated of at large, is transformed into virtues. Those which he calls virtues, must be so called in consequence of some common character that is either intrinsic or extrinsic. We may class things together either because they are made alike by all having in themselves some peculiarity as we do vertebrate animals because they all have vertebral columns; or we may class them together because of some community in their outer relations, as when we group saws, knives, mallets, harrows, under the head of tools. Are the virtues classed as such because of some intrinsic community of nature? Then there must be identifiable a common trait in all the cardinal virtues which Aristotle specifies–"Courage, Temperance, Liberality Magnanimity. Magnificence, Meekness, Amiability or Friendliness, Thruthfulness, Justice." What now is the trait possessed in common by magnificence and meekness? and if any such common trait can be disentangled, is it that which also constitutes the essential trait in truthfulness? The answer must be–no. The virtues, then, not being classed as such because of an intrinsic community of character, must be classed as such because of something extrinsic; and this something can be nothing else than the happiness which Aristotle says consists in the practice of them. They are united by their common relation to this result; while they are not united by their inner natures.

Perhaps still more clearly may the inference be drawn thus: If virtue is primordial and independent, no reason can be given why there should be any correspondence between virtuous conduct and conduct that is pleasure-giving in its total effects on self, or others, or both; and if there is not a necessary correspondence, it is conceivable that the conduct classed as virtuous should be pain-giving in its total effects. That we may see the consequence of so conceiving it, let us take the two virtues considered as typically such in ancient times and in modern times–courage and chastity. By the hypothesis, then, courage, displayed alike in self-defense and in defense of country, is to be conceived as not only entailing pains incidentally but as being necessarily a cause of misery to the individual and to the state; while, by implication, the absence of it redounds to personal and general well-being. Similarly by the hypothesis, we have to conceive that irregular sexual relations are directly and indirectly beneficial–that adultery is conducive to domestic harmony and the careful rearing of children; while marital relations in proportion as they are persistent, generate discord between husband and wife and entail on their offspring, suffering, disease, and death. Unless it is asserted that courage and chastity could still be thought of as virtues though thus productive of misery, it must be admitted that the conceptions of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness producing conduct; and that as this holds of all the virtues, however otherwise unlike, it is from their conduciveness to happiness that they come to be classed as virtues.

§ 14. When from those ethical estimates which take perfection of nature, or virtuousness of action, as tests, we pass to those which take for test rectitude of motive, we approach the intuitional theory of morals; and we may conveniently deal with such estimates by a criticism on this theory.

By the intuitional theory I here mean, not that which recognizes as produced by the inherited effects of continued experiences, the feelings of liking and aversion we have to acts of certain kinds; but I mean the theory which regards such feelings as divinely given, and as independent of results experienced by self or ancestors. "There is therefore," says Hutcheson, "as each one by close attention and reflection may convince himself, a natural and immediate determination to approve certain affections, and actions consequent upon them"; and since, in common with others of his time, he believes in the special creation of man, and all other beings, this "natural sense of immediate excellence" he considers as a supernaturally derived guide. Though he says that the feelings and acts thus intuitively recognized as good, "all agree in one general character, of tending to the happiness of others"; yet he is obliged to conceive this as a preordained correspondence. Nevertheless, it may be shown that conduciveness to happiness, here represented as an incidental trait of the acts which receive these innate moral approvals, is really the test by which these approvals are recognized as moral. The intuitionists place confidence in these verdicts of conscience, simply because they vaguely if not distinctly perceive them to be consonant with the disclosures of that ultimate test. Observe the proof.

By the hypothesis, the wrongness of murder is known by a moral intuition which the human mind was originally constituted to yield; and the hypothesis therefore negatives the admission that this sense of its wrongness arises, immediately or remotely from the consciousness that murder involves deduction from happiness, directly and indirectly. But if you ask an adherent of this doctrine to contrast his intuition with that of the Fijian, who, considering murder an honorable action, is restless until he has distinguished himself by killing someone; and if you inquire of him in what way the civilized intuition is to be justified in opposition to the intuition of the savage; no course is open save that of showing how conformity to the one conduces to well-being, while conformity to the other entails suffering, individual and general. When asked why the moral sense which tells him that it is wrong to take another man’s goods, should be obeyed rather than the moral sense of a Turcoman, who proves how meritorious he considers theft to be by making pilgrimages to the tombs of noted robbers to make offerings; the intuitionist can do nothing but urge that, certainly under conditions like ours, if not also under conditions like those of the Turkomans, disregard of men’s claims to their property not only inflicts immediate misery, but involves a social state inconsistent with happiness. Or if, again, there is required from him a justification for his feeling of repugnance to lying, in contrast with the feeling of an Egyptian, who prides himself on skill in lying (even thinking it praiseworthy to deceive without any further end than that of practicing deception); he can do no more than point to the social prosperity furthered by entire trust between man and man, and the social disorganization that follows universal untruthfulness–consequences that are necessarily conducive to agreeable feelings and disagreeable feelings respectively.

The unavoidable conclusion is, then, that the intuitionist does not, and cannot, ignore the ultimate derivations of right and wrong from pleasure and pain. However much he may be guided, and rightly guided, by the decisions of conscience respecting the characters of acts; he has come to have confidence in these decisions because he perceives, vaguely but positively that conformity to them furthers the welfare of himself and others, and that disregard of them entails in the long-run suffering on all. Require him to name any moral-sense judgment by which he knows as right, some kind of act that will bring a surplus of pain, taking into account the totals in this life and in any assumed other life, and you find him unable to name one: a fact proving that underneath all these intuitions respecting the goodness or badness of acts, there lies the fundamental assumption that acts are good or bad according as their aggregate effects increase men’s happiness or increase their misery.

§ 15. It is curious to see how the devil worship of the savage, surviving in various disguises among the civilized, and leaving as one of its products that asceticism which in many forms and degrees still prevails widely is to be found influencing in marked ways, men who have apparently emancipated themselves, not only from primitive superstitions but from more developed superstitions. Views of life and conduct which originated with those who propitiated deified ancestors by self-tortures, enter even still into the ethical theories of many persons who have years since cast away the theology of the past, and suppose themselves to be no longer influenced by it.

In the writings of one who rejects dogmatic Christianity together with the Hebrew cult which preceded it, a career of conquest costing tens of thousands of lives, is narrated with a sympathy comparable to that rejoicing which the Hebrew traditions show us over destruction of enemies in the name of God. You may find, too, a delight in contemplating the exercise of despotic power, joined with insistence on the salutariness of a state in which the wills of slaves and citizens, are humbly subject to the wills of masters and rules–a sentiment also reminding us of that ancient Oriental life which biblical narratives portray. Along with this worship of the strong man–along with this justification of whatever force may be needed for carrying out his ambition–along with this yearning for a form of society in which supremacy of the few is unrestrained and the virtue of the many consists in obedience to them; we not unnaturally find repudiation of the ethical theory which takes, in some shape or other, the greatest happiness as the end of conduct: we not unnaturally find this utilitarian philosophy designated by the contemptuous title of "pig-philosophy". And then, serving to show what comprehension there has been of the philosophy so nicknamed, we are told that not happiness but blessedness must be the end.

Obviously the implication is that blessedness is not a kind of happiness; and this implication at once suggests the question–What mode of feeling is it? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three states–painful, indifferent, or pleasurable. Does it leave the possessor at the zero point of sentiency? Then it leaves him just as he would be if he had not got it. Does it not leave him at the zero point? Then it must leave him below zero or above zero.

Each of these possibilities may be conceived under two forms. That to which the term blessedness is applied, may be a particular state of consciousness–one among the many states that occur; and on this supposition we have to recognize it as a pleasurable state, an indifferent state, or a painful state. Otherwise, blessedness is a word not applicable to a particular state of consciousness, but characterizes the aggregate of its states; and in this case the average of the aggregate is to be conceived as one in which the pleasurable predominates, or one in which the painful predominates, or one in which pleasures and pains exactly cancel one another. Let us take in turn these two imaginable applications of the word.

"Blessed are the merciful"; "Blessed are the peacemakers"; "Blessed is he that considereth the poor"; are sayings which we may fairly take as conveying the accepted meaning of blessedness. What now shall we say of one who is, for the time being, blessed in performing an act of mercy? Is his mental state pleasurable? If so the hypothesis is abandoned: blessedness is a particular form of happiness. Is the state indifferent or painful? In that case the blessed man is so devoid of sympathy that relieving another from pain, or the fear of pain, leaves him either wholly unmoved, or gives him an unpleasant emotion. Again, if one who is blessed in making peace receives no gratification from the act, then seeing men injure each other does not affect him at all, or gives him a pleasure which is changed into a pain when he prevents the injury. Once more, to say that the blessedness of one who "considereth the poor" implies no agreeable feeling, is to say that his consideration for the poor leaves him without feeling or entails on him a disagreeable feeling. So that if blessedness is a particular mode of consciousness temporarily existing as a concomitant of each kind of beneficent action, those who deny that it is a pleasure, or constituent of happiness, confess themselves either not pleased by the welfare of others or displeased by it.

Otherwise understood, blessedness must, as we have seen, refer to the totality of feelings experienced during the life of one who occupies himself with the actions the word connotes. This also presents the three possibilities–surplus of pleasures, surplus of pains, equality of the two. If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by the relative amount, or the quality of its pleasures: it is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end; and the assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness, lapses. If the blessed life is one in which the pleasures and pains received balance one another, so producing an average that is indifferent; or if it is one in which the pleasures are outbalanced by the pains; then the blessed life has the character which the pessimist alleges of life at large, and therefore regards it as cursed. Annihilation is best, he will argue; since if an average that is indifferent is the outcome of the blessed life, annihilation at once achieves it; and if a surplus of suffering is the outcome of this highest kind of life called blessed, still more should life in general be ended.

A possible rejoinder must be named and disposed of. While it is admitted that the particular kind of consciousness accompanying conduct that is blessed, is pleasurable; it may be contended that pursuance of this conduct and receipt of the pleasure, brings by the implied self-denial, and persistent effort, and perhaps bodily injury, a suffering that exceeds it in amount. And it may then be urged that blessedness, characterized by this excess of aggregate pains over aggregate pleasures, should nevertheless be pursued as an end, rather than the happiness constituted by excess of pleasures over pains. But now, defensible though this conception of blessedness may be when limited to one individual, or some individuals, it becomes indefensible when extended to all individuals; as it must be if blessedness is taken for the end of conduct. To see this we need but ask for what purpose are these pains in excess of pleasures to be borne. Blessedness being the ideal state for all persons; and the self-sacrifices made by each person in pursuance of this ideal state, having for their end to help all other persons in achieving the like ideal state; it results that the blessed though painful state of each, is to be acquired by furthering the like blessed though painful states of others: the blessed consciousness is to be constituted by the contemplation of their consciousness in a condition of average suffering. Does any one accept this inference? If not, his rejection of it involves the admission that the motive for bearing pains in performing acts called blessed, is not the obtaining for others like pains of blessedness, but the obtaining of pleasures for others; and that thus pleasure somewhere is the tacitly implied ultimate end.

In brief, then, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence, increased happiness, positive or negative, in some consciousness or other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called blessed, are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in the actor.

§ 16. To make clear the meaning of the general argument set forth in this chapter, its successive parts must be briefly summarized.

That which in the last chapter we found to be highly evolved conduct, is that which, in this chapter, we find to be what is called good conduct; and the ideal goal to the natural evolution of conduct there recognized, we here recognize as the ideal standard of conduct ethically considered.

The acts adjusted to ends, which while constituting the outer visible life from moment to moment further the continuance of life, we saw become, as evolution progresses, better adjusted; until finally they make the life of each individual entire in length and breadth, at the same time that they efficiently subserve the rearing of young, and do both these not only without hindering other individuals from doing the like, but while giving aid to them in doing the like. And here we see that goodness is asserted of such conduct under each of these three aspects. Other things equal, well-adjusted self-conserving acts we call good; other things equal, we call good the acts that are well adjusted for bringing up progeny capable of complete living; and other things equal, we ascribe goodness to acts which further the complete living of others.

This judging as good, conduct which conduces to life in each and all, we found to involve the assumption that animate existence is desirable. By the pessimist, conduct which subserves life cannot consistently be called good: to call it good implies some form of optimism. We saw however, that pessimists and optimists both start with the postulate that life is a blessing or a curse, according as the average consciousness accompanying it is pleasurable or painful. And since avowed or implied pessimists, and optimists of one or other shade, taken together constitute all men, it results that this postulate is universally accepted. Whence it follows that if we call good the conduct conducive to life, we can do so only with the implication that it is conducive to a surplus of pleasures over pains.

The truth that conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results, to self or others or both, are pleasurable or painful, we found on examination to be involved in all the current judgments on conduct: the proof being that reversing the applications of the words creates absurdities. And we found that every other proposed standard of conduct derives its authority from this standard. Whether perfection of nature is the assigned proper aim, or vituousness of action, or rectitude of motive, we saw that definition of the perfection, the virtue, the rectitude, inevitably brings us down to happiness experienced in some form, at some time, by some person, as the fundamental idea. Nor could we discover any intelligible conception of blessedness, save one which implies a raising of consciousness, individual or general, to a happier state; either by mitigating pains or increasing pleasures.

Even with those who judge of conduct from the religious point of view rather than from the ethical point of view it is the same. Men who seek to propitiate God by inflicting pains on themselves, or refrain from pleasures to avoid offending him, do so to escape greater ultimate pains or to get greater ultimate pleasures. If by positive or negative suffering here, they expected to achieve more suffering hereafter, they would not do as they do. That which they now think duty they would not think duty if it promised eternal misery instead of eternal happiness. Nay, if there be any who believe that human beings were created to be unhappy and that they ought to continue living to display their unhappiness for the satisfaction of their creator, such believers are obliged to use this standard of judgment; for the pleasure of their diabolical god is the end to be achieved.

So that no school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling called by whatever name–gratification, enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception. It is as much a necessary form of moral intuition as space is a necessary form of intellectual intuition.[1]

[I-47]

CHAPTER IV.

WAYS OF JUDGING CONDUCT.↩

§ 17. Intellectual progress is by no one trait so adequately characterized, as by development of the idea of causation; since development of this idea involves development of so many other ideas. Before any way can be made, thought and language must have advanced far enough to render properties or attributes thinkable as such, apart from objects; which, in low stages of human intelligence, they are not. Again, even the simplest notion of cause, as we understand it, can be reached only after many like instances have been grouped into a simple generalization; and through all ascending steps, higher notions of causation imply wider notions of generality. Further, as there must be clustered in the mind, concrete causes of many kinds before there can emerge the conception of cause, apart from particular causes; it follows that progress in abstractness of thought is implied. Concomitantly, there is implied the recognition of constant relations among phenomena, generating ideas of uniformity of sequence and of coexistence–the idea of natural law. These advances can go on only as fast as perceptions and resulting thoughts, are made definite by the use of measures; serving to familiarize the mind with exact correspondence, truth, certainty. And only when growing science accumulates examples of quantitative relations, foreseen and verified, throughout a widening range of phenomena, does causation come to be conceived as necessary and universal. So that though all these cardinal conceptions aid one another in developing, we may properly say that the conception of causation especially depends for its development on the developments of the rest; and therefore is the best measure of intellectual development at large.

How slowly as a consequence of its dependence, the conception of causation evolves, a glance at the evidence shows. We hear with surprise of the savage who, falling down a precipice, ascribes the failure of his foothold to a malicious demon; and we smile at the kindred notion of the ancient Greek, that his death was prevented by a goddess who unfastened for him the thong of the helmet by which his enemy was dragging him. But daily without surprise, we hear men who describe themselves as saved from shipwreck by "divine interposition," who speak of having "providentially" missed a train which met with a fatal disaster, and who call it a "mercy" to have escaped injury from a falling chimney pot–men who, in such cases, recognize physical causation no more than do the uncivilized or semicivilized. The Veddah who thinks that failure to hit an animal with his arrow resulted from inadequate invocation of an ancestral spirit, and the Christian priest who says prayers over a sick man in the expectation that the course of his disease will so be stayed, differ only in respect of the agent from whom they expect supernatural aid and the phenomena to be altered by him: the necessary relations among causes and effects are tacitly ignored by the last as much as by the first. Deficient belief in causation is, indeed, exemplified even in those whose discipline has been specially fitted to generate this belief–even in men of science. For a generation after geologists had become uniformitarians in geology they remained catastrophists in biology: while recognizing none but natural agencies in the genesis of the earth’s crust, they ascribed to supernatural agency the genesis of the organisms on its surface. Nay more–among those who are convinced that living things in genera have been evolved by the continued interaction of forces everywhere operating, there are some who make an exception of man; or who, if they admit that his body has been evolved in the same manner as the bodies of other creatures, allege that his mind has been not evolved but specially created. If, then, universal and necessary causation is only now approaching full recognition, even by those whose investigations are daily reillustrating it, we may expect to find it very little recognized among men at large, whose culture has not been calculated to impress them with it; and we may expect to find it least recognized by them in respect of those classes of phenomena amid which, in consequence of their complexity, causation is most difficult to trace–the psychical, the social, the moral.

Why do I here make these reflections on what seems an irrelevant subject? I do it because on studying the various ethical theories, I am struck with the fact that they are all characterized either by entire absence of the idea of causation, or by inadequate presence of it. Whether theological, political, intuitional, or utilitarian, they all display if not in the same degree, still, each in a large degree, the defects which result from this lack. We will consider them in the order named.

§ 18. The school of morals properly to be considered as the still-extant representative of the most ancient school, is that which recognizes no other rule of conduct than the alleged will of God. It originates with the savage whose only restraint beyond fear of his fellow man, is fear of an ancestral spirit; and whose notion of moral duty as distinguished from his notion of social prudence, arises from this fear. Here the ethical doctrine and the religious doctrine are identical–have in no degree differentiated.

This primitive form of ethical doctrine, changed only by the gradual dying out multitudinous minor supernatural agents and accompanying development of one universal supernatural agent, survives in great strength down to our own day. Religious creeds, established and dissenting, all embody the belief that right and wrong are right and wrong simply in virtue of divine enactment. And this tacit assumption has passed from systems of theology into systems of morality; or rather, let us say that moral systems in early stages of development, little differentiated from the accompanying theological systems, have participated in this assumption. We see this in the works of the Stoics, as well as in the works of certain Christian moralists. Among recent ones I may instance the Essays on the Principles of Morality, by Jonathan Dymond, a Quaker, which makes "the authority of the Deity the sole ground of duty and His communicated will the only ultimate standard of right and wrong." Nor is it by writers belonging to so relatively unphilosophical a sect only, that this view is held; it is held with a difference by writers belonging to sects contrariwise distinguished. For these assert that in the absence of belief in a deity, there would be no moral guidance; and this amounts to asserting that moral truths have no other origin than the will of God, which, if not considered as revealed in sacred writings, must be considered as revealed in conscience.

This assumption when examined, proves to be suicidal. If there are no other origins for right and wrong than this enunciated or intuited divine will, then, as alleged, were there no knowledge of the divine will, the acts now known as wrong would not be known as wrong. But if men did not know such acts to be wrong because contrary to the divine will, and so, in committing them, did not offend by disobedience; and if they could not otherwise know them to be wrong; then they might commit them indifferently with the acts now classed as right: the results, practically considered, would be the same. In so far as secular matters are concerned, there would be no difference between the two; for to say that in the affairs of life, any evils would arise from continuing to do the acts called wrong and ceasing to do the acts called right, is to say that these produce in themselves certain mischievous consequences and certain beneficial consequences; which is to say there is another source for moral rules than the revealed or inferred divine will: they may be established by induction from these observed consequences.

From this implication I see no escape. It must be either admitted or denied that the acts called good and the acts called bad, naturally conduce, the one to human well-being and the other to human ill-being. Is it admitted? Then the admission amounts to an assertion that the conduciveness is shown by experience; and this involves abandonment of the doctrine that there is no origin for morals apart from divine injunctions. Is it denied, that acts classed as good and bad differ in their effects? Then it is tacitly affirmed that human affairs would go on just as well in ignorance of the distinction; and the alleged need for commandments from God disappears.

And here we see how entirely wanting is the conception of cause. This notion that such and such actions are made respectively good and bad simply by divine injunction, is tantamount to the notion that such and such actions have not in the nature of things such and such kinds of effects. If there is not an unconsciousness of causation there is an ignoring of it.

§ 19. Following Plato and Aristotle, who make state enactments the sources of right and wrong; and following Hobbes, who holds that there can be neither justice nor injustice till a regularly constituted coercive power exists to issue and enforce commands; not a few modern thinkers hold that there is no other origin for good and bad in conduct than law. And this implies the belief that moral obligation originates with acts of Parliament, and can be changed this way or that way by majorities. They ridicule the idea that men have any natural rights, and allege that rights are wholly results of convention: the necessary implication being that duties are so too. Before considering whether this theory coheres with outside truths, let us observe how far it is coherent within itself.

In pursuance of his argument that rights and duties originate with established social arrangements, Hobbes says–

Where no covenant hath preceded, there hath no right been transferred, and every man has right to every thing; and consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust; and the definition of injustice, is no other than the not performance of covenant. And whatsoever is not unjust, is just. . . . Therefore before the names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment, greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant.[2]

In this paragraph the essential propositions are: justice is fulfillment of covenant; fulfillment of covenant implies a power enforcing it: "just and unjust can have no place" unless men are compelled to perform their covenants. But this is to say that men cannot perform their covenants without compulsion. Grant that justice is performance of covenant. Now suppose it to be performed voluntarily: there is justice. In such case, however, there is justice in the absence of coercion; which is contrary to the hypothesis. The only conceivable rejoinder is an absurd one: voluntary performance of covenant is impossible. Assert this, and the doctrine that right and wrong come into existence with the establishment of sovereignty is defensible. Decline to assert it, and the doctrine vanishes.

From inner incongruities pass now to outer ones. The justification for his doctrine of absolute civil authority as the source of rules of conduct, Hobbes seeks in the miseries entailed by the chronic war between man and man which must exist in the absence of society; holding that under any kind of government a better life is possible than in the state of nature. Now whether we accept the gratuitous and baseless theory that men surrendered their liberties to a sovereign power of some kind, with a view to the promised increase of satisfactions; or whether we accept the rational theory. inductively based, that a state of political subordination gradually became established through experience of the increased satisfactions derived under it; it equally remains obvious that the acts of the sovereign power have no other warrant than their subservience to the purpose for which it came into existence. The necessities which initiate government, themselves prescribe the actions of government. If its actions do not respond to the necessities, they are unwarranted. The authority of law is, then, by the hypothesis, derived; and can never transcend the authority of that from which it is derived. If general good, or welfare, or utility, is the supreme end; and if state enactments are justified as means to this supreme end; then, state enactments have such authority only as arises from conduciveness to this supreme end. When they are right, it is only because the original authority endorses them; and they are wrong if they do not bear its endorsement. That is to say, conduct cannot be made good or bad by law; but its goodness or badness is to the last determined by its effects as naturally furthering, or not furthering, the lives of citizens.

Still more when considered in the concrete, than when considered in the abstract, do the views of Hobbes and his disciples prove to be inconsistent. Joining in the general belief that without such security for life as enables men to go fearlessly about their business, there can be neither happiness nor prosperity individual or general, they agree that measures for preventing murder, manslaughter, assault, &c., are requisite; and they advocate this or that penal system as furnishing the best deterrents: so arguing, both in respect of the evils and the remedies, that such and such causes will, by the nature of things, produce such and such effects. They recognize as inferable a priori, the truth that men will not lay by property unless they can count with great probability on reaping advantages from it; that consequently where robbery is unchecked, or where a rapacious ruler appropriates whatever earnings his subjects do not effectually hide, production will scarcely exceed immediate consumption; and that necessarily there will be none of that accumulation of capital required for social development, with all its aids to welfare. In neither case, however, do they perceive that they are tacitly asserting the need of certain restraints on conduct as deducible from the necessary conditions to complete life in the social state; and are so making the authority of law derivative and not original.

If it be said by any belonging to this school, that certain moral obligations to be distinguished as cardinal, must be admitted to have a basis deeper than legislation, and that it is for legislation not to create but merely to enforce them–if, I say, admitting this, they go on to allege a legislative origin for minor claims and duties; then we have the implication that whereas some kinds of conduct do, in the nature of things, tend to work out certain kinds of results, other kinds of conduct do not, in the nature of things, tend to work out certain kinds of results. While of these acts the natural good or bad consequences must be allowed, it may be denied of those acts that they have naturally good or bad consequences. Only after asserting this can it be consistently asserted that acts of the last class are made right or wrong by law. For if such acts have any intrinsic tendencies to produce beneficial or mischievous effects, then these intrinsic tendencies furnish the warrant for legislative requirements or interdicts; and to say that the requirements or interdicts make them right or wrong, is to say that they have no intrinsic tendencies to produce beneficial or mischievous effects.

Here, then, we have another theory betraying deficient consciousness of causation. An adequate consciousness of causation yields the irresistible belief that from the most serious to the most trivial actions of men in society, there must flow consequences which, quite apart from legal agency, conduce to well-being or ill-being in greater or smaller degrees. If murders are socially injurious whether forbidden by law or not–if one man’s appropriation of another’s gains by force, brings special and general evils, whether it is or is not contrary to a ruler’s edicts–if nonfulfillment of contract, if cheating, if adulteration, work mischiefs on a community in proportion as they are common, quite irrespective of prohibitions; then, is it not manifest that the like holds throughout all the details of men’s behavior? Is it not clear that when legislation insists on certain acts which have naturally beneficial effects, and forbids others that have naturally injurious effects, the acts are not made good or bad by legislation; but the legislation derived its authority from the natural effects of the acts? Nonrecognition of this implies nonrecognition of natural causation.

§ 20. Nor is it otherwise with the pure intuitionists, who hold that moral perceptions are innate in the original sense–thinkers whose view is that men have been divinely endowed with moral faculties; not that these have resulted from inherited modifications caused by accumulated experiences.

To affirm that we know some things to be right and other things to be wrong, by virtue of a supernaturally given conscience; and thus tacitly to affirm that we do not otherwise know right from wrong; is tacitly to deny any natural relations between acts and results. For if there exist any such relations, then we may ascertain by induction, or deduction, or both, what these are. And if it be admitted that because of such natural relations, happiness is produced by this kind of conduct, which is therefore to be approved, while misery is produced by that kind of conduct, which is therefore to be condemned; then it is admitted that the rightness or wrongness of actions is determinable, and must finally be determined, by the goodness or badness of the effects that flow from them; which is contrary to the hypothesis.

It may indeed, be rejoined that effects are deliberately ignored by this school; which teaches that courses recognized by moral intuition as right, must be pursued without regard to consequences. But on inquiry it turns out that the consequences to be disregarded are particular consequences and not general consequences. When, for example, it is said that property lost by another ought to be restored irrespective of evil to the finder, who possibly may by restoring it, lose that which would have preserved him from starvation; it is meant that in pursuance of the principle, the immediate and special consequences must be disregarded, not the diffused and remote consequences. By which we are shown that though the theory forbids overt recognition of causation, there is an unavowed recognition of it.

And this implies the trait to which I am drawing attention. The conception of natural causation is so imperfectly developed, that there is only an indistinct consciousness that throughout the whole of human conduct, necessary relations of causes and effects prevail; and that from them are ultimately derived all moral rules, however much these may be proximately derived from moral intuitions.

§ 21. Strange to say, even the utilitarian school, which, at first sight, appears to be distinguished from the rest by recognizing natural causation, is, if not so far from complete recognition of it, yet very far.

Conduct, according to its theory is to be estimated by observation of results. When, in sufficiently numerous cases, it has been found that behavior of this kind works evil while behavior of that kind works good, these kinds of behavior are to be judged as wrong and right respectively. Now though it seems that the origin of moral rules in natural causes, is thus asserted by implication, it is but partially asserted. The implication is simply that we are to ascertain by induction that such and such mischiefs or benefits do go along with such and such acts; and are then to infer that the like relations will hold in future. But acceptance of these generalizations and the inferences from them, does not amount to recognition of causation in the full sense of the word. So long as only some relation between cause and effect in conduct is recognized, and not the relation, a completely scientific form of knowledge has not been reached. At present, utilitarians pay no attention to this distinction. Even when it is pointed out, they disregard the fact that empirical utilitarianism is but a transitional form to be passed through on the way to rational utilitarianism.

In a letter to Mr. Mill, written some sixteen years ago, repudiating the title anti-utilitarian which he had applied to me (a letter subsequently published in Mr. Bain’s work on Mental and Moral Science), I endeavored to make clear the difference above indicated; and I must here quote certain passages from that letter.

The view for which I contend is, that morality properly so-called–the science of right conduct–has for its object to determine how and why certain modes of conduct are detrimental, and certain other modes beneficial. These good and bad results cannot be accidental, but must be necessary consequences of the constitution of things; and 1 conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recognized as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimation of happiness or misery

Perhaps an analogy will most clearly show my meaning. During its early stages, planetary astronomy consisted of nothing more than accumulated observations respecting the positions and motions of the sun and planets; from which accumulated observations it came by and by to be empirically predicted, with an approach to truth, that certain of the heavenly bodies would have certain positions at certain times. But the modern science of planetary astronomy consists of deductions from the law of gravitation–deductions showing why the celestial bodies necessarily occupy certain places at certain times. Now, the kind of relation which thus exists between ancient and modern astronomy, is analogous to the kind of relation which, I conceive, exists between the expediency morality and moral science properly so-called. And the objection which I have to the current utilitarianism is, that it recognizes no more developed form of morality–does not see that it has reached but the initial stage of moral science.

Doubtless if utilitarians are asked whether it can be by mere chance that this kind of action works evil and that works good, they will answer no; they will admit that such sequences are parts of a necessary order among phenomena. But though this truth is beyond question; and though if there are causal relations between acts and their results, rules of conduct can become scientific only when they are deduced from these causal relations; there continues to be entire satisfaction with that form of utilitarianism in which these causal relations are practically ignored. It is supposed that in future, as now, utility is to be determined only by observation of results; and that there is no possibility of knowing by deduction from fundamental principles, what conduct must be detrimental and what conduct must be beneficial.

§ 22. To make more specific that conception of ethical science here indicated, let me present it under a concrete aspect; beginning with a simple illustration and complicating this illustration by successive steps.

If, by tying its main artery, we stop most of the blood going to a limb, then, for as long as the limb performs its function, those parts which are called into play must be wasted faster than they are repaired: whence eventual disablement. The relation between due receipt of nutritive matters through its arteries, and due discharge of its duties by the limb, is a part of the physical order. If, instead of cutting off the supply to a particular limb, we bleed the patient largely, so drafting away the materials needed for repairing not one limb but all limbs, and not limbs only but viscera, there results both a muscular debility and an enfeeblement of the vital functions. Here, again, cause and effect are necessarily related. The mischief that results from great depletion, results apart from any divine command, or political enactment, or moral intuition. Now advance a step. Suppose the man to be prevented from taking in enough of the solid and liquid food containing those substances continually abstracted from his blood in repairing his tissues: suppose he has cancer of the esophagus and cannot swallow–what happens? By this indirect depletion, as by direct depletion, he is inevitably made incapable of performing the actions of one in health. In this case, as in the other cases, the connection between cause and effect is one that cannot be established, or altered, by any authority external to the phenomena themselves. Again, let us say that instead of being stopped after passing his mouth, that which he would swallow is stopped before reaching his mouth; so that day after day the man is required to waste his tissues in getting food, and day after day the food he has got to meet this waste, he is forcibly prevented from eating. As before, the progress towards death by starvation is inevitable–the connection between acts and effects is independent of any alleged theological or political authority. And similarly if, being forced by the whip to labor, no adequate return in food is supplied to him, there are equally certain evils, equally independent of sacred or secular enactment. Pass now to those actions more commonly thought of as the occasions for rules of conduct. Let us assume the man to be continually robbed of that which was given him in exchange for his labor, and by which he was to make up for nervo-muscular expenditure and renew his powers. No less than before is the connection between conduct and consequence rooted in the constitution of things; unchangeable by state-made law, and not needing establishment by empirical generalization. If the action by which the man is affected is a stage further away from the results, or produces results of a less decisive kind, still we see the same basis for morality in the physical order. Imagine that payment for his services is made partly in bad coin; or that it is delayed beyond the date agreed upon; or that what he buys to eat is adulterated with innutritive matter. Manifestly, by any of these deeds which we condemn as unjust, and which are punished by law there is, as before, an interference with the normal adjustment of physiological repair to physiological waste. Nor is it otherwise when we pass to kinds of conduct still more remotely operative. If he is hindered from enforcing his claim–if class predominance prevents him from proceeding, or if a bribed judge gives a verdict contrary to evidence, or if a witness swears falsely; have not these deeds, though they affect him more indirectly the same original cause for their wrongness? Even with actions which work diffused and indefinite mischiefs it is the same. Suppose that the man, instead of being dealt with fraudulently, is calumniated. There is, as before, a hindrance to the carrying on of life-sustaining activities; for the loss of character detrimentally affects his business. Nor is this all. The mental depression caused partially incapacitates him for energetic activity, and perhaps brings on ill-health. So that maliciously or carelessly propagating false statements, tends both to diminish his life and to diminish his ability to maintain life. Hence its flagitiousness. Moreover, if we trace to their ultimate ramifications the effects wrought by any of these acts which morality called intuitive reprobates–if we ask what results not to the individual himself only but also to his belongings–if we observe how impoverishment hinders the rearing of his children, by entailing underfeeding or inadequate clothing, resulting perhaps in the death of some and the constitutional injury of others; we see that by the necessary connections of things these acts, besides tending primarily to lower the life of the individual aggressed upon, tend, secondarily to lower the lives of all his family and, thirdly to lower the life of society at large; which is damaged by whatever damages its units.

A more distinct meaning will now be seen in the statement that the utilitarianism which recognizes only the principles of conduct reached by induction, is but preparatory to the utilitarianism which deduces these principles from the processes of life as carried on under established conditions of existence.

§ 22a. Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset, that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general defect–they neglect ultimate causal connections. Of course I do not mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but I mean that they recognize them only incidentally. They do not erect into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statements of them.

Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently generalizes these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage at which its empirical generalizations are included in a rational generalization, does it become developed science. Astronomy has already passed through its successive stages: first collections of facts; then inductions from them; and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space. Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared, have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted that geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in the cooling and solidifying earth, exposed to the sun’s heat and the action of the moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and is still, exhibiting a like series of steps: the evolution of organic forms at large, is being affiliated on physical actions in operation from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents, are coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed of matters that are affected by certain forces and disengage other forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling ignored everything like cause, save in recognizing those effects of habit which were forced on men’s attention and expressed in proverbs; but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes: the implication being that psychology becomes a science, as fast as these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate principles. Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by stray ideas about social organization, scattered through the masses of worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognized by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalizations, are now beginning to assume the character of generalizations made coherent by derivation from causes lying in human nature placed under given conditions. Clearly, then, ethics, which is a science dealing with the conduct of associated human beings, regarded under one of its aspects, has to undergo a like transformation; and, at present undeveloped, can be considered a developed science only when it has undergone this transformation.

A preparation in the simpler sciences is presupposed. Ethics has a physical aspect; since it treats of human activities which, in common with all expenditures of energy conform to the law of the persistence of energy: moral principles must conform to physical necessities. It has a biological aspect; since it concerns certain effects, inner and outer, individual and social, of the vital changes going on in the highest type of animal. It has a psychological aspect; for its subject matter is an aggregate of actions that are prompted by feelings and guided by intelligence. And it has a sociological aspect; for these actions, some of them directly and all of them indirectly, affect associated beings.

What is the implication? Belonging under one aspect to each of these sciences–physical, biological, psychological, sociological–it can find its ultimate interpretations only in those fundamental truths which are common to all of them. Already we have concluded in a general way that conduct at large, including the conduct ethics deals with, is to be fully understood only as an aspect of evolving life; and now we are brought to this conclusion in a more special way.

§ 23. Here, then, we have to enter on the consideration of moral phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being forced to do this by finding that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has wrought out. If the entire visible universe has been evolved–if the solar system as a whole, the earth as a part of it, the life in general which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism–if the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest–if one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest creatures with which morality is concerned, also conform.

The preceding volumes have prepared the way for dealing with morals as thus conceived. Utilizing the conclusions they contain, let us now observe what data are furnished by these. We will take in succession–the physical view the biological view the psychological view and the sociological view.

[I-64]

CHAPTER V.

THE PHYSICAL VIEW.↩

§ 24. Every moment we pass instantly from men’s perceived actions to the motives implied by them; and so are led to formulate these actions in mental terms rather than in bodily terms. Thoughts and feelings are referred to when we speak of any one’s deeds with praise or blame; not those outer manifestations which reveal the thoughts and feelings. Hence we become oblivious of the truth that conduct as actually experienced, consists of changes recognized by touch, sight and hearing. This habit of contemplating only the psychical face of conduct, is so confirmed that an effort is required to contemplate only the physical face. Undeniable as it is that another’s behavior to us is made up of movements of his body and limbs, of his facial muscles, and of his vocal apparatus; it yet seems paradoxical to say that these are the only elements of conduct really known by us, while the elements of conduct which we exclusively think of as constituting it, are not known but inferred.

Here, however, ignoring for the time being the inferred elements in conduct, we have to deal with the perceived elements–we have to observe its traits considered as a set of combined motions. Taking the evolution point of view, and remembering that while an aggregate evolves, not only the matter composing it, but also the motion of that matter, passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, we have now to ask whether conduct as it rises to its higher forms, displays in increasing degrees these characters; and whether it does not display them in the greatest degree when it reaches that highest form which we call moral.

§ 25. It will be convenient to deal first with the trait of increasing coherence. The conduct of lowly organized creatures is broadly contrasted with the conduct of highly organized creatures, in having its successive portions feebly connected. The random movements which an animalcule makes, have severally no reference to movements made a moment before; nor do they affect in specific ways the movements made immediately after. Today’s wanderings of a fish in search of food, though perhaps showing by their adjustments to catching different kinds of prey at different hours, a slightly determined order, are unrelated to the wanderings of yesterday and tomorrow. But such more developed creatures as birds, show us in the building of nests, the sitting on eggs, the rearing of chicks, and the aiding of them after they fly, sets of motions which form a dependent series, extending over a considerable period. And on observing the complexity of the acts performed in fetching and fixing the fibres of the nest or in catching and bringing to the young each portion of food, we discover in the combined motions, lateral cohesion as well as longitudinal cohesion.

Man, even in his lowest state, displays in his conduct far more coherent combinations of motions. By the elaborate manipulations gone through in making weapons that are to serve for the chase next year, or in building canoes and wigwams for permanent uses–by acts of aggression and defense which are connected with injuries long since received or committed, the savage exhibits an aggregate of motions which, in some of its parts, holds together over great periods. Moreover, if we consider the many movements implied by the transactions of each day in the wood, on the water, in the camp, in the family; we see that this coherent aggregate of movements is composed of many minor aggregates, that are severally coherent within themselves and with one another. In civilized man this trait of developed conduct becomes more conspicuous still. Be his business what it may, its processes involve relatively numerous dependent motions; and day by day it is so carried on as to show connections between present motions and motions long gone by, as well as motions anticipated in the distant future. Besides the many doings, related to one another, which the farmer goes through in looking after his cattle, directing his laborers, keeping an eye on his dairy, buying his implements, selling his produce, &c.; the business of getting his lease involves numerous combined movements on which the movements of subsequent years depend; and in manuring his fields with a view to larger returns, or putting down drains with the like motive, he is performing acts which are parts of a coherent combination relatively extensive. That the like holds of the shopkeeper, manufacturer, banker, is manifest; and this increased coherence of conduct among the civilized, will strike us even more when we remember how its parts are often continued in a connected arrangement through life, for the purpose of making a fortune, founding a family, gaining a seat in Parliament.

Now mark that a greater coherence among its component motions, broadly distinguishes the conduct we call moral from the conduct we call immoral. The application of the word dissolute to the last, and of the word self-restrained to the first, implies this–implies that conduct of the lower kind, constituted of disorderly acts, has its parts relatively loose in their relations with one another; while conduct of the higher kind, habitually following a fixed order, so gains a characteristic unity and coherence. In proportion as the conduct is what we call moral, it exhibits comparatively settled connections between antecedents and consequents; for the doing right implies that under given conditions the combined motions constituting conduct will follow in a way that can be specified. Contrariwise, in the conduct of one whose principles are not high, the sequences of motions are doubtful. He may pay the money or he may not; he may keep his appointment or he may fail; he may tell the truth or he may lie. The words trustworthiness and untrustworthiness, as used to characterize the two respectively, sufficiently imply that the actions of the one can be foreknown while those of the other can not; and this implies that the successive movements composing the one bear more constant relations to one another than do those composing the other–are more coherent.

§ 26. Indefiniteness accompanies incoherence in conduct that is little evolved; and throughout the ascending stages of evolving conduct, there is an increasingly definite coordination of the motions constituting it.

Such changes of form as the rudest protozoa show us, are utterly vague–admit of no precise description; and though in higher kinds the movements of the parts are more definable, yet the movement of the whole in respect of direction is indeterminate: there is no adjustment of it to this or the other point in space. In such coelenterate animals as polypes, we see the parts moving in ways which lack precision; and in one of the locomotive forms, as a medusa, the course taken, otherwise at random, can be described only as one which carries it towards the light, where degrees of light and darkness are present. Among annulose creatures the contrast between the track of a worm, turning this way or that at hazard, and the definite course taken by a bee in its flight from flower to flower or back to the hive, shows us the same thing: the bee’s acts in building cells and feeding larvae further exhibiting precision in the simultaneous movements as well as in the successive movements. Though the motions made by a fish in pursuing its prey have considerable definiteness, yet they are of a simple kind, and are in this respect contrasted with the many definite motions of body head, and limbs gone through by a carnivorous mammal in the course of waylaying, running down, and seizing a herbivore; and further, the fish shows us none of those definitely adjusted sets of motions which in the mammal subserve the rearing of young.

Much greater definiteness, if not in the combined movements forming single acts, still in the adjustments of many combined acts to various purposes, characterizes human conduct, even in its lowest stages. In making and using weapons and in the maneuverings of savage warfare, numerous movements all precise in their adaptations to proximate ends, are arranged for the achievement of remote ends, with a precision not paralleled among lower creatures. The lives of civilized men exhibit this trait far more conspicuously. Each industrial art exemplifies the effects of movements which are severally definite; and which are definitely arranged in simultaneous and successive order. Business transactions of every kind are characterized by exact relations between the sets of motions constituting acts, and the purposes fulfilled, in time, place, and quantity. Further, the daily routine of each person shows us in its periods and amounts of activity, of rest, of relaxation, a measured arrangement which is not shown us by the doings of the wandering savage; who has no fixed times for hunting, sleeping, feeding, or any one kind of action.

Moral conduct differs from immoral conduct in the same manner and in a like degree. The conscientious man is exact in all his transactions. He supplies a precise weight for a specified sum; he gives a definite quality in fulfillment of understanding; he pays the full amount he bargained to do. In times as well as in quantities, his acts answer completely to anticipations. If he has made a business contract he is to the day; if an appointment he is to the minute. Similarly in respect to truth: his statements correspond accurately with the facts. It is thus too in his family life. He maintains marital relations that are definite in contrast with the relations that result from breach of the marriage contract; and as a father, fitting his behavior with care to the nature of each child and to the occasion, he avoids the too much and the too little of praise or blame, reward or penalty. Nor is it otherwise in his miscellaneous acts. To say that he deals equitably with those he employs, whether they behave well or ill, is to say that he adjusts his acts to their deserts; and to say that he is judicious in his charities, is to say that he portions out his aid with discrimination instead of distributing it indiscriminately to good and bad, as do those who have no adequate sense of their social responsibilities.

That progress towards rectitude of conduct is progress towards duly proportioned conduct, and that duly proportioned conduct is relatively definite, we may see from another pomt of view. One of the traits of conduct we call immoral, is excess; while moderation habitually characterizes moral conduct. Now excesses imply extreme divergences of actions from some medium, while maintenance of the medium is implied by moderation; whence it follows that actions of the last kind can be defined more nearly than those of the first. Clearly conduct which, being unrestrained, runs into great and incalculable oscillations, therein differs from restrained conduct of which, by implication, the oscillations fall within narrower limits. And falling within narrower limits necessitates relative definiteness of movements.

§ 27. That throughout the ascending forms of life, along with increasing heterogeneity of structure and function, there goes increasing heterogeneity of conduct–increasing diversity in the sets of external motions and combined sets of such motions–needs not be shown in detail. Nor need it be shown that becoming relatively great in the motions constituting the conduct of the uncivilized man, this heterogeneity has become still greater in those which the civilized man goes through. We may pass at once to that further degree of the like contrast which we see on ascending from the conduct of the immoral to that of the moral.

Instead of recognizing this contrast, most readers will be inclined to identify a moral life with a life little varied in its activities. But here we come upon a defect in the current conception of morality. This comparative uniformity in the aggregate of motions, which goes along with morality as commonly conceived, is not only not moral but is the reverse of moral. The better a man fulfills every requirement of life, alike as regards his own body and mind, as regards the bodies and minds of those dependent on him, and as regards the bodies and minds of his fellow citizens, the more varied do his activities become. The more fully he does all these things, the more heterogeneous must be his movements.

One who satisfies personal needs only goes through, other things equal, less multiform processes than one who also administers to the needs of wife and children. Supposing there are no other differences, the addition of family relations necessarily renders the actions of the man who fulfills the duties of husband and parent, more heterogeneous than those of the man who has no such duties to fulfill, or, having them, does not fulfill them; and to say that his actions are more heterogeneous is to say that there is a greater heterogeneity in the combined motions he goes through. The like holds of social obligations. These, in proportion as a citizen duly performs them, complicate his movements considerably. If he is helpful to inferiors dependent on him, if he takes a part in political agitation, if he aids in diffusing knowledge, he, in each of these ways, adds to his kinds of activity–makes his sets of movements more multiform; so different from the man who is the slave of one desire or group of desires.

Though it is unusual to consider as having a moral aspect, those activities which culture involves, yet to the few who hold that due exercise of all the higher faculties, intellectual and aesthetic, must be included in the conception of complete life, here identified with the ideally moral life, it will be manifest that a further heterogeneity is implied by them. For each of such activities, constituted by that play of these faculties which is eventually added to their life-subserving uses, adds to the multiformity of the aggregated motions.

Briefly, then, if the conduct is the best possible on every occasion, it follows that as the occasions are endlessly varied the acts will be endlessly varied to suit–the heterogeneity in the combinations of motions will be extreme.

§ 28. Evolution in conduct considered under its moral aspect, is, like all other evolution, toward equilibrium. I do not mean that it is toward the equilibrium reached at death, though this is, of course, the final state which the evolution of the highest man has in common with all lower evolution; but I mean that it is towards a moving equilibrium.

We have seen that maintaining life, expressed in physical terms, is maintaining a balanced combination of internal actions in face of external forces tending to overthrow it; and we have seen that advance towards a higher life, has been an acquirement of ability to maintain the balance for a longer period, by the successive additions of organic appliances which by their actions counteract, more and more fully, the disturbing forces. Here, then, we are led to the conclusion that the life called moral is one in which this maintenance of the moving equilibrium reaches completeness, or approaches most nearly to completeness.

This truth is clearly disclosed on observing how those physiological rhythms which vaguely show themselves when organization begins, become more regular as well as more various in their kinds, as organization advances. Periodicity is but feebly marked in the actions, inner and outer, of the rudest types. Where life is low there is passive dependence on the accidents of the environment; and this entails great irregularities in the vital processes. The taking in of food by a polype is at intervals now short, now very long, as circumstances determine; and the utilization of it is by a slow dispersion of the absorbed part through the tissues, aided only by the irregular movements of the creature’s body; while such aeration as is effected is similarly without a trace of rhythm. Much higher up we still find very imperfect periodicities; as in the inferior molluscs which, though possessed of vascular systems, have no proper circulation, but merely a slow movement of the crude blood, now in one direction through the vessels and then, after a pause, in the opposite direction. Only with well-developed structures do there come a rhythmical pulse and a rhythm of the respiratory actions. And then in birds and mammals, along with great rapidity and regularity in these essential rhythms, and along with a consequently great vital activity and therefore great expenditure, comparative regularity in the rhythm of the alimentary actions is established, as well as in the rhythm of activity and rest; since the rapid waste to which rapid pulsation and respiration are instrumental, necessitates tolerably regular supplies of nutriment, as well as recurring intervals of sleep during which repair may overtake waste. And from these stages the moving equilibrium characterized by such interdependent rhythms, is continually made better by the counteracting of more and more of those actions which tend to perturb it. So it is as we ascend from savage to civilized and from the lowest among the civilized to the highest. The rhythm of external actions required to maintain the rhythm of internal actions, becomes at once more complicated and more complete; making them into a better moving equilibrium. The irregularities which their conditions of existence entail on primitive men, continually cause wide deviations from the mean state of the moving equilibrium–wide oscillations; which imply imperfection of it for the time being, and bring about its premature overthrow. In such civilized men as we call ill-conducted, frequent perturbations of the moving equilibrium are caused by those excesses characterizing a career in which the periodicities are much broken; and a common result is that the rhythm of the internal actions being often deranged, the moving equilibrium, rendered by so much imperfect, is generally shortened in duration. While one in whom the internal rhythms are best maintained is one by whom the external actions required to fulfill all needs and duties, severally performed on the recurring occasions, conduce to a moving equilibrium that is at once involved and prolonged.

Of course the implication is that the man who thus reaches the limit of evolution, exists in a society congruous with his nature–is a man among men similarly constituted, who are severally in harmony with that social environment which they have formed. This is, indeed, the only possibility. For the production of the highest type of man, can go on only pari passu with the production of the highest type of society. The implied conditions are those before described as accompanying the most evolved conduct–conditions under which each can fulfill at his needs and rear the due number of progeny, not only without hindering others from doing the like, but while aiding them in doing the like. And evidently, considered under its physical aspect, the conduct of the individual so constituted, and associated with like individuals, is one in which all the actions, that is the combined motions of all kinds, have become such as duly to meet every daily process, every ordinary occurrence, and every contingency in his environment. Complete life in a complete society is but another name for complete equilibrium between the coordinated activities of each social unit and those of the aggregate of units.

§ 29. Even to readers of preceding volumes, and still more to other readers, there will seem a strangeness, or even an absurdity in this presentation of moral conduct in physical terms. It has been needful to make it however. If that redistribution of matter and motion constituting evolution goes on in all aggregates, its laws must be fulfilled in the most developed being as in every other thing; and his actions, when decomposed in motions, must exemplify its laws. This we find that they do. There is an entire correspondence between moral evolution and evolution as physically defined.

Conduct as actually known to us in perception and not as interpreted into the accompanying feelings and ideas, consists of combined motions. On ascending through the various grades of animate creatures, we find these combined motions characterized by increasing coherence, increasing definiteness considered singly and in their coordinated groups, and increasing heterogeneity; and in advancing from lower to higher types of man, as well as in advancing from the less moral to the more moral type of man, these traits of evolving conduct become more marked still. Further, we see that the increasing coherence, definiteness, and heterogeneity, of the combined motions, are instrumental to the better maintenance of a moving equilibrium. Where the evolution is small this is very imperfect and soon cut short; with advancing evolution, bringing greater power and intelligence, it becomes more steady and longer continued in face of adverse actions; in the human race at large it is comparatively regular and enduring; and its regularity and enduringness are greater in the highest.

[I-75]

CHAPTER VI.

THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW.↩

§ 30. The truth that the ideally moral man is one in whom the moving equilibrium is perfect, or approaches nearest to perfection, becomes, when translated into physiological language, the truth that he is one in whom the functions of all kinds are duly fulfilled. Each function has some relation, direct or indirect, to the needs of life: the fact of its existence as a result of evolution, being itself a proof that it has been entailed, immediately or remotely, by the adjustment of inner actions to outer actions. Consequently, nonfulfillment of it in normal proportion is nonfulfillment of a requisite to complete life. If there is defective discharge of the function, the organism experiences some detrimental result caused by the inadequacy. If the discharge is in excess, there is entailed a reaction upon the other functions, which in some way diminishes their efficiencies.

It is true that during full vigor, while the momentum of the organic actions is great, the disorder caused by moderate excess or defect of any one function, soon disappears–the balance is reestablished. But it is nonetheless true that always some disorder results from excess or defect, that it influences every function bodily and mental, and that it constitutes a lowering of the life for the time being.

Beyond the temporary falling short of complete life implied by undue or inadequate discharge of a function, there is entailed, as an ultimate result, decreased length of life. If some function is habitually performed in excess of the requirement, or in defect of the requirement; and if, as a consequence, there is an often-repeated perturbation of the functions at large; there results some chronic derangement in the balance of the functions. Necessarily reacting on the structures, and registering in them its accumulated effects, this derangement works a general deterioration; and when the vital energies begin to decline, the moving equilibrium, further from the perfection than it would else have been, is sooner overthrown: death is more or less premature.

Hence the moral man is one whose functions–many and varied in their kinds as we have seen–are all discharged in degrees duly adjusted to the conditions of existence.

§ 31. Strange as the conclusion looks, it is nevertheless a conclusion to be here drawn, that the performance of every function is, in a sense, a moral obligation.

It is usually thought that morality requires us only to restrain such vital activities as, in our present state, are often pushed to excess, or such as conflict with average welfare, special or general; but it also requires us to carry on these vital activities up to their normal limits. All the animal functions, in common with all the higher functions, have, as thus under-stood, their imperativeness. While recognizing the fact that in our state of transition, characterized by very imperfect adaptation of constitution to conditions, moral obligations of supreme kinds often necessitate conduct which is physically injurious; we must also recognize the fact that, considered apart from other effects, it is immoral so to treat the body as in any way to diminish the fullness or vigor of its vitality.

Hence results one test of actions. There may in every case be put the questions–Does the action tend to maintenance of complete life for the time being? And does it tend to prolongation of life to its full extent? To answer yes or no to either of these questions, is implicitly to class the action as right or wrong in respect of its immediate bearings, whatever it may be in respect of its remote bearings.

The seeming paradoxicalness of this statement results from the tendency, so difficult of avoidance, to judge a conclusion which presupposes an ideal humanity, by its applicability to humanity as now existing. The foregoing conclusion refers to that highest conduct in which, as we have seen, the evolution of conduct terminates–that conduct in which the making of all adjustments of acts to ends subserving complete individual life, together with all those subserving maintenance of offspring and preparation of them for maturity, not only consist with the making of like adjustments by others, but furthers it. And this conception of conduct in its ultimate form, implies the conception of a nature having such conduct for its spontaneous outcome–the product of its normal activities. So understanding the matter, it becomes manifest that under such conditions, any falling short of function, as well as any excess of function, implies deviation from the best conduct or from perfectly moral conduct.

§ 32. Thus far in treating of conduct from the biological point of view we have considered its constituent actions under their physiological aspects only; leaving out of sight their psychological aspects. We have recognized the bodily changes and have ignored the accompanying mental changes. And at first sight it seems needful for us here to do this; since taking account of states of consciousness, apparently implies an inclusion of the psychological view in the biological view.

This is not so, however. As we pointed out in the Principles of Psychology (secs. 52, 53), we enter upon psychology proper, only when we begin to treat of mental states and their relations, considered as referring to external agents and their relations. While we concern ourselves exclusively with modes of mind as correlatives of nervous changes, we are treating of what was there distinguished as aesthophysiology. We pass to psychology only when we consider the correspondence between the connections among subjective states and the connections among objective actions. Here, then, without transgressing the limits of our immediate topic, we may deal with feelings and functions in their mutual dependencies.

We cannot omit doing this; because the psychical changes which accompany many of the physical changes in the organism, are biological factors in two ways. Those feelings, classed as sensations, which, directly initiated in the bodily framework, go along with certain states of the vital organs and more conspicuously with certain states of the external organs, now serve mainly as guides to the performance of functions but partly as stimuli, and now serve mainly as stimuli but in a smaller degree as guides. Visual sensations which, as coordinated, enable us to direct our movements, also, if vivid, raise the rate of respiration; while sensations of cold and heat, greatly depressing or raising the vital actions, serve also for purposes of discrimination. So, too, the feelings classed as emotions, which are not localizable in the bodily framework, act in more general ways, alike as guides and stimuli–having influences over the performance of functions more potent even than have most sensations. Fear, at the same time that it urges flight and evolves the forces spent in it, also affects the heart and the alimentary canal; while joy, prompting persistence in the actions bringing it, simultaneously exalts the visceral processes.

Hence in treating of conduct under its biological aspect, we are compelled to consider that interaction of feelings and functions, which is essential to animal life in all its more developed forms.

§ 33.[3] In the Principles of Psychology, section 124, it was shown that necessarily, throughout the animate world at large, pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare"; since "it is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution, that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions." The argument was as follows:

If we substitute for the word pleasure the equivalent phrase–a feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there, and if we substitute for the word pain the equivalent phrase–a feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out; we see at once that, if the states of consciousness which a creature endeavors to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and if the states of consciousness which it endeavors to expel are the correlatives of beneficial actions, it must quickly disappear through persistence in the injurious and avoidance of the beneficial. In other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which, on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable and habitually avoided feelings went along with activities directly or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been, other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.

Fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in living things, even before consciousness arises; and after the rise of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than to become better established. At the very outset, life is maintained by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts which impede it; and whenever sentiency makes its appearance as an accompaniment, its forms must be such that in the one case the produced feeling is of a kind that will be sought–pleasure, and in the other case is of a kind that will be shunned–pain. Observe the necessity of these relations as exhibited in the concrete.

A plant which envelops a buried bone with a plexus of rootlets, or a potato which directs its blanched shoots towards a grating through which light comes into the cellar, shows us that the changes which outer agents themselves set up in its tissues are changes which aid the utilization of these agents. If we ask what would happen if a plant’s roots grew not towards the place where there was moisture but away from it, or if its leaves, enabled by light to assimilate, nevertheless bent themselves toward the darkness; we see that death would result in the absence of the existing adjustments. This general relation is still better shown in an insectivorous plant, such as the Dionoea muscipula, which keeps its trap closed round animal matter but not round other matter. Here it is manifest that the stimulus arising from the first part of the absorbed substance, itself sets up those actions by which the mass of the substance is utilized for the plant’s benefit. When we pass from vegetal organisms to unconscious animal organisms, we see a like connection between proclivity and advantage. On observing how the tentacles of a polyp attach themselves to, and begin to close round, a living creature, or some animal substance, while they are indifferent to the touch of other substance; we are similarly shown that diffusion of some of the nutritive juices into the tentacles, which is an incipient assimilation, causes the motions effecting prehension. And it is obvious that life would cease were these relations reversed. Nor is it otherwise with this fundamental connection between contact with food and taking in of food, among conscious creatures, up to the very highest. Tasting a substance implies the passage of its molecules through the mucous membrane of the tongue and palate; and this absorption, when it occurs with a substance serving for food, is but a commencement of the absorption carried on throughout the alimentary canal. Moreover, the sensation accompanying this absorption, when it is of the kind produced by food, initiates at the place where it is strongest, in front of the pharynx, an automatic act of swallowing, in a manner rudely analogous to that in which the stimulus of absorption in a polyp’s tentacles initiates prehension.

If from these processes and relations that imply contact between a creature’s surface and the substance it takes in, we turn to those set up by diffused particles of the substance, constituting to conscious creatures its odor, we meet a kindred general truth. Just as, after contact, some molecules of a mass of food are absorbed by the part touched, and excite the act of prehension; so are absorbed such of its molecules as, spreading through the water, reach the organism; and, being absorbed by it, excite those actions by which contact with the mass is effected. If the physical stimulation caused by the dispersed particles is not accompanied by consciousness, still the motor changes set up must conduce to survival of the organism if they are such as end in contact; and there must be relative innutrition and mortality of organisms in which the produced contractions do not bring about this result. Nor can it be questioned that whenever and wherever the physical stimulation has a concomitant sentiency, this must be such as consists with, and conduces to, movement towards the nutritive matter: it must be not a repulsive but an attractive sentiency. And this which holds with the lowest consciousness, must hold throughout; as we see it do in all such superior creatures as are drawn to their food by odor.

Besides those movements which cause locomotion, those which effect seizure must no less certainly become thus adjusted. The molecular changes caused by absorption of nutritive matter from organic substance in contact, or from adjacent organic substance, initiate motions which are indefinite where the organization is low, and which become more definite with the advance of organization. At the outset, while the undifferentiated protoplasm is everywhere absorbent and everywhere contractile, the changes of form initiated by the physical stimulation of adjacent nutritive matter are vague, and ineffectually adapted to utilization of it; but gradually, along with the specialization into parts that are contractile and parts that are absorbent, these motions become better adapted; for necessarily individuals in which they are least adapted disappear faster than those in which they are most adapted. Recognizing this necessity we have here especially to recognize a further necessity The relation between these stimulations and adjusted contractions must be such that increase of the one causes increase of the other; since the directions of the discharges being once established, greater stimulation causes greater contraction, and the greater contraction causing closer contact with the stimulating agent, causes increase of stimulus and is thereby itself further increased. And now we reach the corollary which more particularly concerns us. Clearly as fast as an accompanying sentiency arises, this cannot be one that is disagreeable, prompting desistance, but must be one that is agreeable, prompting persistence. The pleasurable sensation must be itself the stimulus to the contraction by which the pleasurable sensation is maintained and increased; or must be so bound up with the stimulus that the two increase together. And this relation which we see is directly established in the case of a fundamental function, must be indirectly established with all other functions; since nonestablishment of it in any particular case implies, in so far, unfitness to the conditions of existence.

In two ways then, it is demonstrable that there exists a primordial connection between pleasure-giving acts and continuance or increase of life, and, by implication, between pain-giving acts and decrease or loss of life. On the one hand, setting out with the lowest living things, we see that the beneficial act and the act which there is a tendency to perform, are originally two sides of the same; and cannot be disconnected without fatal results. On the other hand, if we contemplate developed creatures as now existing, we see that each individual and species is from day to day kept alive by pursuit of the agreeable and avoidance of the disagreeable.

Thus approaching the facts from a different side, analysis brings us down to another face of that ultimate truth disclosed by analysis in a preceding chapter. We found it was no more possible to frame ethical conceptions from which the consciousness of pleasure, of some kind, at some time, to some being, is absent, than it is possible to frame the conception of an object from which the consciousness of space is absent. And now we see that this necessity of thought originates in the very nature of sentient existence. Sentient existence can evolve only on condition that pleasure-giving acts are life-sustaining acts.

§ 34. Notwithstanding explanations already made, the naked enunciation of this as an ultimate truth, underlying all estimations of right and wrong, will in many, if not in most, cause astonishment. Having in view certain beneficial results that are preceded by disagreeable states of consciousness, such as those commonly accompanying labor; and having in view the injurious results that follow the receipt of certain gratifications, such as those which excess in drinking produces; the majority tacitly or avowedly believe that the bearing of pains is on the whole beneficial, and that the receipt of pleasures is on the whole detrimental. The exceptions so fill their minds as to exclude the rule.

When asked, they are obliged to admit that the pains accompanying wounds, bruises, sprains, are the concomitants of evils, alike to the sufferer and to those around him; and that the anticipations of such pains serve as deterrents from care-less or dangerous acts. They cannot deny that the tortures of burning or scalding, and the miseries which intense cold, starvation, and thirst produce, are indissolubly connected with permanent or temporary mischiefs, tending to incapacitate one who bears them for doing things that should be done, either for his own welfare or the welfare of others. The agony of incipient suffocation they are compelled to recognize as a safeguard to life, and must allow that avoidance of it is conducive to all that life can bring or achieve. Nor will they refuse to own that one who is chained in a cold, damp, dungeon, in darkness and silence, is injured in health and efficiency; alike by the positive pains thus inflicted on him and by the accompanying negative pains due to absence of light, of freedom, of companionship. Conversely, they do not doubt that notwithstanding occasional excesses the pleasure which accompanies the taking of food, goes along with physical benefit; and that the benefit is the greater the keener the satisfaction of appetite. They have no choice but to acknowledge that the instincts and sentiments which so overpoweringly prompt marriage, and those which find their gratification in the fostering of offspring, work out an immense surplus of benefit after deducting all evils. Nor dare they question that the pleasure taken in accumulating property, leaves a large balance of advantage, private and public, after making all drawbacks. Yet many and conspicuous as are the cases in which pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, serve as incentives to proper acts and deterrents from improper acts, these pass unnoticed; and notice is taken only of those cases in which men are directly or indirectly misled by them. The well-working in essential matters is ignored; and the ill-working in unessential matters is alone recognized.

Is it replied that the more intense pains and pleasures, which have immediate reference to bodily needs, guide us rightly; while the weaker pains and pleasures, not immediately connected with the maintenance of life, guide us wrongly? Then the implication is that the system of guidance by pleasures and pains, which has answered with all types of creatures below the human, fails with the human. Or rather, the admission being that with mankind it succeeds in so far as fulfillment of certain imperative wants goes, it fails in respect of wants that are not imperative. Those who think this are required, in the first place, to show us how the line is to be drawn between the two; and then to show us why the system which succeeds in the lower will not succeed in the higher.

§ 35. Doubtless, however, after all that has been said, there will be raised afresh the same difficulty–there will be instanced the mischievous pleasures and the beneficent pains. The drunkard, the gambler, the thief, who severally pursue gratifications, will be named in proof that the pursuit of gratifications misleads; while the self-sacrificing relative, the worker who perseveres through weariness, the honest man who stints himself to pay his way will be named in proof that disagreeable modes of consciousness accompany acts that are really beneficial. But after recalling the fact pointed out in section 20, that this objection does not tell against guidance by pleasures and pains at large, since it merely implies that special and proximate pleasures and pains must be disregarded out of consideration for remote and diffused pleasures and pains; and after admitting that in mankind as at present constituted, guidance by proximate pleasures and pains fails throughout a wide range of cases; I go on to set forth the interpretation biology gives of these anomalies, as being not necessary and permanent but incidental and temporary.

Already while showing that among inferior creatures, pleasures and pains have all along guided the conduct by which life has been evolved and maintained, I have pointed out that since the conditions of existence for each species have been occasionally changing, there have been occasionally arising partial misadjustments of the feelings to the requirements, necessitating readjustments. This general cause of derangement operating on all sentient beings, has been operating on human beings in a manner unusually decided, persistent, and involved. It needs but to contrast the mode of life followed by primitive men, wandering in the forests and living on wild food, with the mode of life followed by rustics, artisans, traders, and professional men in a civilized community; to see that the constitution, bodily and mental, well adjusted to the one is ill adjusted to the other. It needs but to observe the emotions kept awake in each savage tribe, chronically hostile to neighboring tribes, and then to observe the emotions which peaceful production and exchange bring into play, to see that the two are not only unlike but opposed. And it needs but to note how, during social evolution, the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the militant activities carried on by coercive cooperation, have been at variance with the ideas and sentiments appropriate to the industrial activities, carried on by voluntary cooperation; to see that there has ever been within each society, and still continues, a conflict between the two moral natures adjusted to these two unlike modes of life. Manifestly, then, this readjustment of constitution to conditions, involving readjustment of pleasures and pains for guidance, which all creatures from time to time undergo, has been in the human race during civilization, especially difficult; not only because of the greatness of the change from small nomadic groups to vast settled societies, and from predatory habits to peaceful habits; but also because the old life of enmity between societies has been maintained along with the new life of amity within each society. While there coexist two ways of life so radically opposed as the militant and the industrial, human nature cannot become properly adapted to either.

That hence results such failure of guidance by pleasures and pains as is daily exhibited, we discover on observing in what parts of conduct the failure is most conspicuous. As above shown, the pleasurable and painful sensations are fairly well adjusted to the peremptory physical requirements: the benefits of conforming to the sensations which prompt us in respect of nutrition, respiration, maintenance of temperature, &c., immensely exceed the incidental evils; and such misadjustments as occur may be ascribed to the change from the outdoor life of the primitive man to the indoor life which the civilized man is often compelled to lead. It is the emotional pleasures and pains which are in so considerable a degree out of adjustment to the needs of life as carried on in society; and it is of these that the readjustment is made, in the way above shown, so tardy because so difficult.

From the biological point of view then, we see that the connections between pleasure and beneficial action and between pain and detrimental action, which arose when sentient existence began, and have continued among animate creatures up to man, are generally displayed in him also throughout the lower and more completely organized part of his nature; and must be more and more fully displayed throughout the higher part of his nature, as fast as his adaptation to the conditions of social life increases.

§ 36.[4] Biology has a further judgment to pass on the relations of pleasures and pains to welfare. Beyond the connections between acts beneficial to the organism and the pleasures accompanying performance of them, and between acts detrimental to the organism and the pains causing desistance from them, there are connections between pleasure in general and physiological exaltation, and between pain in general and physiological depression. Every pleasure increases vitality; every pain decreases vitality. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life. Let us consider, first, the pains.

By the general mischiefs that result from submission to pains, I do not mean those arising from the diffused effects of local organic lesions, such as follow an aneurism caused by intense effort spite of protesting sensations, or such as follow the varicose veins brought on by continued disregard of fatigue in the legs, or such as follow the atrophy set up in muscles that are persistently exerted when extremely weary; but I mean the general mischiefs caused by that constitutional disturbance which pain forthwith sets up. These are conspicuous when the pains are acute, whether they be sensational or emotional. Bodily agony long borne, produces death by exhaustion. More frequently, arresting the action of the heart for a time, it causes that temporary death we call fainting. On other occasions vomiting is a consequence. And where such manifest derangements do not result, we still, in the pallor and trembling, trace the general prostration. Beyond the actual loss of life caused by subjection to intense cold, there are depressions of vitality less marked caused by cold less extreme–temporary enfeeblement following too long an immersion in icy water; enervation and pining away consequent on inadequate clothing. Similarly is it with submission to great heat: we have lassitude reaching occasionally to exhaustion; we have, in weak persons, fainting, succeeded by temporary debilitation; and in steaming tropical jungles. Europeans contract fevers which when not fatal often entail lifelong incapacities. Consider, again, the evils that follow violent exertion continued in spite of painful feelings–now a fatigue which destroys appetite or arrests digestion if food is taken, implying failure of the reparative processes when they are most needed; and now a prostration of the heart, here lasting for a time and there, where the transgression has been repeated day after day made permanent: reducing the rest of life to a lower level. No less conspicuous are the depressing effects of emotional pains. There are occasional cases of death from grief; and in other cases the mental suffering which a calamity causes, like bodily suffering, shows its effects by syncope. Often a piece of bad news is succeeded by sickness; and continued anxiety will produce loss of appetite, perpetual indigestion, and diminished strength. Excessive fear, whether aroused by physical or moral danger, will, in like manner, arrest for a time the processes of nutrition; and, not unfrequently, in pregnant women brings on miscarriage; while, in less extreme cases, the cold perspiration and unsteady hands indicate a general lowering of the vital activities, entailing partial incapacity of body or mind or both. How greatly emotional pain deranges the visceral actions is shown us by the fact that incessant worry is not unfrequently followed by jaundice. And here, indeed, the relation between cause and effect happens to have been proved by direct experiment. Making such arrangements that the bile duct of a dog delivered its product outside the body, Claude Bernard observed that so long as he petted the dog and kept him in good spirits, secretion went on at its normal rate; but on speaking angrily, and for a time so treating him as to produce depression, the flow of bile was arrested. Should it be said that evil results of such kinds are proved to occur only when the pains, bodily or mental, are great; the reply is that in healthy persons the injurious perturbations caused by small pains, though not easily traced, are still produced; and that in those whose vital powers are much reduced by illness, slight physical irritations and triffing moral annoyances, often cause relapses.

Quite opposite are the constitutional effects of pleasure. It sometimes, though rarely, happens that in feeble persons intense pleasure–pleasure that is almost pain–gives a nervous shock that is mischievous; but it does not do this in those who are undebilitated by voluntary or enforced submission to actions injurious to the organism. In the normal order, pleasures, great and small, are stimulants to the processes by which life is maintained. Among the sensations may be instanced those produced by bright light. Sunshine is enlivening in comparison with gloom–even a gleam excites a wave of pleasure; and experiments have shown that sunshine raises the rate of respiration: raised respiration being an index of raised vital activities in general. A warmth that is agreeable in degree favors the heart’s action, and furthers the various functions to which this is instrumental. Though those who are in full vigor and fitly clothed, can maintain their temperature in winter, and can digest additional food to make up for the loss of heat, it is otherwise with the feeble; and, as vigor declines, the beneficence of warmth becomes conspicuous. That benefits accompany the agreeable sensations produced by fresh air, and the agreeable sensations that accompany muscular action after due rest, and the agreeable sensations caused by rest after exertion, cannot be questioned. Receipt of these pleasures conduces to the maintenance of the body in fit condition for all the purposes of life. More manifest still are the physiological benefits of emotional pleasures. Every power, bodily and mental, is increased by "good spirits"; which is our name for a general emotional satisfaction. The truth that the fundamental vital actions–those of nutrition–are furthered by laughter-moving conversation, or rather by the pleasurable feeling causing laughter, is one of old standing; and every dyspeptic knows that in exhilarating company a large and varied dinner including not very digestible things, may be eaten with impunity, and indeed with benefit, while a small, carefully chosen dinner of simple things, eaten in solitude, will be followed by indigestion. This striking effect on the alimentary system is accompanied by effects, equally certain though less manifest, on the circulation and the respiration. Again, one who, released from daily labors and anxieties, receives delights from fine scenery or is enlivened by the novelties he sees abroad, comes back showing by toned-up face and vivacious manner, the greater energy with which he is prepared to pursue his avocation. Invalids especially, on whose narrowed margin of vitality the influence of conditions is most visible, habitually show the benefits derived from agreeable states of feeling. A lively social circle, the call of an old friend, or even removal to a brighter room, will, by the induced cheerfulness, much improve the physical state. In brief, as every medical man knows, there is no such tonic as happiness.

These diffused physiological effects of pleasures and pains, which are joined with the local or special physiological effects, are, indeed, obviously inevitable. We have seen (Principles of Psychology, secs. 123—25) that while craving, or negative pain, accompanies the underactivity of an organ, and while positive pain accompanies its overactivity, pleasure accompanies its normal activity. We have seen that by evolution no other relations could be established; since, through all inferior types of creatures, if defect or excess of function produced no disagreeable sentiency, and medium function no agreeable sentiency, there would be nothing to ensure a proportioned performance of function. And as it is one of the laws of nervous action that each stimulus, beyond a direct discharge to the particular organ acted on, indirectly caused a general discharge throughout the nervous system (Prin. of Psy., §§21, 39), it results that the rest of the organs, all influenced as they are by the nervous system, participate in the stimulation. So that beyond the aid, more slowly shown, which the organs yield to one another through the physiological division of labor, there is the aid, more quickly shown, which mutual excitation gives. While there is a benefit to be presently felt by the whole organism from the due performance of each function, there is an immediate benefit from the exaltation of its functions at large caused by the accompanying pleasure; and from pains, whether of excess or defect, there also come these double effects, immediate and remote.

§ 37. Nonrecognition of these general truths vitiates moral speculation at large. From the estimate of right and wrong habitually framed, these physiological effects wrought on the actor by his feelings are entirely omitted. It is tacitly assumed that pleasures and pains have no reactions on the body of the recipient, affecting his fitness for the duties of life. The only reactions recognized are those on character; respecting which the current supposition is, that acceptance of pleasures is detrimental and submission to pains beneficial. The notion, remotely descended from the ghost theory of the savage, that mind and body are independent, has, among its various implications, this belief that states of consciousness are in no wise related to bodily states. "You have had your gratification–it is past; and you are as you were before," says the moralist to one. And to another he says, "You have borne the suffering–it is over; and there the matter ends." Both statements are false. Leaving out of view indirect results, the direct results are that the one has moved a step away from death and the other has moved a step toward death.

Leaving out of view, I say, the indirect results. It is these indirect results, here for the moment left out of view, which the moralist has conclusively in view: being so occupied by them that he ignores the direct results. The gratification, perhaps purchased at undue cost, perhaps enjoyed when work should have been done, perhaps snatched from the rightful claimant, is considered only in relation to remote injurious effects, and no setoff is made for immediate beneficial effects. Conversely, from positive and negative pains, borne now in the pursuit of some future advantage, now in discharge of responsibilities, now in performing a generous act, the distant good is alone dwelt on and the proximate evil ignored. Consequences, pleasurable and painful, experienced by the actor forthwith, are of no importance; and they become of importance only when anticipated as occurring hereafter to the actor or to other persons. And further, future evils borne by the actor are considered of no account if they result from self-denial, and are emphasized only when they result from self-gratification. Obviously, estimates so framed are erroneous; and obviously, the pervading judgments of conduct based on such estimates must be distorted. Mark the anomalies of opinion produced.

If, as the sequence of a malady contracted in pursuit of illegitimate gratification, an attack of iritis injures vision, the mischief is to be counted among those entailed by immoral conduct; but if, regardless of protesting sensations, the eyes are used in study too soon after ophthalmia, and there follows blindness for years or for life, entailing not only personal unhappiness but a burden on others, moralists are silent. The broken leg which a drunkard’s accident causes, counts among those miseries brought on self and family by intemperance, which form the ground for reprobating it; but if anxiety to fulfill duties prompts the continued use of a sprained knee spite of the pain, and brings on a chronic lameness involving lack of exercise, consequent ill-health, inefficiency, anxiety, and unhappiness, it is supposed that ethics has no verdict to give in the matter. A student who is plucked because he has spent in amusement the time and money that should have gone in study, is blamed for thus making parents unhappy and preparing for himself a miserable future; but another who, thinking exclusively of claims on him, reads night after night with hot or aching head, and, breaking down, cannot take his degree, but returns home shattered in health and unable to support himself, is named with pity, only as not subject to any moral judgment; or rather, the moral judgment passed is wholly favorable.

Thus recognizing the evils caused by some kinds of conduct only, men at large, and moralists as exponents of their beliefs, ignore the suffering and death daily caused around them by disregard of that guidance which has established itself in the course of evolution. Led by the tacit assumption, common to pagan Stoics and Christian ascetics, that we are so diabolically organized that pleasures are injurious and pains beneficial, people on all sides yield examples of lives blasted by persisting in actions against which their sensations rebel. Here is one who, drenched to the skin and sitting in a cold wind, poohpoohs his shiverings and gets rheumatic fever and subsequent heart-disease, which makes worthless the short life remaining to him. Here is another who, disregarding painful feelings, works too soon after a debilitating illness, and establishes disordered health that lasts for the rest of his days, and makes him useless to himself and others. Now the account is of a youth who, persisting in gymnastic feats spite of scarcely bearable straining, bursts a blood vessel, and, long laid on the shelf, is permanently damaged; while now it is of a man in middle life who, pushing muscular effort to painful excess, suddenly brings on hernia. In this family is a case of aphasia, spreading paralysis, and death, caused by eating too little and doing too much; in that, softening of the brain has been brought on by ceaseless mental efforts against which the feelings hourly protested; and in others, less-serious brain affections have been contracted by overstudy continued regardless of discomfort and the cravings for fresh air and exercise.[5] Even without accumulating special examples, the truth is forced on us by the visible traits of classes. The careworn man of business too long at his office, the cadaverous barrister poring half the night over his briefs, the feeble factory hands and unhealthy seamstresses passing long hours in bad air, the anemic, flat-chested schoolgirls, bending over many lessons and forbidden boisterous play, no less than Sheffield grinders who die of suffocating dust, and peasants crippled with rheumatism due to exposure, show us the widespread miseries caused by persevering in actions repugnant to the sensations and neglecting actions which the sensations prompt. Nay the evidence is still more extensive and conspicuous. What are the puny malformed children, seen in poverty-stricken districts, but children whose appetites for food and desires for warmth have not been adequately satisfied? What are populations stinted in growth and prematurely aged, such as parts of France show us, but populations injured by work in excess and food in defect: the one implying positive pain, the other negative pain? What is the implication of that greater mortality which occurs among people who are weakened by privations, unless it is that bodily miseries conduce to fatal illnesses? Or once more, what must we infer from the frightful amount of disease and death suffered by armies in the field, fed on scanty and bad provisions, lying on damp ground, exposed to extremes of heat and cold, inadequately sheltered from rain, and subject to exhausting efforts; unless it be the terrible mischiefs caused by continuously subjecting the body to treatment which the feelings protest against?

It matters not to the argument whether the actions entailing such effects are voluntary or involuntary. It matters not from the biological point of view, whether the motives prompting them are high or low. The vital functions accept no apologies on the ground that neglect of them was unavoidable, or that the reason for neglect was noble. The direct and indirect sufferings caused by nonconformity to the laws of life, are the same whatever induces the nonconformity; and cannot be omitted in any rational estimate of conduct. If the purpose of ethical inquiry is to establish rules of right living; and if the rules of right living are those of which the total results, individual and general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness; then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognize only the remote results.

§ 38. Here might be urged the necessity for preluding the study of moral science, by the study of biological science. Here might be dwelt on the error men make in thinking they can understand those special phenomena of human life with which ethics deals, while paying little or no attention to the general phenomena of human life, and while utterly ignoring the phenomena of life at large. And doubtless there would be truth in the inference that such acquaintance with the world of living things as discloses the part which pleasures and pains have played in organic evolution, would help to rectify these one-sided conceptions of moralists. It cannot be held, however, that lack of this knowledge is the sole cause, or the main cause, of their one-sidedness. For facts of the kind above instanced, which, duly attended to, would prevent such distortions of moral theory, are facts which it needs no biological inquiries to learn, but which are daily thrust before the eyes of all. The truth is, rather, that the general consciousness is so possessed by sentiments and ideas at variance with the conclusions necessitated by familiar evidence, that the evidence gets no attention. These adverse sentiments and ideas have several roots.

There is the theological root. As before shown, from the worship of cannibal ancestors who delighted in witnessing tortures, there resulted the primitive conception of deities who were propitiated by the bearing of pains, and, consequently angered by the receipt of pleasures. Through the religions of the semicivilized, in which this conception of the divine nature remains conspicuous, it has persisted, in progressively modified forms, down to our own times; and still colors the beliefs, both of those who adhere to the current creed and of those who nominally reject it. There is another root in the primitive and still-surviving militancy. While social antagonisms continue to generate war, which consists in endeavors to inffict pain and death while submitting to the risks of pain and death, and which necessarily involves great privations; it is needful that physical suffering, whether considered in itself or in the evils it bequeaths, should be thought little of, and that among pleasures recognized as most worthy should be those which victory brings. Nor does partially developed industrialism fail to furnish a root. With social evolution, which implies transition from the life of wandering hunters to the life of settled peoples engaged in labor, and which therefore entails activities widely unlike those to which the aboriginal constitution is adapted, there comes an underexercise of faculties for which the social state affords no scope, and an overtaxing of faculties required for the social state: the one implying denial of certain pleasures, and the other submission to certain pains. Hence, along with that growth of population which makes the struggle for existence intense, bearing of pains and sacrifice of pleasures is daily necessitated.

Now always and everywhere, there arises among men a theory conforming to their practice. The savage nature, originating the conception of a savage deity, evolves a theory of supernatural control sufficiently stringent and cruel to in-fluence his conduct. With submission to despotic government severe enough in its restraints to keep in order barbarous natures, there grows up a theory of divine right to rule, and the duty of absolute submission. Where war is made the business of life by the existence of warlike neighbors, virtues which are required for war come to be regarded as supreme virtues; while, contrariwise, when industrialism has grown predominant, the violence and the deception which warriors glory in come to be held criminal. In like manner, then, there arises a tolerable adjustment of the actually accepted (not the nominally accepted) theory of right living, to living as it is daily carried on. If the life is one that necessitates habitual denial of pleasures and bearing of pains, there grows up an answering ethical system under which the receipt of pleasures is tacitly disapproved and the bearing of pains avowedly approved. The mischiefs entailed by pleasures in excess are dwelt on, while the benefits which normal pleasures bring are ignored; and the good results achieved by submission to pains are fully set forth while the evils are overlooked.

But while recognizing the desirableness of, and indeed the necessity for, systems of ethics adapted, like religious systems and political systems, to their respective times and places; we have here to regard the first as, like the others, transitional. We must infer that like a purer creed and a better government, a truer ethics belongs to a more advanced social state. Led, a priori, to conclude that distortions must exist, we are enabled to recognize as such, the distortions we find: answering in nature, as these do, to expectation. And there is forced on us the truth that a scientific morality arises only as fast as the one-sided conceptions adapted to transitory conditions, are developed into both-sided conceptions. The science of right living has to take account of all consequences in so far as they affect happiness, personally or socially directly or indirectly; and by as much as it ignores any class of consequences, by so much does it fail to be science.

§ 39. Like the physical view, then, the biological view corresponds with the view gained by looking at conduct in general from the standpoint of evolution.

That which was physically defined as a moving equilibrium, we define biologically as a balance of functions. The implication of such a balance is that the several functions in their kinds, amounts, and combinations, are adjusted to the several activities which maintain and constitute complete life; and to be so adjusted is to have reached the goal towards which the evolution of conduct continually tends.

Passing to the feelings which accompany the performance of functions, we see that of necessity during the evolution of organic life, pleasures have become the concomitants of normal amounts of functions, while pains, positive and negative, have become the concomitants of excesses and defects of functions. And though in every species derangements of these relations are often caused by changes of conditions, they ever reestablish themselves: disappearance of the species being the alternative.

Mankind, inheriting from creatures of lower kinds, such adjustments between feelings and functions as concern fundamental bodily requirements; and daily forced by peremptory feelings to do the things which maintain life and avoid those which bring immediate death; has been subject to a change of conditions unusually great and involved. This has considerably deranged the guidance by sensations, and has deranged in a much greater degree the guidance by emotions. The result is that in many cases pleasures are not connected with actions which must be performed, nor pains with actions which must be avoided, but contrariwise.

Several influences have conspired to make men ignore the well-working of these relations between feelings and functions, and to observe whatever of ill-working is seen in them. Hence, while the evils which some pleasures entail are dilated upon, the benefits habitually accompanying receipt of pleasures are unnoticed; at the same time that the benefits achieved through certain pains are magnified while the immense mischiefs which pains bring are made little of.

The ethical theories characterized by these perversions, are products of, and are appropriate to, the forms of social life which the imperfectly adapted constitutions of men produce. But with the progress of adaptation, bringing faculties and requirements into harmony, such incongruities of experience, and consequent distortions of theory, must diminish; until, along with complete adjustment of humanity to the social state, will go recognition of the truths that actions are completely right only when, besides being conducive to future happiness, special and general, they are immediately pleasurable, and that painfulness, not only ultimate but proximate, is the concomitant of actions which are wrong.

So that from the biological point of view ethical science becomes a specification of the conduct of associated men who are severally so constituted that the various self-preserving activities, the activities required for rearing offspring, and those which social welfare demands, are fulfilled in the spontaneous exercise of duly proportioned faculties, each yielding when in action its quantum of pleasure; and who are, by consequence, so constituted that excess or defect in any one of these actions brings its quantum of pain, immediate and remote.

[I-102]

CHAPTER VII.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW.↩

§ 40. The last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their relation to conduct, recognized only their physiological aspects: their psychological aspects were passed over. In this chapter, conversely, we are not concerned with the constitutional connections between feelings, as incentives or deterrents, and physical benefits to be gained or mischiefs to be avoided; nor with the reactive effects of feelings on the state of the organism, as fitting or unfitting it for future action. Here we have to consider represented pleasures and pains, sensational and emotional, as constituting deliberate motives–as forming factors in the conscious adjustments of acts to ends.

§ 41. The rudimentary psychical act, not yet differentiated from a physical act, implies an excitation and a motion. In a creature of low type the touch of food excites prehension. In a somewhat higher creature the odor from nutritive matter sets up motion of the body towards the matter. And where rudimentary vision exists, sudden obscuration of light, implying the passage of something large, causes convulsive muscular movements which mostly carry the body away from the source of danger. In each of these cases we may distinguish four factors. There is (a) that property of the external object which primarily affects the organism–the taste, smell, or capacity; and, connected with such property, there is in the external object that character (b) which renders seizure of it, or escape from it, beneficial. Within the organism there is (c) the impression or sensation which the property (a) produces, serving as stimulus; and there is, connected with it, the motor change (d) by which seizure or escape is effected. Now psychology is chiefly concerned with the connection between the relation a b, and the relation c d, under all those forms which they assume in the course of evolution. Each of the factors, and each of the relations, grows more involved as organization advances. Instead of being single the identifying attribute a often becomes, in the environment of a superior animal, a cluster of attributes; such as the size, form, colors, motions, displayed by a distant creature that is dangerous. The factor b, with which this combination of attributes is associated, becomes the congeries of characters, powers, habits, which constitute it an enemy. Of the subjective factors, c becomes a complicated set of visual sensations coordinated with one another and with the ideas and feelings established by experience of such enemies, and constituting the motive to escape; while d becomes the intricate, and often prolonged, series of runs, leaps, doubles, dives, &c., made in eluding the enemy. In human life we find the same four outer and inner factors still more multiform and entangled in their compositions and connections. The entire assemblage of physical attributes a, presented by an estate that is advertised for sale, passes enumeration; and the assemblage of various utilities, b, going along with these attributes, is also beyond brief specification. The perceptions and ideas, likes and dislikes, c, set up by the aspect of the estate, and which, compounded and recompounded, eventually form the motive for buying it, make a whole too large and complex for description; and the transactions, legal, pecuniary, and other, gone through in making the purchase and taking possession, are scarcely less numerous and elaborate. Nor must we overlook the fact that as evolution progresses, not only do the factors increase in complexity but also the relations among them. Originally, a is directly and simply connected with b, while c is directly and simply connected with d. But eventually, the connections between a and b, and between c and d, become very indirect and involved. On the one hand, as the first illustration shows us, sapidity and nutritiveness are closely bound together; as are also the stimulation caused by the one and the contraction which utilizes the other. But, as we see in the last illustration, the connection between the visible traits of an estate and those characters which constitute its value, is at once remote and complicated; while the transition from the purchaser’s highly composite motive to the numerous actions of sensory and motor organs, severally intricate, which effect the purchase, is through an entangled plexus of thoughts and feelings constituting his decision.

After this explanation will be apprehended a truth otherwise set forth in the Principles of Psychology. Mind consists of feelings and the relations among feelings. By composition of the relations, and ideas of relations, intelligence arises. By composition of the feelings, and ideas of feelings, emotion arises. And, other things equal, the evolution of either is great in proportion as the composition is great. One of the necessary implications is that cognition becomes higher in proportion as it is remoter from reflex action; while emotion becomes higher in proportion as it is remoter from sensation.

And now of the various corollaries from this broad view of psychological evolution, let us observe those which concern the motives and actions that are classed as moral and immoral.

§ 42. The mental process by which, in any case, the adjustment of acts to ends is effected, and which, under its higher forms, becomes the subject matter of ethical judgments, is, as above implied, divisible into the rise of a feeling or feelings constituting the motive, and the thought or thoughts through which the motive is shaped and finally issues in action. The first of these elements, originally an excitement, becomes a simple sensation; then a compound sensation; then a cluster of partially presentative and partially representative sensations, forming an incipient emotion; then a cluster of exclusively ideal or representative sensations, forming an emotion proper; then a cluster of such clusters, forming a compound emotion; and eventually becomes a still more involved emotion composed of the ideal forms of such compound emotions. The other element, beginning with that immediate passage of a single stimulus into a single motion, called reflex action, presently comes to be a set of associated discharges of stimuli producing associated motions, constituting instinct. Step by step arise more entangled combinations of stimuli, somewhat variable in their modes of union, leading to complex motions similarly variable in their adjustments; whence occasional hesitations in the sensori-motor processes. Presently is reached a stage at which the combined clusters of impressions, not all present together, issue in actions not all simultaneous; implying representation of results, or thought. Afterwards follow stages in which various thoughts have time to pass before the composite motives produce the appropriate actions. Until at last arise those long deliberations during which the probabilities of various consequences are estimated, and the promptings of the correlative feelings balanced; constituting calm judgment. That under either of its aspects the later forms of this mental process are the higher, ethically considered as well as otherwise considered, will be readily seen.

For from the first, complication of sentiency has accompanied better and more numerous adjustments of acts to ends; as also has complication of movement, and complication of the coordinating or intellectual process uniting the two. Whence it follows that the acts characterized by the more complex motives and the more involved thoughts, have all along been of higher authority for guidance. Some examples will make this clear.

Here is an aquatic creature guided by the odor of organic matter towards things serving for food; but a creature which, lacking any other guidance, is at the mercy of larger creatures coming near. Here is another which, also guided to food by odor, possesses rudimentary vision; and so is made to start spasmodically away from a moving body which diffuses this odor, in those cases where it is large enough to produce sudden obscuration of light–usually an enemy. Evidently life will frequently be saved by conforming to the later and higher stimulus, instead of to the earlier and lower. Observe at a more advanced stage a parallel conflict. This is a beast which pursues others for prey, and, either lacking experience or prompted by raging hunger, attacks one more powerful than itself and gets destroyed. Conversely, that is a beast which, prompted by a hunger equally keen, but either by individual experience or effects of inherited experience, made conscious of evil by the aspect of one more powerful than itself, is deterred from attacking, and saves its life by subordinating the primary motive, consisting of craving sensations, to the secondary motive, consisting of ideal feelings, distinct or vague. Ascending at once from these examples of conduct in animals to examples of human conduct, we shall see that the contrasts between inferior and superior have habitually the same traits. The savage of lowest type devours all the food captured by today’s chase; and, hungry, on the morrow has perhaps for days to bear the pangs of starvation. The superior savage, conceiving more vividly the entailed sufferings if no game is to be found, is deterred by his complex feeling from giving way entirely to his simple feeling. Similarly are the two contrasted in the inertness which goes along with lack of forethought, and the activity which due forethought produces. The primitive man, idly inclined, and ruled by the sensation of the moment, will not exert himself until actual pains have to be escaped; but the man somewhat advanced, able more distinctly to imagine future gratifications and sufferings, is prompted by the thought of these to overcome his love of ease: decrease of misery and mortality resulting from this predominance of the representative feelings over the presentative feelings. Without dwelling on the fact that among the civilized, those who lead the life of the senses are contrasted in the same way with those whose lives are largely occupied with pleasures not of a sensual kind, let me point out that there are analogous contrasts between guidance by the less complex representative feelings, or lower emotions, and guidance by the more complex representative feelings, or higher emotions. When led by his acquisitiveness–a rerepresentative feeling which, acting under due control, conduces to welfare–the thief takes another man’s property; his act is determined by certain imagined proximate pleasures of relatively simple kinds, rather than by less clearly imagined possible pains that are more remote and of relatively involved kinds. But in the conscientious man, there is an adequate restraining motive, still more re-representative in its nature, including not only ideas of punishment, and not only ideas of lost reputation and ruin, but including ideas of the claims of the person owning the property, and of the pains which loss of it will entail on him; all joined with a general aversion to acts injurious to others, which arises from the inherited effects of experience. And here at the end we see, as we saw at the beginning, that guidance by the more complex feeling, on the average conduces to welfare more than does guidance by the simpler feeling.

The like holds with the intellectual coordinations through which stimuli issue in motions. The lowest actions, called reflex, in which an impression made on an afferent nerve causes by discharge through an efferent nerve a contraction, shows us a very limited adjustment of acts to ends: the impression being simple, and the resulting motion simple, the internal coordination is also simple. Evidently when there are several senses which can be together affected by an outer object; and when, according as such object is discriminated as of one or other kind, the movements made in response are combined in one or other way; the intermediate coordinations are necessarily more involved. And evidently each further step in the evolution of intelligence, always instrumental to better self-preservation, exhibits this same general trait. The adjustments by which the more involved actions are made appropriate to the more involved circumstances, imply more intricate, and consequently more deliberate and conscious, coordinations; until, when we come to civilized men, who in their daily business taking into account many data and conditions adjust their proceedings to various consequences, we see that the intellectual actions, becoming of the kind we call judicial, are at once very elaborate and very deliberate.

Observe, then, what follows respecting the relative authorities of motives. Throughout the ascent from low creatures up to man, and from the lowest types of man up to the highest, self-preservation has been increased by the subordination of simple excitations to compound excitations–the subjection of immediate sensations to the ideas of sensations to come–the overruling of presentative feelings by representative feelings, and of representative feelings by re-representative feelings. As life has advanced, the accompanying sentiency has become increasingly ideal; and among feelings produced by the compounding of ideas, the highest, and those which have evolved latest, are the recompounded or doubly ideal. Hence it follows that as guides, the feelings have authorities proportionate to the degrees in which they are removed by their complexity and their ideality from simple sensations and appetites. A further implication is made clear by studying the intellectual sides of these mental processes by which acts are adjusted to ends. Where they are low and simple, these comprehend the guiding only of immediate acts by immediate stimuli–the entire transaction in each case, lasting but a moment, refers only to a proximate result. But with the development of intelligence and the growing ideality of the motives, the ends to which the acts are adjusted cease to be exclusively immediate. The more ideal motives concern ends that are more distant; and with approach to the highest types, present ends become increasingly subordinate to those future ends which the ideal motives have for their objects. Hence there arises a certain presumption in favor of a motive which refers to a remote good, in comparison with one which refers to a proximate good.

§ 43. In the last chapter I hinted that besides the several influences there named as fostering the ascetic belief that doing things which are agreeable is detrimental while bearing disagreeable things is beneficial, there remained to be named an influence of deeper origin. This is shadowed forth in the foregoing paragraphs.

For the general truth that guidance by such simple pleasures and pains as result from fulfilling or denying bodily desires, is, under one aspect, inferior to guidance by those pleasures and pains which the complex ideal feelings yield, has led to the belief that the promptings of bodily desires should be disregarded. Further, the general truth that pursuit of proximate satisfactions is, under one aspect, inferior to pursuit of ultimate satisfactions, has led to the belief that proximate satisfactions must not be valued.

In the early stages of every science, the generalizations reached are not qualified enough. The discriminating statements of the truths formulated, arise afterwards, by limitation of the undiscriminating statements. As with bodily vision, which at first appreciates only the broadest traits of objects, and so leads to rude classings which developed vision, impressible by minor differences, has to correct; so with mental vision in relation to general truths, it happens that at first the inductions, wrongly made all-embracing, have to wait for skepticism and critical observation to restrict them, by taking account of unnoticed differences. Hence, we may expect to find the current ethical conclusions too sweeping. Let us note how, in three ways, these dominant beliefs, alike of professed moralists and of people at large, are made erroneous by lack of qualifications.

In the first place, the authority of the lower feelings as guides is by no means always inferior to the authority of the higher feelings, but is often superior. Daily occur occasions on which sensations must be obeyed rather than sentiments. Let any one think of sitting all night naked in a snowstorm, or going a week without food, or letting his head be held under water for ten minutes, and he will see that the pleasures and pains directly related to maintenance of life, may not be wholly subordinated to the pleasures and pains indirectly related to maintenance of life. Though in many cases guidance by the simple feelings rather than by the complex feelings is injurious, in other cases guidance by the complex feelings rather than by the simple feelings is fatal; and throughout a wide range of cases their relative authorities as guides are indeterminate. Grant that in a man pursued, the protesting feelings accompanying intense and prolonged effort, must, to preserve life, be overruled by the fear of his pursuers; it may yet happen that, persisting till he drops, the resulting exhaustion causes death, though, the pursuit having been abandoned, death would not otherwise have resulted. Grant that a widow left in poverty, must deny her appetite that she may give enough food to her children to keep them alive; yet the denial of her appetite pushed too far, may leave them not only entirely without food but without guardianship. Grant that, working his brain unceasingly from dawn till dark, the man in pecuniary difficulties must disregard rebellious bodily sensations in obedience to the conscientious desire to liquidate the claims on him; yet he may carry this subjection of simple feelings to complex feelings to the extent of shattering his health, and failing in that end which, with less of this subjection, he might have achieved. Clearly, then, the subordination of lower feelings must be a conditional subordination. The supremacy of higher feelings must be a qualified supremacy.

In another way does the generalization ordinarily made err by excess. With the truth that life is high in proportion as the simple presentative feelings are under the control of the compound representative feelings, it joins, as though they were corollaries, certain propositions which are not corollaries. The current conception is, not that the lower must yield to the higher when the two conflict, but that the lower must be disregarded even when there is no conflict. This tendency which the growth of moral ideas has generated, to condemn obedience to inferior feelings when superior feelings protest, has begotten a tendency to condemn inferior feelings considered intrinsically. "I really think she does things because she likes to do them," once said to me one lady concerning another: the form of expression and the manner both implying the belief not only that such behavior is wrong, but also that every one must recognize it as wrong. And there prevails widely a notion of this kind. In practice, indeed, the notion is very generally inoperative. Though it prompts various incidental asceticisms, as of those who think it alike manly and salutary to go without a great coat in cold weather, or to persevere through the winter in taking an out-of-door plunge, yet, generally, the pleasurable feelings accompanying due fulfillment of bodily needs, are accepted: acceptance being, indeed, sufficiently peremptory. But oblivious of these contradictions in their practice, men commonly betray a vague idea that there is something degrading, or injurious, or both, in doing that which is agreeable and avoiding that which is disagreeable. "Pleasant but wrong," is a phrase frequently used in a way implying that the two are naturally connected. As above hinted, however, such beliefs result from a confused apprehension of the general truth that the more compound and representative feelings are, on the average, of higher authority than the simple and presentative feelings. Apprehended with discrimination, this truth implies that the authority of the simple, ordinarily less than that of the compound but occasionally greater, is habitually to be accepted when the compound do not oppose.

In yet a third way is this principle of subordination misconceived. One of the contrasts between the earlier-evolved feelings and the later-evolved feelings, is that they refer respectively to the more immediate effects of actions and to the more remote effects; and speaking generally, guidance by that which is near is inferior to guidance by that which is distant. Hence has resulted the belief that, irrespective of their kinds, the pleasures of the present must be sacrificed to the pleasures of the future. We see this in the maxim often impressed on children when eating their meals, that they should reserve the nicest morsel till the last: the check on improvident yielding toimmediate impulse, being here joined with the tacit teaching that the same gratification becomes more valuable as it becomes more distant. Such thinking is traceable throughout daily conduct; by no means indeed in all, but in those who are distinguished as prudent and well regulated in their conduct. Hurrying over his breakfast that he may catch the train, snatching a sandwich in the middle of the day, and eating a late dinner when he is so worn out that he is incapacitated for evening recreation, the man of business pursues a life in which not only the satisfactions of bodily desires, but also those of higher tastes and feelings, are, as far as may be, disregarded, that distant ends may be achieved; and yet if you ask what are these distant ends, you find (in cases where there are no parental responsibilities) that they are included under the conception of more comfortable living in time to come. So ingrained is this belief that it is wrong to seek immediate enjoyments and right to seek remote ones only, that you may hear from a busy man who has been on a pleasure excursion, a kind of apology for his conduct. He deprecates the unfavorable judgments of his friends by explaining that the state of his health had compelled him to take a holiday. Nevertheless, if you sound him with respect to his future, you find that his ambition is by and by to retire and devote himself wholly to the relaxations which he is now somewhat ashamed of taking.

The general truth disclosed by the study of evolving conduct, subhuman and human, that for the better preservation of life the primitive, simple, presentative feelings must be controlled by the later-evolved, compound, and representative feelings, has thus come, in the course of civilization, to be recognized by men; but necessarily at first in too indiscriminate a way. The current conception, while it errs by implying that the authority of the higher over the lower is unlimited, errs also by implying that the rule of the lower must be resisted even when it does not conflict with the rule of the higher, and further errs by implying that a gratification which forms a proper aim if it is remote, forms an improper aim if it is proximate.

§ 44. Without explicitly saying so, we have been here tracing the genesis of the moral consciousness. For unquestionably the essential trait in the moral consciousness, is the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings.

Among the higher animals we may see, distinctly enough, the conflict of feelings and the subjection of simpler to more compound; as when a dog is restrained from snatching food by fear of the penalties which may come if he yields to his appetite; or as when he desists from scratching at a hole lest he should lose his master, who has walked on. Here, however, though there is subordination, there is not conscious subordination–there is no introspection revealing the fact that one feeling has yielded to another. So is it even with human beings when little developed mentally. The presocial man, wandering about in families and ruled by such sensations and emotions as are caused by the circumstances of the moment, though occasionally subject to conflicts of motives, meets with comparatively few cases in which the advantage of postponing the immediate to the remote is forced on his attention; nor has he the intelligence requisite for analyzing and generalizing such of these cases as occur. Only as social evolution renders the life more complex, the restraints many and strong, the evils of impulsive conduct marked, and the comforts to be gained by providing for the future tolerably certain, can there come experiences numerous enough to make familiar the benefit of subordinating the simpler feelings to the more complex ones. Only then, too, does there arise a sufficient intellectual power to make an induction from these experiences, followed by a sufficient massing of individual inductions into a public and traditional induction impressed on each generation as it grows up.

And here we are introduced to certain facts of profound significance. This conscious relinquishment of immediate and special good to gain distant and general good, while it is a cardinal trait of the self-restraint called moral, is also a cardinal trait of self-restraints other than those called moral–the restraints that originate from fear of the visible ruler, of the invisible ruler, and of society at large. Whenever the individual refrains from doing that which the passing desire prompts, lest he should afterward suffer legal punishment, or divine vengeance, or public reprobation, or all of them, he surrenders the near and definite pleasure rather than risk the remote and greater, though less definite, pains, which taking it may bring on him; and, conversely, when he undergoes some present pain, that he may reap some probable future pleasure, political, religious, or social. But though all these four kinds of internal control have the common character that the simpler and less ideal feelings are consciously overruled by the more complex and ideal feelings; and though, at first, they are practically coextensive and undistinguished; yet, in the course of social evidence they differentiate; and, eventually the moral control with its accompanying conceptions and sentiments, emerges as independent. Let us glance at the leading aspects of the process.

While, as in the rudest groups, neither political nor religious rule exists, the leading check to the immediate satisfaction of each desire as it arises, is consciousness of the evils which the anger of fellow savages may entail, if satisfaction of the desire is obtained at their cost. In this early stage the imagined pains which constitute the governing motive, are those apt to be inflicted by beings of like nature, undistinguished in power: the political, religious, and social restraints, are as yet represented only by this mutual dread of vengeance. When special strength, skill, or courage makes one of them a leader in battle, he necessarily inspires greater fear than any other; and there comes to be a more decided check on such satisfactions of the desires as will injure or offend him. Gradually as, by habitual war, chieftainship is established, the evils thought of as likely to arise from angering the chief, not only by aggression upon him but by disobedience to him, because distinguishable both from the smaller evils which other personal antagonisms cause, and from the more diffused evils thought of as arising from social reprobation. That is, political control begins to differentiate from the more indefinite control of mutual dread. Meanwhile there has been developing the ghost-theory. In all but the rudest groups, the double of a deceased man, propitiated at death and afterward is conceived as able to injure the survivors. Consequently as fast as the ghost-theory becomes established and definite, there grows up another kind of check on immediate satisfaction of the desires–a check constituted by ideas of the evils which ghosts may inflict if offended; and when political headships get settled, and the ghosts of dead chiefs, thought of as more powerful and more relentless than other ghosts, are especially dreaded, there begins to take shape the form of restraint distinguished as religious. For a long time these three sets of restraints, with their correlative sanctions, though becoming separate in consciousness, remain coextensive; and do so because they mostly refer to one end–success in war. The duty of blood-revenge is insisted on even while yet nothing to be called social organization exists. As the chief gains predominance, the killing of enemies becomes a political duty; and as the anger of the dead chief comes to be dreaded, the killing of enemies becomes a religious duty. Loyalty to the ruler while he lives and after he dies, is increasingly shown by holding life at his disposal for purposes of war. The earliest enacted punishments are those for insubordination and for breaches of observances which express subordination–all of them militant in origin. While the divine injunctions, originally traditions of the dead king’s will, mainly refer to the destruction of peoples with whom he was at enmity; and divine anger or approval are conceived as determined by the degrees in which subjection to him is shown, directly by worship and indirectly by fulfilling these injunctions. The Fijian, who is said on entering the other world to commend himself by narrating his successes in battle, and who, when alive, is described as sometimes greatly distressed if he thinks he has not killed enemies enough to please his gods, shows us the resulting ideas and feelings; and reminds us of kindred ideas and feelings betrayed by ancient races. To all which add that the control of social opinion, besides being directly exercised, as in the earliest stage, by praise of the brave and blame of the cowardly, comes to be indirectly exercised, with a kindred general effect by applause of loyalty to the ruler and piety to the god. So that the three differentiated forms of control which grow up along with militant organization and action, while enforcing kindred restraints and incentives, also enforce one another; and their separate and joint disciplines have the common character that they involve the sacrifice of immediate special benefits to obtain more distant and general benefits.

At the same time there have been developing under the same three sanctions, restraints and incentives of another order, similarly characterized by subordination of the proximate to the remote. Joint aggressions upon men outside the society, cannot prosper if there are many aggressions of man on man within the society. War implies cooperation; and cooperation is prevented by antagonisms among those who are to cooperate. We saw that in the primitive ungoverned group, the main check on immediate satisfaction of his desires by each man, is the fear of other men’s vengeance if they are injured by taking the satisfaction; and through early stages of social development, this dread of retaliation continues to be the chief motive to such forbearance as exists. But though long after political authority has become established the taking of personal satisfaction for injuries persists, the growth of political authority gradually checks it. The fact that success in war is endangered if his followers fight among themselves, forces itself on the attention of the ruler. He has a strong motive for restraining quarrels, and therefore for preventing the aggressions which cause quarrels; and as his power becomes greater he forbids the aggressions and inflicts punishments for disobedience. Presently, political restraints of this class, like those of the preceding class, are enforced by religious restraints. The sagacious chief, succeeding in war partly because he thus enforces order among his followers, leaves behind him a tradition of the commands he habitually gave. Dread of his ghost tends to produce regard for these commands; and they eventually acquire sacredness. With further social evolution come, in like manner, further interdicts, checking aggressions of less serious kinds; until eventually there grows up a body of civil laws. And then in the way shown, arise beliefs concerning the divine disapproval of these minor, as well as of the major, civil offenses: ending, occasionally, in a set of religious injunctions harmonizing with, and enforcing, the political injunctions. While simultaneously there develops, as before, a social sanction for these rules of internal conduct, strengthening the political and religious sanctions.

But now observe that while these three controls, political, religious, and social, severally lead men to subordinate proximate satisfactions to remote satisfactions; and while they are in this respect like the moral control, which habitually requires the subjection of simple presentative feelings to complex representative feelings and postponement of present to future; yet they do not constitute the moral control, but are only preparatory to it–are controls within which the moral control evolves. The command of the political ruler is at first obeyed, not because of its perceived rectitude; but simply because it is his command, which there will be a penalty for disobeying. The check is not a mental representation of the evil consequences which the forbidden act will, in the nature of things, cause; but it is a mental representation of the factitious evil consequences. Down to our own time we trace in legal phrases, the original doctrine that the aggression of one citizen on another is wrong, and will be punished, not so much because of the injury done him, as because of the implied disregard of the king’s will. Similarly, the sinfulness of breaking a divine injunction was universally at one time, and is still by many, held to consist in the disobedience to God, rather than in the deliberate entailing of injury; and even now it is a common belief that acts are right only if performed in conscious fulfillment of the divine will: nay are even wrong if otherwise performed. The like holds, too, with that further control exercised by public opinion. On listening to the remarks made respecting conformity to social rules, it is noticeable that breach of them is condemned not so much because of any essential impropriety as because the world’s authority is ignored. How imperfectly the truly moral control is even now differentiated from these controls within which it has been evolving, we see in the fact that the systems of morality criticized at the outset, severally identify moral control with one or other of them. For moralists of one class derive moral rules from the commands of a supreme political power. Those of another class recognize no other origin for them than the revealed divine will. And though men who take social prescription for their guide do not formulate their doctrine, yet the belief, frequently betrayed, that conduct which society permits is not blameworthy, implies that there are those who think right and wrong can be made such by public opinion.

Before taking a further step we must put together the results of this analysis. The essential truths to be carried with us respecting these three forms of external control to which the social unit is subject, are these: First, that they have evolved with the evolution of society, as means to social self-preservation, necessary under the conditions; and that, by implication, they are in the main congruous with one another. Second, that the correlative internal restraints generated in the social unit, are representations of remote results which are incidental rather than necessary–a legal penalty, a supernatural punishment, a social reprobation. Third, that these results, simpler and more directly wrought by personal agencies, can be more vividly conceived than can the results which, in the course of things, actions naturally entail; and the conceptions of them are therefore more potent over undeveloped minds. Fourth, that as with the restraints thus generated is always joined the thought of external coercion, there arises the notion of obligation; which so becomes habitually associated with the surrender of immediate special benefits for the sake of distant and general benefits. Fifth, that the moral control corresponds in large measure with the three controls thus originating, in respect of its injunctions; and corresponds, too, in the general nature of the mental processes producing conformity to those injunctions; but differs in their special nature.

§ 45. For now we are prepared to see that the restraints properly distinguished as moral, are unlike these restraints out of which they evolve, and with which they are long confounded, in this–they refer not to the extrinsic effects of actions but to their intrinsic effects. The truly moral deterrent from murder, is not constituted by a representation of hanging as a consequence, or by a representation of tortures in hell as a consequence, or by a representation of the horror and hatred excited in fellow men; but by a representation of the necessary natural results–the infliction of death-agony on the victim, the destruction of all his possibilities of happiness, the entailed sufferings to his belongings. Neither the thought of imprisonment, nor of divine anger, nor of social disgrace, is that which constitutes the moral check on theft; but the thought of injury to the person robbed, joined with a vague consciousness of the general evils caused by disregard of proprietary rights. Those who reprobate the adulterer on moral grounds, have their minds filled, not with ideas of an action for damages, or of future punishment following the breach of a commandment, or of loss of reputation; but they are occupied with ideas of unhappiness entailed on the aggrieved wife or husband, the damaged lives of children, and the diffused mischiefs which go along with disregard of the marriage tie. Conversely, the man who is moved by a moral feeling to help another in difficulty, does not picture to himself any reward here or hereafter; but pictures only the better condition he is trying to bring about. One who is morally prompted to fight against a social evil, has neither material benefit nor popular applause before his mind; but only the mischiefs he seeks to remove and the increased well-being which will follow their removal. Throughout, then, the moral motive differs from the motives it is associated with in this, that instead of being constituted by representations of incidental, collateral, nonnecessary consequences of acts, it is constituted by representations of consequences which the acts naturally produce. These representations are not all distinct, though some of such are usually present; but they form an assemblage of indistinct representations accumulated by experience of the results of like acts in the life of the individual, superposed on a still more indistinct but voluminous consciousness due to the inherited effects of such experiences in progenitors: forming a feeling that is at once massive and vague.

And now we see why the moral feelings and correlative restraints have arisen later than the feelings and restraints that originate from political, religious, and social authorities; and have so slowly and even yet so incompletely disentangled themselves. For only by these lower feelings and restraints could be maintained the conditions under which the higher feelings and restraints evolve. It is thus alike with the self-regarding feelings and with the other-regarding feelings. The pains which improvidence will bring, and the pleasures to be gained by storing up things for future use and by laboring to get such things, can be habitually contrasted in thought, only as fast as settled social arrangements make accumulation possible; and that there may arise such settled arrangements, fear of the seen ruler, of the unseen ruler, and of public opinion, must come into play. Only after political, religious, and social restraints have produced a stable community, can there be sufficient experience of the pains, positive and negative, sensational and emotional, which crimes of aggression cause, as to generate that moral aversion to them constituted by consciousness of their intrinsically evil results. And more manifest still is it that such a moral sentiment as that of abstract equity, which is offended not only by material injuries done to men but also by political arrangements that place them at a disadvantage, can evolve only after the social stage reached gives familiar experience both of the pains flowing directly from injustices and also of those flowing indirectly from the class privileges which make injustices easy.

That the feelings called moral have the nature and origin alleged, is further shown by the fact that we associate the name with them in proportion to the degree in which they have these characters–first of being re-representative; second of being concerned with indirect rather than with direct effects, and generally with remote rather than immediate; and thirdly of referring to effects that are mostly general rather than special. Thus, though we condemn one man for extravagance and approve the economy shown by another man, we do not class their acts as respectively vicious and virtuous: these words are too strong: the present and future results here differ too little in concreteness and ideality to make the words fully applicable. Suppose, however, that the extravagance necessarily brings distress on wife and children–brings pains diffused over the lives of others as well as of self, and the viciousness of the extravagance becomes clear. Suppose, further, that prompted by the wish to relieve his family from the misery he has brought on them, the spendthrift forges a bill or commits some other fraud. Though, estimated apart, we characterize his overruling emotion as moral, and make allowance for him in consideration of it, yet his action taken as a whole we condemn as immoral: we regard as of superior authority, the feelings which respond to men’s proprietary claims–feelings which are re-representative in a higher degree and refer to more remote diffused consequences. The difference, habitually recognized, between the relative elevations of justice and generosity, well illustrates this truth. The motive causing a generous act has reference to effects of a more concrete, special, and proximate kind, than has the motive to do justice; which, beyond the proximate effects, usually themselves less concrete than those that generosity contemplates, includes a consciousness of the distant, involved, diffused effects of maintaining equitable relations. And justice we hold to be higher generosity.

Comprehension of this long argument will be aided by here quoting a further passage from the before-named letter to Mr. Mill, following the passage already quoted from it.

To make any position fully understood, it seems needful to add that, corresponding to the fundamental propositions of a developed Moral Science, there have been, and still are, developing in the race, certain fundamental moral intuitions; and that, though these moral intuitions are the results of accumulated experiences of Utility, gradually organized and inherited, they have come to be qulte independent of conscious experience. Just in the same way that I believe the intuition of space, possessed by any living individual, to have arisen from organized and consolidated experiences of all antecedent individuals who bequeathed to him their slowly developed nervous organization–just as I believe that this intuition, requiring only to be made definite and complete by personal experiences, has practically become a form of thought, apparently quite independent of experience; so do I believe that the experiences of utility organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition–certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility. I also hold that just as the space-intuition responds to the exact demonstrations of Geometry, and has its rough conclusions interpreted and verified by them; so will moral intuitions respond to the demonstrations of Moral Science, and will have their rough conclusions interpreted and verified by them.

To this, in passing, I will add only that the evolution hypothesis thus enables us to reconcile opposed moral theories, as it enables us to reconcile opposed theories of knowledge. For as the doctrine of innate forms of intellectual intuition falls into harmony with the experiential doctrine, when we recognize the production of intellectual faculties by inheritance of effects wrought by experience; so the doctrine of innate powers of moral perception becomes congruous with the utilitarian doctrine, when it is seen that preferences and aversions are rendered organic by inheritance of the effects of pleasurable and painful experiences in progenitors.

§ 46. One further question has to be answered–How does there arise the feeling of moral obligation in general? Whence comes the sentiment of duty considered as distinct from the several sentiments which prompt temperance, providence, kindness, justice, truthfulness, &c.? The answer is that it is an abstract sentiment generated in a manner analogous to that in which abstract ideas are generated.

The idea of each color had originally entire concreteness given to it by an object possessing the color; as some of the unmodified names, such as orange and violet, show us. The dissociation of each color from the object specially associated with it in thought at the outset, went on as fast as the color came to be associated in thought with objects unlike the first, and unlike one another. The idea of orange was conceived in the abstract more fully in proportion as the various orange-colored objects remembered, canceled one another’s diverse attributes, and left outstanding their common attribute. So is it if we ascend a stage and note how there arises the abstract idea of color apart from particular colors. Were all things red the conception of color in the abstract could not exist. Imagine that every object was either red or green, and it is manifest that the mental habit would be to think of one or other of these two colors in connection with anything named. But multiply the colors so that thought rambles undecidedly among the ideas of them that occur along with any object named, and there results the notion of indeterminate color–the common property which objects possess of affecting us by light from their surfaces, as well as by their forms. For evidently the notion of this common property is that which remains constant while imagination is picturing every possible variety of color. It is the uniform trait in all colored things; that is–color in the abstract. Words referring to quantity furnish cases of more marked dissociation of abstract from concrete. Grouping various things as small in comparison either with those of their kind or with those of other kinds; and similarly grouping some objects as comparatively great; we get the opposite abstract notions of smallness and greatness. Applied as these are to innumerable very diverse things–not objects only, but forces, times, numbers, values–they have become so little connected with concretes, that their abstract meanings are very vague. Further, we must note that an abstract idea thus formed often acquires an illusive independence; as we may perceive in the case of motion, which, dissociated in thought from all particular bodies and velocities and directions, is sometimes referred to as though it could be conceived apart from something moving. Now all this holds of the subjective as well as of the objective; and among other states of consciousness, holds of the emotions as known by introspection. By the grouping of those re-representative feelings above described, which, differing among themselves in other respects have a component in common; and by the consequent mutual canceling of their diverse components; this common component is made relatively appreciable, and becomes an abstract feeling. Thus is produced the sentiment of moral obligation or duty. Let us observe its genesis.

We have seen that during the progress of animate existence, the later-evolved, more compound and more representative feelings, serving to adjust the conduct to more distant and general needs, have all along had an authority as guides superior to that of the earlier and simpler feelings–excluding cases in which these last are intense. This superior authority, unrecognizable by lower types of creatures which cannot generalize, and little recognizable by primitive men, who have but feeble powers of generalization, has become distinctly recognized as civilization and accompanying mental development have gone on. Accumulated experiences have produced the consciousness that guidance by feelings which refer to remote and general results, is usually more conducive to welfare than guidance by feelings to be immediately gratified. For what is the common character of the feelings that prompt honesty, truthfulness, diligence, providence, &c., which men habitually find to be better prompters than the appetites and simple impulses? They are all complex, re-representative feelings, occupied with the future rather than the present. The idea of authoritativeness has therefore come to be connected with feelings having these traits: the implication being that the lower and simpler feelings are without authority. And this idea of authoritativeness is one element in the abstract consciousness of duty.

But there is another element–the element of coerciveness. This originates from experience of those several forms of restraint that have, as above described, established themselves in the course of civilization–the political, religious, and social. To the effects of punishments inflicted by law and public opinion on conduct of certain kinds, Dr. Bain ascribes the feeling of moral obligation. And I agree with him to the extent of thinking that by them is generated the sense of compulsion which the consciousness of duty includes, and which the word obligation indicates. The existence of an earlier and deeper element, generated as above described, is, however, I think, implied by the fact that certain of the higher self-regarding feelings, instigating prudence and economy, have a moral authority in opposition to the simpler self-regarding feelings: showing that apart from any thought of factitious penalties on improvidence, the feeling constituted by representation of the natural penalties has acquired an acknowledged superiority. But accepting in the main the view that fears of the political and social penalties (to which, I think, the religious must be added) have generated that sense of coerciveness which goes along with the thought of postponing present to future and personal desires to the claims of others, it here chiefly concerns us to note that this sense of coerciveness becomes indirectly connected with the feelings distinguished as moral. For since the political, religious, and social restraining motives, are mainly formed of represented future results; and since the moral restraining motive is mainly formed of represented future results; it happens that the representations, having much in common, and being often aroused at the same time, the fear joined with three sets of them becomes, by association, joined with the fourth. Thinking of the extrinsic effects of a forbidden act, excites a dread which continues present while the intrinsic effects of the act are thought of; and being thus linked with these intrinsic effects causes a vague sense of moral compulsion. Emerging as the moral motive does but slowly from amidst the political, religious, and social motives, it long participates in that consciousness of subordination to some external agency which is joined with them; and only as it becomes distinct and predominant does it lose this associated consciousness–only then does the feeling of obligation fade.

This remark implies the tacit conclusion, which will be to most very startling, that the sense of duty or moral obligation is transitory, and will diminish as fast as moralization increases. Startling though it is, this conclusion may be satisfactorily defended. Even now progress towards the implied ultimate state is traceable. The observation is not infrequent that persistence in performing a duty ends in making it a pleasure; and this amounts to the admission that while at first the motive contains an element of coercion, at last this element of coercion dies out, and the act is performed without any consciousness of being obliged to perform it. The contrast between the youth on whom diligence is enjoined, and the man in business so absorbed in affairs that he cannot be induced to relax, shows us how the doing of work, originally under the consciousness that it ought to be done, may eventually cease to have any such accompanying consciousness. Sometimes, indeed, the relation comes to be reversed; and the man of business persists in work from pure love of it when told that he ought not. Nor is it thus with self-regarding feelings only. That the maintaining and protecting of wife by husband often result solely from feelings directly gratified by these actions, without any thought of must; and that the fostering of children by parents is in many cases made an absorbing occupation without any coercive feeling of ought; are obvious truths which show us that even now, with some of the fundamental other-regarding duties, the sense of obligation has retreated into the background of the mind. And it is in some degree so with other-regarding duties of a higher kind. Conscientiousness has in many outgrown that stage in which the sense of a compelling power is joined with rectitude of action. The truly honest man here and there to be found, is not only without thought of legal, religious, or social compulsion, when he discharges an equitable claim on him; but he is without thought of self-compulsion. He does the right thing with a simple feeling of satisfaction in doing it; and is, indeed, impatient if anything prevents him from having the satisfaction of doing it.

Evidently, then, with complete adaptation to the social state, that element in the moral consciousness which is expressed by the word obligation, will disappear. The higher actions required for the harmonious carrying on of life, will be as much matters of course as are these lower actions which the simple desires prompt. In their proper times and places and proportions, the moral sentiments will guide men just as spontaneously and adequately as now do the sensations. And though, joined with their regulating influence when this is called for, will exist latent ideas of the evils which nonconformity would bring; these will occupy the mind no more than do ideas of the evils of starvation at the time when a healthy appetite is being satisfied by a meal.

§ 47. This elaborate exposition, which the extreme complexity of the subject has necessitated, may have its leading ideas restated thus:

Symbolizing by a and b, related phenomena in the environment, which in some way concern the welfare of the organism; and symbolizing by c and d, the impressions, simple or compound, which the organism receives from the one, and the motions, single or combined, by which its acts are adapted to meet the other; we saw that psychology in general is concerned with the connection between the relation a b and the relation d. Further, we saw that by implication the psychological aspect of ethics, is that aspect under which the adjustment of c d to a b, appears, not as an intellectual coordination simply, but as a coordination in which pleasures and pains are alike factors and results.

It was shown that throughout evolution, motive and act become more complex, as the adaptation of inner related actions to outer related actions extends in range and variety. Whence followed the corollary that the later-evolved feelings, more representative and re-representative in their constitution, and referring to remoter and wider needs, have, on the average, an authority as guides greater than have the earlier and simpler feelings.

After thus observing that even an inferior creature is ruled by a hierarchy of feelings so constituted that general welfare depends on a certain subordination of lower to higher, we saw that in man, as he passes into the social state, there arises the need for sundry additional subordinations of lower to higher: cooperation being made possible only by them. To the restraints constituted by mental representations of the intrinsic effects of actions, which, in their simpler forms, have been evolving from the beginning, are added the restraints caused by mental representations of extrinsic effects, in the shape of political, religious, and social penalties.

With the evolution of society made possible by institutions maintaining order, and associating in men’s minds the sense of obligation with prescribed acts and with desistances from forbidden acts, there arose opportunities for seeing the bad consequences naturally flowing from the conduct interdicted and the good consequences from the conduct required. Hence eventually grew up moral aversions and approvals: experience of the intrinsic effects necessarily here coming later than experience of the extrinsic effects, and therefore producing its results later.

The thoughts and feelings constituting these moral aversions and approvals, being all along closely connected with the thoughts and feelings constituting fears of political, religious, and social penalties, necessarily came to participate in the accompanying sense of obligation. The coercive element in the consciousness of duties at large, evolved by converse with external agencies which enforce duties, diffused itself by association through that consciousness of duty, properly called moral, which is occupied with intrinsic results instead of extrinsic results.

But this self-compulsion, which at a relatively high stage becomes more and more a substitute for compulsion from without, must itself, at a still higher stage, practically disappear. If some action to which the special motive is insufficient, is performed in obedience to the feeling of moral obligation, the fact proves that the special faculty concerned is not yet equal to its function–has not acquired such strength that the required activity has become its normal activity, yielding its due amount of pleasure. With complete evolution then, the sense of obligation, not ordinarily present in consciousness, will be awakened only on those extraordinary occasions that prompt breach of the laws otherwise spontaneously conformed to.

And this brings us to the psychological aspect of that conclusion which, in the last chapter, was reached under its biological aspect. The pleasures and pains which the moral sentiments originate, will, like bodily pleasures and pains, become incentives and deterrents so adjusted in their strengths to the needs, that the moral conduct will be the natural conduct.

[I-132]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW.↩

§ 48. Not for the human race only, but for every race, there are laws of right living. Given its environment and its structure, and there is for each kind of creature a set of actions adapted in their kinds, amounts, and combinations, to secure the highest conservation its nature permits. The animal, like the man, has needs for food, warmth, activity rest, and so forth; which must be fulfilled in certain relative degrees to make its life whole. Maintenance of its race implies satisfaction of special desires, sexual and philoprogenitive, in due proportions. Hence there is a supposable formula for the activities of each species, which, could it be drawn out, would constitute a system of morality for that species. But such a system of morality would have little or no reference to the welfare of others than self and offspring. Indifferent to individuals of its own kind, as an inferior creature is, and habitually hostile to individuals of other kinds, the formula for its life could take no cognizance of the lives of those with which it came in contact; or rather, such formula would imply that maintenance of its life was at variance with maintenance of their lives.

But on ascending from beings of lower kinds to the highest kind of being, man; or, more strictly, on ascending from man in his presocial stage to man in his social stage; the formula has to include an additional factor. Though not peculiar to human life under its developed form, the presence of this factor is still, in the highest degree, characteristic of it. Though there are inferior species displaying considerable degrees of sociality; and though the formulas for their complete lives would have to take account of the relations arising from union; yet our own species is, on the whole, to be distinguished as having a formula for complete life which specially recognizes the relations of each individual to others, in presence of whom, and in cooperation with whom, he has to live.

This additional factor in the problem of complete living, is, indeed, so important that the necessitated modifications of conduct have come to form a chief part of the code of conduct. Because the inherited desires which directly refer to the maintenance of individual life, are fairly adjusted to the requirements, there has been no need to insist on that conformity to them which furthers self-conservation. Conversely, because these desires prompt activities that often conffict with the activities of others; and because the sentiments responding to others’ claims are relatively weak; moral codes emphasize those restraints on conduct which the presence of fellow men entails.

From the sociological point of view then, ethics becomes nothing else than a definite account of the forms of conduct that are fitted to the associated state, in such wise that the lives of each and all may be the greatest possible, alike in length and breadth.

§ 49. But here we are met by a fact which forbids us thus to put in the foreground the welfares of citizens, individually considered, and requires us to put in the foreground the welfare of the society as a whole. The life of the social organism must, as an end, rank above the lives of its units. These two ends are not harmonious at the outset; and though the tendency is towards harmonization of them, they are still partially conflicting.

As fast as the social state establishes itself, the preservation of the society becomes a means of preserving its units. Living together arose because, on the average, it proved more advantageous to each than living apart; and this implies that maintenance of combination is maintenance of the conditions to more satisfactory living than the combined persons would otherwise have. Hence, social self-preservation becomes a proximate aim taking precedence of the ultimate aim, individual self-preservation.

This subordination of personal to social welfare is, however, contingent: it depends on the presence of antagonistic societies. So long as the existence of a community is endangered by the actions of communities around, it must remain true that the interests of individuals must be sacrificed to the interests of the community, as far as is needful for the community’s salvation. But if this is manifest, it is, by implication, manifest, that when social antagonisms cease, this need for sacrifice of private claims to public claims ceases also; or rather, there cease to be any public claims at variance with private claims. All along, furtherance of individual lives has been the ultimate end; and if this ultimate end has been postponed to the proximate end of preserving the community’s life, it has been so only because this proximate end was instrumental to the ultimate end. When the aggregate is no longer in danger, the final object of pursuit, the welfare of the units, no longer needing to be postponed, becomes the immediate object of pursuit.

Consequently, unlike sets of conclusions respecting human conduct emerge, according as we are concerned with a state of habitual or occasional war, or are concerned with a state of permanent and general peace. Let us glance at these alternative states and the alternative implications.

§ 50. At present the individual man has to carry on his life with due regard to the lives of others belonging to the same society; while he is sometimes called on to be regardless of the lives of those belonging to other societies. The same mental constitution having to fulfill both these requirements, is necessarily incongruous; and the correlative conduct, adjusted first to the one need and then to the other, cannot be brought within any consistent ethical system.

Hate and destroy your fellow man, is now the command; and then the command is, love and aid your fellow man. Use every means to deceive, says the one code of conduct; while the other code says, be truthful in word and deed. Seize what property you can and burn all you cannot take away, are injunctions which the religion of enmity countenances; while by the religion of amity, theft and arson are condemned as crimes. And as conduct has to be made up of parts thus at variance with one another, the theory of conduct remains confused. There coexists a kindred irreconcilability between the sentiments answering to the forms of cooperation required for militancy and industrialism respectively. While social antagonisms are habitual, and while, for efficient action against other societies, there needs great subordination to men who command, the virtue of loyalty and the duty of implicit obedience have to be insisted on: disregard of the ruler’s will is punished with death. But when war ceases to be chronic, and growing industrialism habituates men to maintaining their own claims while respecting the claims of others, loyalty becomes less profound, the authority of the ruler is questioned or denied in respect of various private actions and beliefs. State dictation is in many directions successfully defied, and the political independence of the citizen comes to be regarded as a claim which it is virtuous to maintain and vicious to yield up. Necessarily during the transition, these opposite sentiments are incongruously mingled. So is it, too, with domestic institutions under the two regimes. While the first is dominant, ownership of a slave is honorable, and in the slave submission is praiseworthy; but as the last grows dominant, slave-owning becomes a crime and servile obedience excites contempt. Nor is it otherwise in the family. The subjection of women to men, complete while war is habitual but qualified as fast as peaceful occupations replace it, comes eventually to be thought wrong; and equality before the law is asserted. At the same time the opinion concerning paternal power changes. The once unquestioned right of the father to take his children’s lives is denied; and the duty of absolute submission to him, long insisted on, is changed into the duty of obedience within reasonable limits.

Were the ratio between the life of antagonism with alien societies, and the life of peaceful cooperation within each society a constant ratio, some permanent compromise between the conflicting rules of conduct appropriate to the two lives might be reached. But since this ratio is a variable one, the compromise can never be more than temporary. Ever the tendency is towards congruity between beliefs and requirements. Either the social arrangements are gradually changed until they come into harmony with prevailing ideas and sentiments; or, if surrounding conditions prevent change in the social arrangements, the necessitated habits of life modify the prevailing ideas and sentiments to the requisite extent. Hence, for each kind and degree of social evolution determined by external conflict and internal friendship, there is an appropriate compromise between the moral code of enmity and the moral code of amity: not, indeed, a definable, consistent compromise, but a compromise fairly well understood.

This compromise, vague, ambiguous, illogical, though it may be, is nevertheless for the time being authoritative. For if, as above shown, the welfare of the society must take precedence of the welfares of its component individuals, during those stages in which the individuals have to preserve themselves by preserving their society; then such temporary compromise between the two codes of conduct as duly regards external defense, while favoring internal cooperation to the greatest extent practicable, subserves the maintenance of life in the highest degree; and thus gains the ultimate sanction. So that the perplexed and inconsistent moralities of which each society and each age shows us a more or less different one, are severally justified as being approximately the best under the circumstances.

But such moralities are, by their definitions, shown to belong to incomplete conduct; not to conduct that is fully evolved. We saw that the adjustments of acts to ends which, while constituting the external manifestations of life conduce to the continuance of life, have been rising to a certain ideal form now approached by the civilized man. But this form is not reached so long as there continue aggressions of one society upon another. Whether the hindrances to complete living result from the trespasses of fellow citizens, or from the trespasses of aliens, matters not: if they occur there does not yet exist the state defined. The limit to the evolution of conduct is arrived at by the members of each society only when, being arrived at by members of other societies also, the causes of international antagonism end simultaneously with the causes of antagonism between individuals.

And now having from the sociological point of view recognized the need for, and authority of, these changing systems of ethics, proper to changing ratios between warlike activities and peaceful activities, we have, from the same point of view, to consider the system of ethics proper to the state in which peaceful activities are undisturbed.

§ 51. If, excluding all thought of dangers or hindrances from causes external to a society, we set ourselves to specify those conditions under which the life of each person, and therefore of the aggregate, may be the greatest possible; we come upon certain simple ones which, as here stated, assume the form of truisms.

For, as we have seen, the definition of that highest life accompanying completely-evolved conduct, itself excludes all acts of aggression–not only murder, assault, robbery, and the major offenses generally, but minor offenses, such as libel, injury to property, and so forth. While directly deducting from individual life, these indirectly cause perturbations of social life. Trespasses against others rouse antagonisms in them; and if these are numerous the group loses coherence. Hence, whether the integrity of the group itself is considered as the end; or whether the end considered is the benefit ultimately secured to its units by maintaining its integrity; or whether the immediate benefit of its units taken separately, is considered the end; the implication is the same: such acts are at variance with achievement of the end. That these inferences are self-evident and trite (as indeed the first inferences drawn from the data of every science that reaches the deductive stage naturally are) must not make us pass lightly over the all-important fact that, from the sociological point of view, the leading moral laws are seen to follow as corollaries from the definition of complete life carried on under social conditions.

Respect for these primary moral laws is not enough, however. Associated men pursuing their several lives without injuring one another but without helping one another, reap no advantages from association beyond those of companionship. If, while there is no cooperation for defensive purposes (which is here excluded by the hypothesis) there is also no cooperation for satisfying wants, the social state loses its raison d’être–almost, if not entirely. There are, indeed, people who live in a condition little removed from this; as the Esquimaux. But though these, exhibiting none of the cooperation necessitated by war, which is unknown to them, lead lives such that each family is substantially independent of others, occasional cooperation occurs. And, indeed, that families should live in company without ever yielding mutual aid, is scarcely conceivable.

Nevertheless, whether actually existing or only approached, we must here recognize as hypothetically possible, a state in which these primary moral laws alone are conformed to; for the purpose of observing, in their uncomplicated forms, what are the negative conditions to harmonious social life. Whether the members of a social group do or do not cooperate, certain limitations to their individual activities are necessitated by their association; and after recognizing these as arising in the absence of cooperation, we shall be the better prepared to understand how conformity to them is effected when cooperation begins.

§ 52. For whether men live together in quite independent ways, careful only to avoid aggressing; or whether, advancing from passive association to active association, they cooperate; their conduct must be such that the achievement of ends by each shall at least not be hindered. And it becomes obvious that when they cooperate, there must not only be no resulting hindrance but there must be facilitation; since in the absence of facilitation there can be no motive to cooperate. What shape, then, must the mutual restraints take when cooperation begins? Or rather–What, in addition to the primary mutual restraints already specified, are those secondary mutual restraints required to make cooperation possible?

One who, living in an isolated way expends effort in pursuit of an end, gets compensation for the effort by securing the end; and so achieves satisfaction. If he expends the effort without achieving the end, there results dissatisfaction. The satisfaction and the dissatisfaction, are measures of success and failure in life-sustaining acts; since that which is achieved by effort is something which directly or indirectly furthers life, and so pays for the cost of the effort; while if the effort fails there is nothing to pay for the cost of it, and so much life is wasted. What must result from this when men’s efforts are joined? The reply will be made clearer if we take the successive forms of cooperation in the order of ascending complexity. We may distinguish as homogeneous cooperation, (1) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are simultaneously enjoyed. As cooperation that is not completely homogeneous, we may distinguish, (2) that in which like efforts are joined for like ends that are not simultaneously enjoyed. A cooperation of which the heterogeneity is more distinct is, (3) that in which unlike efforts are joined for like ends. And lastly comes the decidedly heterogeneous cooperation, (4) that in which unlike efforts are joined for unlike ends.

The simplest and earliest of these, in which men’s powers, similar in kind and degree, are united in pursuit of a benefit which, when obtained, they all participate in, is most familiarly exemplified in the catching of game by primitive men: this simplest and earliest form of industrial cooperation being also that which is least differentiated from militant cooperation; for the cooperators are the same, and the processes, both destructive of life, are carried on in analogous ways. The condition under which such cooperation may be successfully carried on, is that the cooperators shall share alike in the produce. Each thus being enabled to repay himself in food for the expended effort, and being further enabled to achieve other such desired ends as maintenance of family, obtains satisfaction: there is no aggression of one on another, and the cooperation is harmonious. Of course the divided produce can be but roughly proportioned to the several efforts joined in obtaining it; but there is actually among savages, as we see that for harmonious cooperation there must be, a recognition of the principle that efforts when combined shall severally bring equivalent benefits, as they would do if they were separate. Moreover, beyond the taking equal shares in return for labors that are approximately equal, there is generally an attempt at proportioning benefit to achievement, by assigning something extra, in the shape of the best part of the trophy, to the actual slayer of the game. And obviously, if there is a wide departure from this system of sharing benefits when there has been a sharing of efforts, the cooperation will cease. Individual hunters will prefer to do the best they can for themselves separately.

Passing from this simplest case of cooperation to a case not quite so simple–a case in which the homogeneity is incomplete–let us ask how a member of the group may be led without dissatisfaction to expend effort in achieving a benefit which, when achieved, is enjoyed exclusively by another? Clearly he may do this on condition that the other shall afterward expend a like effort, the beneficial result of which shall be similarly rendered up by him in return. This exchange of equivalents of effort is the form which social cooperation takes while yet there is little or no division of labor save that between the sexes. For example, the Bodo and Dhimals "mutually assist each other for the nonce, as well in constructing their houses as in clearing their plots for cultivation." And this principle–I will help you if you will help me–common in simple communities where the occupations are alike in kind, and occasionally acted upon in more advanced communities, is one under which the relation between effort and benefit, no longer directly maintained, is maintained indirectly. For whereas when men’s activities are carried on separately, or are joined in the way exemplified above, effort is immediately paid for by benefit, in this form of cooperation the benefit achieved by effort is exchanged for a like benefit to be afterward received when asked for. And in this case as in the preceding case, cooperation can be maintained only by fulfillment of the tacit agreements. For if they are habitually not fulfilled, there will commonly be refusal to give aid when asked; and each man will be left to do the best he can by himself. All those advantages to be gained by union of efforts in doing things that are beyond the powers of the single individual, will be unachievable. At the outset, then, fulfillment of contracts that are implied if not expressed, becomes a condition to social cooperation; and therefore to social development.

From these simple forms of cooperation in which the labors men carry on are of like kinds, let us turn to the more complex forms in which they carry on labors of unlike kinds. Where men mutually aid in building huts or felling trees, the number of days’ work now given by one to another, is readily balanced by an equal number of days’ work afterward given by the other to him. And no estimation of the relative values of the labors being required, a definite understanding is little needed. But when division of labor arises–when there come transactions between one who makes weapons and another who dresses skins for clothing, or between a grower of roots and a catcher of fish–neither the relative amounts nor the relative qualities of their labors admit of easy measure; and with the multiplication of businesses, implying numerous kinds of skill and power, there ceases to be anything like manifest equivalence between either the bodily and mental efforts set against one another, or between their products. Hence the arrangement cannot now be taken for granted, as while the things exchanged are like in kind: it has to be stated. If A allows B to appropriate a product of his special skill, on condition that he is allowed to appropriate a different product of B’s special skill, it results that as equivalence of the two products cannot be determined by direct comparison of their quantities and qualities, there must be a distinct understanding as to how much of the one may be taken in consideration of so much of the other.

Only under voluntary agreement, then, no longer tacit and vague but overt and definite, can cooperation be harmoniously carried on when division of labor becomes established. And as in the simplest cooperation, where like efforts are joined to secure a common good, the dissatisfaction caused in those who, having expended their labors do not get their shares of the good, prompts them to cease cooperating; as in the more advanced cooperation, achieved by exchanging equal labors of like kind expended at different times, aversion to cooperate is generated if the expected equivalent of labor is not rendered; so in this developed cooperation, the failure of either to surrender to the other that which was avowedly recognized as of like value with the labor or product given, tends to prevent cooperation by exciting discontent with its results. And evidently, while antagonisms thus caused impede the lives of the units, the life of the aggregate is endangered by diminished cohesion.

§ 53. Beyond these comparatively direct mischiefs, special and general, there have to be noted indirect mischiefs. As already implied by the reasoning in the last paragraph, not only social integration but also social differentiation, is hindered by breach of contract.

In Part II of the Principles of Sociology, it was shown that the fundamental principles of organization are the same for an individual organism and for a social organism; because both consist of mutually dependent parts. In the one case as in the other, the assumption of unlike activities by the component members, is possible only on condition that they severally benefit in due degrees by one another’s activities. That we may the better see what are the implications in respect of social structures, let us first note the implications in respect of individual structures.

The welfare of a living body implies an approximate equilibrium between waste and repair. If the activities involve an expenditure not made good by nutrition, dwindling follows. If the tissues are enabled to take up from the blood enriched by food, fit substances enough to replace those used up in efforts made, the weight may be maintained. And if the gain exceeds the loss, growth results. That which is true of the whole in its relations to the external world, is no less true of the parts in their relations to one another. Each organ, like the entire organism, is wasted by performing its function, and has to restore itself from the materials brought to it. If the quantity of materials furnished by the joint agency of the other organs is deficient, the particular organ dwindles. If they are sufficient, it can maintain its integrity If they are in excess, it is enabled to increase. To say that this arrangement constitutes the physiological contract, is to use a metaphor which, though not true in aspect is true in essence. For the relations of structures are actually such that, by the help of a central regulative system, each organ is supplied with blood in proportion to the work it does. As was pointed out (Principles of Sociology, sec. 254) well-developed animals are so constituted that each muscle or viscus, when called into action, sends to the vasomotor centers through certain nerve fibers, an impulse caused by its action; whereupon through other nerve fibers, there comes an impulse causing dilatation of its blood vessels. That is to say, all other parts of the organism when they jointly require it to labor, forthwith begin to pay it in blood. During the ordinary state of physiological equilibrium, the loss and the gain balance, and the organ does not sensibly change. If the amount of its function is increased within such moderate limits that the local blood vessels can bring adequately increased supplies, the organ grows: beyond replacing its losses by its gains, it makes a profit on its extra transactions; so being enabled by extra structures to meet extra demands. But if the demands made on it become so great that the supply of materials cannot keep pace with the expenditure, either because the local blood vessels are not large enough or for any other reason; then the organ begins to decrease from excess of waste over repair: there sets in what is known as atrophy. Now since each of the organs has thus to be paid in nutriment for its services by the rest; it follows that the due balancing of their respective claims and payments is requisite, directly for the welfare of each organ, and indirectly for the welfare of the organism. For in a whole formed of mutually dependent parts, anything which prevents due performance of its duty by one part reacts injuriously on all the parts.

With change of terms these statements and inferences hold of a society. That social division of labor which parallels in so many other respects the physiological division of labor, parallels it in this respect also. As was shown at large in the Principles of Sociology, Part II, each order of functionaries and each group of producers, severally performing some action or making some article not for direct satisfaction of their own needs but for satisfaction of the needs of fellow citizens in general, otherwise occupied, can continue to do this only so long as the expenditures of effort and returns of profit are approximately equivalent. Social organs like individual organs remain stationary if there come to them normal proportions of the commodities produced by the society as a whole. If because the demands made on an industry or profession are unusually great, those engaged in it make excessive profits, more citizens flock to it and the social structure constituted by its members grows; while decrease of the demands and therefore of the profits, either leads its members to choose other careers or stops the accessions needful to replace those who die, and the structure dwindles. Thus is maintained that proportion among the powers of the component parts which is most conducive to the welfare of the whole.

And now mark that the primary condition to achievement of this result is fulfillment of contract. If from the members of any part payment is frequently withheld, or falls short of the promised amount, then, through ruin of some and abandonment of the occupation by others, the part diminishes; and if it was before not more than competent to its duty, it now becomes incompetent, and the society suffers. Or if social needs throw on some part great increase of function, and the members of it are enabled to get for their services unusually high prices; fulfillment of the agreements to give them these high prices, is the only way of drawing to the part such additional number of members as will make it equal to the augmented demands. For citizens will not come to it if they find the high prices agreed upon are not paid.

Briefly, then, the universal basis of cooperation is the proportioning of benefits received to services rendered. Without this there can be no physiological division of labor; without this there can be no sociological division of labor. And since division of labor, physiological or sociological, profits the whole and each part; it results that on maintenance of the arrangements necessary to do it, depend both special and general welfare. In a society such arrangements are maintained only if bargains, overt or tacit, are carried out. So that beyond the primary requirement to harmonious coexistence in a society, that its units shall not directly aggress on one another; there comes this secondary requirement, that they shall not indirectly aggress by breaking agreements.

§ 54. But now we have to recognize the fact that complete fulfillment of these conditions, original and derived, is not enough. Social cooperation may be such that no one is impeded in the obtainment of the normal return for effort, but contrariwise is aided by equitable exchange of services; and yet much may remain to be achieved. There is a theoretically possible form of society, purely industrial in its activities, which, though approaching nearer to the moral idea in its code of conduct than any society not purely industrial, does not fully reach it.

For while industrialism requires the life of each citizen to be such that it may be carried on without direct or indirect aggressions on other citizens, it does not require his life to be such that it shall directly further the lives of other citizens. It is not a necessary implication of industrialism, as thus far defined, that each, beyond the benefits given and received by exchange of services, shall give and receive other benefits. A society is conceivable formed of men leading perfectly inoffensive lives, scrupulously fulfilling their contracts, and efficiently rearing their offspring, who yet, yielding to one another no advantages beyond those agreed upon, fall short of that highest degree of life which the gratuitous rendering of services makes possible. Daily experiences prove that every one would suffer many evils and lose many goods, did none give him unpaid assistance. The life of each would be more or less damaged had he to meet all contingencies single-handed. Further, if no one did for his fellows anything more than was required by strict performance of contract, private interests would suffer from the absence of attention to public interests. The limit of evolution of conduct is consequently not reached, until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others.

It may be shown that the form of nature which thus to justice adds beneficence, is one which adaptation to the social state produces. The social man has not reached that harmonization of constitution with conditions forming the limit of evolution, so long as there remains space for the growth of faculties which, by their exercise, bring positive benefit to others and satisfaction to self. If the presence of fellow men, while putting certain limits to each man’s sphere of activity, opens certain other spheres of activity in which feelings while achieving their gratifications, do not diminish but add to the gratifications of others, then such spheres will inevitably be occupied. Recognition of this truth does not, however, call on us to qualify greatly that conception of the industrial state above set forth; since sympathy is the root of both justice and beneficence.

§ 55. Thus the sociological view of ethics supplements the physical, the biological, and the psychological views, by disclosing those conditions under which only associated activities can be so carried on, that the complete living of each consists with, and conduces to, the complete living of all.

At first the welfare of social groups, habitually in antagonism with other groups, takes precedence of individual welfare; and the rules of conduct which are authoritative for the time being, involve incompleteness of individual life that the general life may be maintained. At the same time the rules have to enforce the claims of individual life as far as may be; since on the welfare of the units the welfare of the aggregate largely depends.

In proportion as societies endanger one another less, the need for subordinating individual lives to the general life, decreases; and with approach to a peaceful state, the general life, having from the beginning had furtherance of individual lives as its ultimate purpose, comes to have this as its proximate purpose.

During the transitional stages there are necessitated successive compromises between the moral code which asserts the claims of the society versus those of the individual, and the moral code which asserts the claims of the individual versus those of the society. And evidently each such compromise, though for the time being authoritative, admits of no consistent or definite expression.

But gradually as war declines–gradually as the compulsory cooperation needful in dealing with external enemies becomes unnecessary, and leaves behind the voluntary cooperation which effectually achieves internal sustentation; there grows increasingly clear the code of conduct which voluntary cooperation implies. And this final permanent code alone admits of being definitely formulated, and so constituting ethics as a science in contrast with empirical ethics.

The leading traits of a code under which complete living through voluntary cooperation is secured, may be simply stated. The fundamental requirement is that the lifesustaining actions of each shall severally bring him the amounts and kinds of advantage naturally achieved by them; and this implies firstly that he shall suffer no direct aggressions on his person or property, and secondly that he shall suffer no indirect aggressions by breach of contract. Observance of these negative conditions to voluntary cooperation having facilitated life to the greatest extent by exchange of services under agreement, life is to be further facilitated by exchange of services beyond agreement: the highest life being reached only when, besides helping to complete one another’s lives by specified reciprocities of aid, men otherwise help to complete one another’s lives.

[I-150]

CHAPTER IX.

CRITICISMS AND EXPLANATIONS.↩

§ 56. Comparisons of the foregoing chapters with one another, suggest sundry questions which must be answered partially if not completely before anything can be done towards reducing ethical principles from abstract forms to concrete forms.

We have seen that to admit the desirableness of conscious existence, is to admit that conduct should be such as will produce a consciousness which is desirable–a consciousness which is as much pleasurable and as little painful as may be. We have also seen that this necessary implication corresponds with the a priori inference, that the evolution of life has been made possible only by the establishment of connections between pleasures and beneficial actions and between pains and detrimental actions. But the general conclusion reached in both of these ways, though it covers the area within which our special conclusions must fall, does not help us to reach those special conclusions.

Were pleasures all of one kind, differing only in degree; were pains all of one kind, differing only in degree; and could pleasures be measured against pains with definite results; the problems of conduct would be greatly simplified. Were the pleasures and pains serving as incentives and deterrents, simultaneously present to consciousness with like vividness, or were they all immediately impending, or were they all equidistant in time; the problems would be further simplified. And they would be still further simplified if the pleasures and pains were exclusively those of the actor. But both the desirable and the undesirable feelings are of various kinds, making quantitative comparisons difficult; some are present and some are future, increasing the difficulty of quantitative comparison; some are entailed on self and some are entailed on others; again increasing the difficulty. So that the guidance yielded by the primary principle reached, is of little service unless supplemented by the guidance of secondary principles.

Already, in recognizing the needful subordination of presentative feelings to representative feelings, and the implied postponement of present to future throughout a wide range of cases, some approach towards a secondary principle of guidance has been made. Already too, in recognizing the limitations which men’s associated state puts to their actions, with the implied need for restraining feelings of some kinds by feelings of other kinds, we have come in sight of another secondary principle of guidance. Still, there remains much to be decided respecting the relative claims of these guiding principles, general and special.

Some elucidation of the questions involved, will be obtained by here discussing certain views and arguments set forth by past and present moralists.

§ 57. Using the name hedonism for that ethical theory which makes happiness the end of action; and distinguishing hedonism into the two kinds, egoistic and universalistic, according as the happiness sought is that of the actor himself or is that of all, Mr. Sidgwick alleges its implied belief to be that pleasures and pains are commensurable. In his criticism on (empirical) egoistic hedonism he says:

The fundamental assumption of Hedonism, clearly stated, is that all feelings considered merely as feelings can be arranged in a certain scale of desirability, so that the desirability or pleasantness of each bears a definite ratio to that of all the others. [Methods of Ethics, 2d ed., p. 115.]

And asserting this to be its assumption, he proceeds to point out difficulties in the way of the hedonistic calculation; apparently for the purpose of implying that these difficulties tell against the hedonistic theory.

Now though it may be shown that by naming the intensity the duration, the certainty, and the proximity, of a pleasure or a pain, as traits entering into the estimation of its relative value, Bentham has committed himself to the specified assumption; and though it is perhaps reasonably taken for granted that hedonism as represented by him, is identical with hedonism at large; yet it seems to me that the hedonist, empirical or other, is not necessarily committed to this assumption. That the greatest surplus of pleasures over pains ought to be the end of action, is a belief which he may still consistently hold after admitting that the valuations of pleasures and pains are commonly vague and often erroneous. He may say that though indefinite things do not admit of definite measurements, yet approximately true estimates of their relative values may be made when they differ considerably; and he may further say that even when their relative values are not determinable, it remains true that the most valuable should be chosen. Let us listen to him.

A debtor who cannot pay me, offers to compound for his debt by making over one of sundry things he possesses–a diamond ornament, a silver vase, a picture, a carriage. Other questions being set aside, I assert it to be my pecuniary interest to choose the most valuable of these; but I cannot say which is the most valuable. Does the proposition that it is my pecuniary interest to choose the most valuable therefore become doubtful? Must I not choose as well as I can; and if I choose wrongly must I give up my ground of choice? Must I infer that in matters of business I may not act on the principle that, other things equal, the more profitable transaction is to be preferred; because in many cases I cannot say which is the more profitable, and have often chosen the less profitable? Because I believe that of many dangerous courses I ought to take the least dangerous, do I make "the fundamental assumption" that courses can be arranged according to a scale of dangerousness; and must I abandon my belief if I cannot so arrange them? If I am not by consistency bound to do this, then I am no more by consistency bound to give up the principle that the greatest surplus of pleasures over pains should be the end of action, because the "commensurability of pleasures and pains" cannot be asserted.

At the close of his chapters on empirical hedonism, Mr. Sidgwick himself says he does "not think that the common experience of mankind, impartially examined, really sustains the view that egoistic Hedonism is necessarily suicidal"; adding, however, that the "uncertainty of hedonistic calculation cannot be denied to have great weight." But here the fundamental assumption of hedonism, that happiness is the end of action, is still supposed to involve the assumption that "feelings can be arranged in a certain scale of desirability". This we have seen it does not: its fundamental assumption is in no degree invalidated by proof that such arrangement of them is impracticable.

To Mr. Sidgwick’s argument there is the further objection, no less serious, that to whatever degree it tells against egoistic hedonism, it tells in a greater degree against universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism. He admits that it tells as much; saying "whatever weight is to be attached to the objections brought against this assumption [the commensurability of pleasures and pains] must of course tell against the present method." Not only does it tell, but it tells in a double way I do not mean merely that, as he points out, the assumption becomes greatly complicated if we take all sentient beings into account, and if we include posterity along with existing individuals. I mean that, taking as the end to be achieved the greatest happiness of the existing individuals forming a single community the set of difficulties standing in the way of egoistic hedonism, is compounded with another set of difficulties no less great, when we pass from it to universalistic hedonism. For if the dictates of universalistic hedonism are to be fulfilled, it must be under the guidance of individual judgments, or of corporate judgments, or of both. Now any one of such judgments issuing from a single mind, or from any aggregate of minds, necessarily embodies conclusions respecting the happinesses of other persons; few of them known, and the great mass never seen. All these persons have natures differing in countless ways and degrees from the natures of those who form the judgments; and the happinesses of which they are severally capable differ from one another, and differ from the happinesses of those who form the judgments. Consequently, if against the method of egoistic hedonism there is the objection that a man’s own pleasures and pains, unlike in their kinds, intensities, and times of occurrence, are incommensurable; then against the method of universalistic hedonism it may be urged that to the incommensurability of each judge’s own pleasures and pains (which he must use as standards) has now to be added the much more decided incommensurability of the pleasures and pains which he conceives to be experienced by innumerable other persons; all differently constituted from himself and from one another.

Nay more–there is a triple set of difficulties in the way of universalistic hedonism. To the double indeterminateness of the end has to be added the indeterminateness of the means. If hedonism, egoistic or universalistic, is to pass from dead theory into living practice, acts of one or other kind must be decided on to achieve proposed objects; and in estimating the two methods we have to consider how far the fitness of the acts respectively required can be judged. If, in pursuing his own ends, the individual is liable to be led by erroneous opinions to adjust his acts wrongly much more liable is he to be led by erroneous opinions to adjust wrongly, more complex acts to the more complex ends constituted by other men’s welfares. It is so if he operates singly to benefit a few others; and it is still more soif he cooperates with many to benefit all. Making general happiness the immediate object of pursuit, implies numerous and complicated instrumentalities officered by thousands of unseen and unlike persons, and working on millions of other persons unseen and unlike. Even the few factors in this immense aggregate of appliances and processes which are known, are very imperfectly known; and the great mass of them are unknown. So that even supposing valuation of pleasures and pains for the community at large is more practicable than, or even as practicable as, valuation of his own pleasures and pains by the individual; yet the ruling of conduct with a view to the one end is far more difficult than the ruling of it with a view to the other. Hence if the method of egoistic hedonism is unsatisfactory far more unsatisfactory, for the same and kindred reasons, is the method of universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism.

And here we come in sight of the conclusion which it has been the purpose of the foregoing criticism to bring into view. The objection made to the hedonistic method contains a truth, but includes with it an untruth. For while the proposition that happiness, whether individual or general, is the end of action, is not invalidated by proof that it cannot under either form be estimated by measurement of its components; yet it may be admitted that guidance in the pursuit of happiness by a mere balancing of pleasures and pains, is, if partially practicable throughout a certain range of conduct, futile throughout a much wider range. It is quite consistent to assert that happiness is the ultimate aim of action, and at the same time to deny that it can be reached by making it the immediate aim. I go with Mr. Sidgwick as far as the conclusion that "we must at least admit the desirability of confirming or correcting the results of such comparisons [of pleasures and pains] by any other method upon which we may find reason to rely"; and I then go further, and say that throughout a large part of conduct guidance by such comparisons is to be entirely set aside and replaced by other guidance.

§ 58. The antithesis here insisted upon between the hedonistic and considered in the abstract, and the method which current hedonism, whether egoistic or universalistic, associates with that end; and the joining acceptance of the one with rejection of the other; commits us to an overt discussion of these two cardinal elements of ethical theory I may conveniently initiate this discussion by criticizing another of Mr. Sidgwick’s criticisms on the methods of hedonism.

Though we can give no account of those simple pleasures which the senses yield, because they are undecomposable, yet we distinctly know their characters as states of consciousness. Conversely, the complex pleasures formed by compounding and re-compounding the ideas of simple pleasures, though theoretically resolvable into their components, are not easy to resolve; and in proportion as they are heterogeneous in composition, the difficulty of framing intelligible conceptions of them increases. This is especially the case with the pleasures which accompany our sports. ~Theating of these, along with the pleasures of pursuit in general, for the purpose of showing that "in order to get them one must forget them," Mr. Sidgwick remarks:

A man who maintains throughout an epicurean mood, fixing his aim on his own pleasure, does not catch the full spirit of the chase; his eagerness never gets just the sharpness of edge which imparts to the pleasure its highest zest and flavor. Here comes into view what we may call the fundamental paradox of Hedonism, that the impulse towards pleasure, if too predominant, defeats its own aim. This effect is not visible, or at any rate is scarcely visible, in the case of passive sensual pleasures. But our active employments generally, whether the activities on which they attend are classed as "bodily" or as "intellectual" (as well as of many emotional pleasures), it may certainly be said that we cannot attain them, at least in their best form, so long as we concentrate our aim on them. [Methods of Ethics, 2d ed., p. 41.]

Now I think we shall not regard this truth as paradoxical after we have duly analyzed the pleasure of pursuit. The chief components of this pleasure are–first, a renewed consciousness of personal efficiency (made vivid by actual success and partially excited by impending success) which consciousness of personal efficiency, connected in experience with achieved ends of every kind, arouses a vague but massive consciousness of resulting gratifications; and, second, a representation of the applause which recognition of this efficiency by others has before brought, and will again bring. Games of skill show us this clearly. Considered as an end in itself, the good cannon which a billiard player makes yields no pleasure. Whence then does the pleasure of making it arise? Partly from the fresh proof of capability which the player gives to himself, and partly from the imagined admiration of those who witness the proof of his capability: the last being the chief, since he soon tires of making cannons in the absence of witnesses. When from games which, yielding the pleasures of success, yield no pleasure derived from the end considered intrinsically, we pass to sports in which the end has intrinsic value as a source of pleasure, we see substantially the. same thing. Though the bird which the sportsman brings down is useful as food, yet his satisfaction arises mainly from having made a good shot, and from having added to the bag which will presently bring praise of his skill. The gratification of self-esteem he immediately experiences; and the gratification of receiving applause he experiences, if not immediately and in full degree, yet by representation; for the ideal pleasure is nothing else than a faint revival of the real pleasure. These two kinds of agreeable excitement present in the sportsman during the chase, constitute the mass of the desires stimulating him to continue it; for all desires are nascent forms of the feelings to be obtained by the efforts they prompt. And though while seeking more birds these representative feelings are not so vividly excited as by success just achieved, yet they are excited by imaginations of further successes; and so make enjoyable the activities constituting the pursuit. Recognizing, then, the truth that the pleasures of pursuit are much more those derived from the efficient use of means than those derived from the end itself, we see that "the fundamental paradox of hedonism" disappears.

These remarks concerning end and means, and the pleasure accompanying use of the means as added to the pleasure derived from the end, I have made for the purpose of drawing attention to a fact of profound significance. During evolution there has been a superposing of new and more complex sets of means upon older and simpler sets of means; and a superposing of the pleasures accompanying the uses of these successive sets of means; with the result that each of these pleasures has itself eventually become an end. We begin with a simple animal which, without ancillary appliances, swallows such food as accident brings in its way; and so, as we may assume, stills some kind of craving. Here we have the primary end of nutrition with its accompanying satisfaction, in their simple forms. We pass to higher types having jaws for seizing and biting–jaws which thus, by their actions, facilitate achievement of the primary end. On observing animals furnished with these organs, we get evidence that the use of them becomes in itself pleasurable irrespective of the end: instance a squirrel, which, apart from food to be so obtained, delights in nibbling everything it gets hold of. Turning from jaws to limbs we see that these, serving some creatures for pursuit and others for escape, similarly yield gratification by their exercise; as in lambs which skip and horses which prance. How the combined use of limbs and jaws, originally subserving the satisfaction of appetite, grows to be in itself pleasurable, is daily illustrated in the playing of dogs. For that throwing down and worrying which, when prey is caught, precedes eating, is, in their mimic fights, carried by each as far as he dares. Coming to means still more remote from the end, namely those by which creatures chased are caught, we are again shown by dogs that when no creature is caught there is still a gratification in the act of catching. The eagerness with which a dog runs after stones, or dances and barks in anticipation of jumping into the water after a stick, proves that apart from the satisfaction of appetite, and apart even from the satisfaction of killing prey, there is a satisfaction in the successful pursuit of a moving object. Throughout, then, we see that the pleasure attendant on the use of means to achieve an end, itself becomes an end.

Now if we contemplate these as phenomena of conduct in general, some facts worthy of note may be discerned–facts which, if we appreciate their significance, will aid us in developing our ethical conceptions. One of them is that among the successive sets of means, the later are the more remote from the primary end; are, as coordinating earlier and simpler means, the more complex; and are accompanied by feelings which are more representative. Another fact is that each set of means, with its accompanying satisfactions, eventually becomes in its turn dependent on one originating later than itself. Before the gullet swallows, the jaws must lay hold; before the jaws tear out and bring within the grasp of the gullet a piece fit for swallowing, there must be that cooperation of limbs and senses required for killing the prey; before this cooperation can take place, there needs the much longer cooperation constituting the chase; and even before this there must be persistent activities of limbs, eyes, and nose, in seeking prey. The pleasure attending each set of acts, while making possible the pleasure attending the set of acts which follows, is joined with a representation of this subsequent set of acts and its pleasure, and of the other which succeed in order; so that along with the feelings accompanying the search for prey, are partially aroused the feelings accompanying the actual chase, the actual destruction, the actual devouring, and the eventual satisfaction of appetite. A third fact is that the use of each set of means in due order, constitutes an obligation. Maintenance of its life being regarded as the end of its conduct, the creature is obliged to use in succession the means of finding prey, the means of catching prey, the means of killing prey, the means of devouring prey. Lastly it follows that though the assuaging of hunger, directly associated with sustentation, remains to the last the ultimate end; yet the successful use of each set of means in its turn is the proximate end–the end which takes temporary precedence in authoritativeness.

§ 59. The relations between means and ends thus traced throughout the earlier stages of evolving conduct, are traceable throughout later stages; and hold true of human conduct, up even to its highest forms. As fast as, for the better maintenance of life, the simpler sets of means and the pleasures accompanying the uses of them, come to be supplemented by the more complex sets of means and their pleasures, these begin to take precedence in time and in imperativeness. To use effectually each more complex set of means becomes the proximate end, and the accompanying feeling becomes the immediate gratification sought; though there may be, and habitually is, an associated consciousness of the remoter ends and remoter gratifications to be obtained. An example will make clear the parallelism.

Absorbed in his business the trader, if asked what is his main end, will say–making money. He readily grants that achievement of this end is desired by him in furtherance of ends beyond it. He knows that in directly seeking money he is indirectly seeking food, clothes, house room, and the comforts of life for self and family. But while admitting that money is but a means to these ends, he urges that the money-getting actions precede in order of time and obligation, the various actions and concomitant pleasures subserved by them; and he testifies to the fact that making money has become itself an end, and success in it a source of satisfaction, apart from these more distant ends. Again, on observing more closely the trader’s proceedings, we find that though to the end of living comfortably he gets money, and though to the end of getting money he buys and sells at a profit, which so becomes a means more immediately pursued, yet he is chiefly occupied with means still more remote from ultimate ends, and in relation to which even the selling at a profit becomes an end. For leaving to subordinates the actual measuring out of goods and receiving of proceeds, he busies himself mainly with his general affairs–inquiries concerning markets, judgments of future prices, calculations, negotiations, correspondence: the anxiety from hour to hour being to do well each one of these things indirectly conducive to the making of profits. And these ends precede in time and obligation the effecting of profitable sales, just as the effecting of profitable sales precedes the end of moneymaking, and just as the end of moneymaking precedes the end of satisfactory living. His bookkeeping best exemplifies the principle at large. Entries to the debtor or creditor sides are being made all through the day; the items are classified and arranged in such way that at a moment’s notice the state of each account may be ascertained; and then, from time to time, the books are balanced, and it is required that the result shall come right to a penny: satisfaction following proved correctness, and annoyance being caused by error. If you ask why all this elaborate process, so remote from the actual getting of money, and still more remote from the enjoyments of life, the answer is that keeping accounts correctly is fulfilling a condition to the end of moneymaking, and becomes in itself a proximate end–a duty to be discharged, that there may be discharged the duty of getting an income, that there may be discharged the duty of maintaining self, wife, and children.

Approaching as we here do to moral obligation, are we not shown its relations to conduct at large? Is it not clear that observance of moral principles is fulfillment of certain general conditions to the successful carrying on of special activities? That the trader may prosper, he must not only keep his books correctly, but must pay those he employs according to agreement, and must meet his engagements with creditors. May we not say, then, that conformity to the second and third of these requirements is, like conformity to the first, an indirect means to effectual use of the more direct means of achieving welfare? May we not say, too, that as the use of each more indirect means in due order becomes itself an end, and a source of gratification; so, eventually, becomes the use of this most indirect means? And may we not infer that though conformity to moral requirements precedes in imperativeness conformity to other requirements; yet that this imperativeness arises from the fact that fulfillment of the other requirements, by self or others or both, is thus furthered?

§ 60. This question brings us round to another side of the issue before raised. When alleging that empirical utilitarianism is but introductory to rational utilitarianism, I pointed out that the last does not take welfare for its immediate object of pursuit, but takes for its immediate object of pursuit conformity to certain principles which, in the nature of things, causally determine welfare. And now we see that this amounts to recognition of that law, traceable throughout the evolution of conduct in general, that each later and higher order of means takes precedence in time and authoritativeness of each earlier and lower order of means. The contrast between the ethical methods thus distinguished, made tolerably clear by the above illustrations, will be made still clearer by contemplating the two as put in opposition by the leading exponent of empirical utilitarianism. Treating of legislative aims, Bentham writes:

But justice, what is it that we are to understand by justice: and why not happiness but justice? What happiness is, every man knows, because, what pleasure is, every man knows, and what pain is, every man knows. But what justice is–this is what on every occasion is the subject-matter of dispute. Be the meaning of the word justice what it will, what regard is it entitled to otherwise than as a means of happiness.[6]

Let us first consider the assertion here made respecting the relative intelligibilities of these two ends; and let us afterwards consider what is implied by the choice of happiness instead of justice.

Bentham’s positive assertion that "what happiness is every man knows, because, what pleasure is, every man knows, is met by counterassertions equally positive. "Who can tell," asks Plato, "what pleasure really is, or know it in its essence, except the philosopher, who alone is conversant with realities."[7] Aristotle, too, after commenting on the different opinions held by the vulgar, by the political, by the contemplative, says of happiness that "to some it seems to be virtue, to others prudence, and to others a kind of wisdom: to some again, these, or some one of these, with pleasure, or at least, not without pleasure; others again include external prosperity."[8] And Aristotle, like Plato, comes to the remarkable conclusion that the pleasures of the intellect, reached by the contemplative life, constitute the highest happiness![9] How disagreements concerning the nature of happiness and the relative values of pleasures, thus exhibited in ancient times, continue down to modern times, is shown in Mr. Sidgwick’s discussion of egoistic hedonism, above commented upon. Further, as was pointed out before, the indefiniteness attending the estimations of pleasures and pains, which stands in the way of egoistic hedonism as ordinarily conceived, is immensely increased on passing to universalistic hedonism as ordinarily conceived; since its theory implies that the imagined pleasures and pains of others are to be estimated by the help of these pleasures and pains of self, already so difficult to estimate. And that anyone after observing the various pursuits into which some eagerly enter but which others shun, and after listening to the different opinions concerning the likableness of this or that occupation or amusement, expressed at every table, should assert that the nature of happiness can be fully agreed upon, so as to render it a fit end for direct legislative action, is surprising.

The accompanying proposition that justice is unintelligible as an end, is no less surprising. Though primitive men have no words for either happiness or justice; yet even among them an approach to the conception of justice is traceable. The law of retaliation, requiring that a death inflicted by one tribe on another, shall be balanced by the death either of the murderer or of some member of his tribe, shows us in a vague shape that notion of equalness of treatment which forms an essential element in it. When we come to early races who have given their thoughts and feelings literary form, we find this conception of justice, as involving equalness of action, becoming distinct. Among the Jews, David expressed in words this association of ideas when, praying to God to "hear the right," he said–"Let my sentence come forth from thy presence; let thine eyes behold the things that are equal"; as also, among early Christians, did Paul when to the Colossians he wrote–"Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal." Commenting on the different meanings of justice, Aristotle concludes that "the just will therefore be the lawful and the equal; and the unjust the unlawful and the unequal. But since the unjust man is also one who takes more than his share," &c. And that justice was similarly conceived by the Romans they proved by including under it such meanings as exact, proportionate, impartial, severally implying fairness of division; and still better by identification of it with equity which is a derivative œquus: the word œquus itself having for one of its meanings just or impartial. This coincidence of view among ancient peoples respecting the nature of justice, has extended to modern peoples; who by a general agreement in certain cardinal principles which their systems of law embody forbidding direct aggressions, which are forms of unequal actions, and forbidding indirect aggressions by breaches of contract, which are other forms of unequal actions, one and all show us the identification of justice with equalness. Bentham, then, is wrong when he says–"But what justice is–this is what on every occasion is the subject-matter of dispute." He is more wrong, indeed, than has thus far appeared. For, in the first place, he misrepresents utterly by ignoring the fact that in ninety-nine out of every hundred daily transactions between men, no dispute about justice arises; but the business done is recognized on both sides as justly done. And in the second place if, with respect to the hundredth transaction there is a dispute, the subject matter of it is not "what justice is," for it is admitted to be equity or equalness; but the subject matter of dispute always is–what, under these particular circumstances, constitutes equalness?–a widely different question.

It is not then self-evident, as Bentham alleges, that happiness is an intelligible end while justice is not; but, contrariwise, examination makes evident the greater intelligibility of justice as an end. And analysis shows why it is the more intelligible. For justice, or equity or equalness, is concerned exclusively with quantity understated conditions; whereas happiness is concerned with both quantity and quality under conditions not stated. When, as in case of theft, a benefit is taken while no equivalent benefit is yielded–when, as in case of adulterated goods bought or base coin paid, that which is agreed to be given in exchange as of equal value is not given, but something of less value–when, as in case of broken contract, the obligation on one side has been discharged while there has been no discharge, or incomplete discharge, of the obligation on the other; we see that, the circumstances being specified, the injustice complained of refers to the relative amounts of actions, or products, or benefits, the natures of which are recognized only so far as is needful for saying whether as much has been given, or done, or allowed, by each concerned, as was implied by tacit or overt understanding to be an equivalent. But when the end proposed is happiness, the circumstances remaining unspecified, the problem is that of estimating both quantities and qualities, unhelped by any such definite measures as acts of exchange imply, or as contracts imply, or as are implied by the differences between the doings of one aggressing and one aggressed upon. The mere fact that Bentham himself includes as elements in the estimation of each pleasure or pain, its intensity, duration, certainty, and proximity, suffices to show how difficult is this problem. And when it is remembered that all pleasures and pains, not felt in particular cases only but in the aggregate of cases, and severally regarded under these four aspects, have to be compared with one another and their relative values determined, simply by introspection; it will be manifest both that the problem is complicated by the addition of indefinite judgments of qualities to indefinite measures of quantities, and that it is further complicated by the multitudinousness of these vague estimations to be gone through and summed up.

But now passing over this assertion of Bentham that happiness is a more intelligible end than justice, which we find to be the reverse of truth, let us note the several implications of the doctrine that the supreme legislative body ought to make the greatest happiness of the greatest number its immediate aim.

It implies, in the first place, that happiness may be compassed by methods framed directly for the purpose, without any previous inquiry respecting the conditions that must be fulfilled; and this presupposes a belief that there are no such conditions. For if there are any conditions without fulfillment of which happiness cannot be compassed, then the first step must be to ascertain these conditions with a view to fulfilling them; and to admit this is to admit that not happiness itself must be the immediate end, but fulfillment of the conditions to its attainment must be the immediate end. The alternatives are simple: Either the achievement of happiness is not conditional, in which case one mode of action is as good as another, or it is conditional, in which case the required mode of action must be the direct aim and not the happiness to be achieved by it.

Assuming it conceded, as it will be, that there exist conditions which must be fulfilled before happiness can be attained, let us next ask what is implied by proposing modes of so controlling conduct as to further happiness, without previously inquiring whether any such modes are already known? The implication is that human intelligence throughout the past, operating on experiences, has failed to discover any such modes; whereas present human intelligence may be expected forthwith to discover them. Unless this be asserted, it must be admitted that certain conditions to the achievement of happiness have already been partially if not wholly ascertained; and if so, our first business should be to look for them. Having found them, our rational course is to bring existing intelligence to bear on these products of past intelligence, with the expectation that it will verify the substance of them while possibly correcting the form. But to suppose that no regulative principles for the conduct of associated human beings have thus far been established, and that they are now to be established de novo, is to suppose that man as he is differs from man as he was in an incredible degree.

Beyond ignoring the probability or rather the certainty, that past experience generalized by past intelligence, must by this time have disclosed partially, if not wholly, some of the essential conditions to the achievement of happiness, Bentham’s proposition ignores the formulated knowledge of them actually existing. For whence come the conception of justice and the answering sentiment. He will scarcely say that they are meaningless, although his proposition implies as much; and if he admits that they have meanings, he must choose between two alternatives either of which is fatal to his hypothesis. Are they supernaturally caused modes of thinking and feeling, tending to make men fulfill the conditions to happiness? If so their authority is peremptory. Are they modes of thinking and feeling naturally caused in men by experience of these conditions? If so, their authority is no less peremptory. Not only then, does Bentham fail to infer that certain principles of guidance must by this time have been ascertained, but he refuses to recognize these principles as actually reached and present to him.

And then after all, he tacitly admits that which he overtly denies, by saying that–"Be the meaning of the word justice what it will, what regard is it entitled to otherwise than as a means to happiness?" For if justice is a means having happiness as its end, then justice must take precedence of happiness, as every other means takes precedence of every other end. Bentham’s own elaborate polity, is a means having happiness as its end, as justice is, by his own admission, a means having happiness as an end. If, then, we may properly skip justice, and go directly to the end happiness, we may properly skip Bentham’s polity, and go directly to the end happiness. In short, we are led to the remarkable conclusion that in all cases we must contemplate exclusively the end and must disregard the means.

§ 61. This relation of ends to means, underlying all ethical speculation, will be further elucidated if we join with some of the above conclusions, certain conclusions drawn in the last chapter. We shall see that while greatest happiness may vary widely in societies which, though ideally constituted, are subject to unlike physical circumstances, certain fundamental conditions to the achievement of this greatest happiness, are common to all such societies.

Given a people inhabiting a tract which makes nomadic habits necessary, and the happiness of each individual will be greatest when his nature is so molded to the requirements of his life, that all his faculties find their due activities in daily driving and tending cattle, milking, migrating, and so forth. The members of a community otherwise similar, which is permanently settled, will severally achieve their greatest happiness when their natures have become such that a fixed habitat, and the occupations necessitated by it, supply the spheres in which each instinct and emotion is exercised and brings the concomitant pleasure. The citizens of a large nation industrially organized, have reached their possible ideal of happiness, when the producing, distributing, and other activities, are such in their kinds and amounts, that each citizen finds in them a place for all his energies and aptitudes, while he obtains the means of satisfying all his desires. Once more we may recognize as not only possible but probable, the eventual existence of a community also industrial, the members of which, having natures similarly responding to these requirements, are also characterized by dominant aesthetic faculties, and achieve complete happiness only when a large part of life is filled with æsthetic activities. Evidently these different types of men, with their different standards of happiness, each finding the possibility of that happiness in his own society, would not find it if transferred to any of the other societies. Evidently though they might have in common such kinds of happiness as accompany the satisfaction of vital needs, they would not have in common sundry other kinds of happiness.

But now mark that while, to achieve greatest happiness in each of such societies, the special conditions to be fulfilled must differ from those to be fulfilled in the other societies, certain general conditions must be fulfilled in all the societies. Harmonious cooperation, by which alone in any of them the greatest happiness can be attained, is, as we saw, made possible only by respect for one another’s claims: there must be neither those direct aggressions which we class as crimes against person and property, nor must there be those indirect aggressions constituted by breaches of contracts. So that maintenance of equitable relations between men, is the condition to attainment of greatest happiness in all societies; however much the greatest happiness attainable in each may differ in nature, or amount, or both.

And here a physical analogy may fitly be used to give the greatest definiteness to this cardinal truth. A mass of matter of whatever kind, maintains its state of internal equilibrium, so long as its component particles severally stand toward their neighbors in equidistant positions. Accepting the conclusions of modern physicists, which imply that each molecule moves rhythmically, then a balanced state implies that each performs its movements within a space bounded by the like spaces required for the movements of those around. If the molecules have been so aggregated that the oscillations of some are more restrained than the oscillations of others, there is a proportionate instability. If the number of them thus unduly restrained is considerable, the instability is such that the cohesion in some part is liable to fail, and a crack results. If the excesses of restraint are great and multitudinous, a trifling disturbance causes the mass to break up into small fragments. To which add that the recognized remedy for this unstable state, is an exposure to such physical condition (ordinarily high temperature) as enables the molecules so to change their relative positions that their mutual restraints become equal on all sides. And now observe that this holds whatever be the natures of the molecules. They may be simple; they may be compound; they may be composed of this or that matter in this or that way. In other words, the special activities of each molecule, constituted by the relative movements of its units, may be various in their kinds and degrees; and yet, be they what they may, it remains true that to preserve internal equilibrium throughout the mass of molecules, the mutual limitations of their activities must be everywhere alike.

And this is the above-described prerequisite to social equilibrium, whatever the special natures of the associated persons. Assuming that within each society such persons are of the same type, needing for the fulfillment of their several lives kindred activities, and though these activities may be of one kind in one society and of another kind in another, so admitting of indefinite variation, this condition to social equilibrium does not admit of variation. It must be fulfilled before complete life, that is greatest happiness, can be attained in any society; be the particular quality of that life, or that happiness, what it may.[10]

§ 62. After thus observing how means and ends in conduct stand to one another, and how there emerge certain conclusions respecting their relative claims, we may see a way to reconcile sundry conflicting ethical theories. These severally embody portions of the truth; and simply require combining in proper order to embody the whole truth.

The theological theory contains a part. If for the divine will, supposed to be supernaturally revealed, we substitute the naturally revealed end towards which the Power manifested throughout evolution works; then, since evolution has been, and is still, working towards the highest life, it follows that conforming to those principles by which the highest life is achieved, is furthering that end. The doctrine that perfection or excellence of nature should be the object of pursuit, is in one sense true; for it tacitly recognizes that ideal form of being which the highest life implies, and to which evolution tends. There is a truth, also, in the doctrine that virtue must be the aim; for this is another form of the doctrine that the aim must be to fulfill the conditions to achievement of the highest life. That the intuitions of a moral faculty should guide our conduct, is a proposition in which a truth is contained; for these intuitions are the slowly organized results of experiences received by the race while living in presence of these conditions. And that happiness is the supreme end is beyond question true; for this is the concomitant of that highest life which every theory of moral guidance has distinctly or vaguely in view.

So understanding their relative positions, those ethical systems which make virtue, right, obligation, the cardinal aims, are seen to be complementary to those ethical systems which make welfare, pleasure, happiness, the cardinal aims. Though the moral sentiments generated in civilized men by daily conduct with social conditions and gradual adaptation to them, are indispensable as incentives and deterrents; and though the intuitions corresponding to these sentiments, have, in virtue of their origin, a general authority to be reverently recognized; yet the sympathies and antipathies hence originating, together with the intellectual expressions of them, are, in their primitive forms, necessarily vague. To make guidance by them adequate to all requirements, their dictates have to be interpreted and made definite by science; to which end there must be analysis of those conditions to complete living which they respond to, and from converse with which they have arisen. And such analysis necessitates the recognition of happiness for each and all, as the end to be achieved by fulfillment of these conditions.

Hence, recognizing in due degrees all the various ethical theories, conduct in its highest form will take as guides, innate perceptions of right duly enlightened and made precise by an analytic intelligence; while conscious that these guides are proximately supreme solely because they lead to the ultimately supreme end, happiness special and general.

[I-174]

CHAPTER X.

THE RELATIVITY OF PAINS AND PLEASURES..↩

§ 63. A truth of cardinal importance as a datum of ethics, which was incidentally referred to in the last chapter, must here be set forth at full length. I mean the truth that not only men of different races, but also different men of the same race, and even the same men at different periods of life, have different standards of happiness. Though there is some recognition of this by moralists, the recognition is inadequate; and the far-reaching conclusions to be drawn when the relativity of happiness is fully recognized, are scarcely suspected.

It is a belief universal in early life–a belief which in most people is but partially corrected in later life, and in very few wholly dissipated–that there is something intrinsic in the pleasantness of certain things, while other things are intrinsically unpleasant. The error is analogous to, and closely allied with, the error crude realism makes. Just as to the uncultured mind it appears self-evident that the sweetness of sugar is inherent in sugar, that sound as we perceive it is sound as it exists in the external world, and that the warmth from a fire is in itself what it seems; so does it appear self-evident that the sweetness of sugar is necessarily grateful, that there is in a beautiful sound something that must be beautiful to all creatures, and that the agreeable feeling produced by warmth is a feeling which every other consciousness must find agreeable.

But as criticism proves the one set of conclusions to be wrong, so does it prove to be wrong the other set. Not only are the qualities of external things as intellectually apprehended by us, relative to our own organisms; but the pleasurableness or painfulness of the feelings which we associate with such qualities, are also relative to our own organisms. They are so in a double sense–they are relative to its structures, and they are relative to the states of its structures.

That we may not rest in a mere nominal acceptance of these general truths, but may so appreciate them as to see their full bearings on ethical theory we must here glance at them as exemplified by animate creatures at large. For after contemplating the wide divergences of sentiency accompanying the wide divergences of organization which evolution in general has brought about, we shall be enabled the better to see the divergences of sentiency to be expected from the further evolution of humanity

§ 64. Because they can be most quickly disposed of, let us first deal with pains: a further reason for first dealing with pains being that we may thus forthwith recognize, and then leave out of consideration, those sentient states the qualities of which may be regarded as absolute rather than relative.

The painfulness of the feelings produced by forces which tend to destroy organic structures, wholly or in part, is of course common to all creatures capable of feeling. We saw it to be inevitable that during evolution there must everywhere be established such connections between external actions and the modes of consciousness they cause, that the injurious ones are accompanied by disagreeable feelings and the beneficial ones by agreeable feelings. Consequently pressures or strains which tear or bruise, and heats which burn or scald, being in all cases partially or wholly destructive, are in all cases painful. But even here the relativity of the feelings may in one sense be asserted. For the effect of a force of given quantity or intensity. varies partly with the size and partly with the structure of the creature exposed to it. The weight which is scarcely felt by a large animal crushes a small one; the blow which breaks the limb of a mouse produces little effect on a horse; the weapon which 1acerates a horse leaves a rhinoceros uninjured. And with these differences of injuriousness doubtless go differences of feeling. Merely glancing at the illustrations of this truth furnished by sentient beings in general, let us consider the illustrations mankind furnish.

Comparisons of robust laboring men with women or children, show us that degrees of mechanical stress which the first bear with impunity produce on the others injuries and accompanying pains. The blistering of a tender skin by an amount of friction which does not even redden a coarse one, or the bursting of superficial blood vessels, and consequent discoloration, caused in a person of lax tissues by a blow which leaves in well-toned tissues no trace, will sufficiently exemplify this contrast. Not only however, are the pains due to violent incident forces, relative to the characters or constitutional qualities of the parts directly affected, but they are relative in equally marked ways, or even in more marked ways, to the characters of the nervous structures. The common assumption is that equal bodily injuries excite equal pams. But this is a mistake. Pulling out a tooth or cutting off a limb, gives to different persons widely different amounts of suffering: not the endurance only but the feeling to be endured, varies greatly: and the variation largely depends on the degree of nervous development. This is well shown by the great insensibility of idiots–blows, cuts, and extremes of heat and cold, being borne by them with indifference.[11] The relation thus shown in the most marked manner where the development of the central nervous system is abnormally low is shown in a less marked manner where the development of the central nervous system is normally low; namely among inferior races of men. Many travellers have commented on the strange callousness shown by savages who have been mangled in battle or by accident; and surgeons in India say that wounds and operations are better borne by natives than by Europeans. Further, there comes the converse fact that among the higher types of men, larger-brained and more sensitive to pain than the lower, the most sensitive are those whose nervous developments, as shown by their mental powers, are the highest: part of the evidence being the relative intolerance of disagreeable sensations common among men of genius,[12] and the general irritability characteristic of them.

That pain is relative not to structures only but to their states as well, is also manifest–more manifest indeed. The sensibility of an external part depends on its temperature. Cool it below a certain point and it becomes, as we say numb; and if by ether-spray it is made very cold, it may be cut without any feeling being produced. Conversely heat the part so that its blood-vessels dilate, and the pain which any injury or irritation causes is greater than usual. How largely the production of pain depends on the condition of the part affected, we see in the extreme tenderness of an inflamed surface–a tenderness such that a slight touch causes shrinking, and such that rays from the fire which ordinarily would be indifferent become intolerable. Similarly with the special senses. A light which eyes that are in good order bear without disagreeable feeling, cannot be borne by inflamed eyes. And beyond the local state, the state of the system as a whole, and the state of the nervous centers, are both factors. Those enfeebled by illness are distressed by noises which those in health bear with equanimity; and men with overwrought brains are irritated in unusual degrees by annoyances, both physical and moral. Further, the temporary condition known as exhaustion enters into the relation. Limbs overworn by prolonged exertion, cannot without aching perform acts which would at other times cause no appreciable feeling. After reading continuously for very many hours, even strong eyes begin to smart. And noises that can be listened to for a short time with indifference, become, if there is no cessation, causes of suffering.

So that though there is absoluteness in the relation between positive pains and actions that are positively injurious, in so far that wherever there is sentiency it exists; yet even here partial relativity may be asserted. For there is no fixed relation between the acting force and the produced feeling. The amount of feeling varies with the size of the organism, with the character of its outer structures, with the character of its nervous system; and also with the temporary states of the part affected, of the body at large, and of the nervous centers.

§ 65. The relativity of pleasures is far more conspicuous; and the illustrations of it furnished by the sentient world at large are innumerable.

It needs but to glance round at the various things which different creatures are prompted by their desires to eat and are gratified in eating–flesh for predaceous animals, grass for the herbivora, worms for the mole, flies for the swallow, seeds for the finch, honey for the bee, a decaying carcase for the maggot–to be reminded that the tastes for foods are relative to the structures of the creatures. And this truth, made conspicuous by a survey of animals in general, is forced on our attention even by a survey of different races of men. Here human flesh is abhorred, and there regarded as the greatest delicacy; in this country roots are allowed to putrefy before they are eaten, and in that the taint of decay produces disgust; the whale’s blubber which one race devours with avidity. will in another by its very odor produce nausea. Nay without looking abroad we may in the common saying that "one man’s meat is another man’s poison," see the general admission that members of the same society so far differ, that a taste which is to these pleasurable is to those displeasurable. So is it with the other senses. Assafoetida, which by us is singled out as typical of the disgusting in odor, ranks among the Estonians as a favorite perfume; and even those around us vary so far in their likings that the scents of flowers grateful to some are repugnant to others. Analogous differences in the preferences for colors, we daily hear expressed. And in a greater or less degree the like holds with all sensations, down even to those of touch: the feeling yielded by velvet, which is to most agreeable, setting the teeth on edge in some.

It needs but to name appetite and satiety to suggest multitudinous facts showing that pleasures are relative not only to the organic structures but also to their states. The food which yields keen gratification when there is great hunger ceases to be grateful when hunger is satisfied; and if then forced on the eater is rejected with aversion. So, too, a particular kind of food, seeming when first tasted so delicious that daily repetition would be a source of endless enjoyment, becomes, in a few days, not only unenjoyable but repugnant. Brilliant colors which, falling on unaccustomed eyes give delight, pall on the sense if long looked at; and there is relief in getting away from the impressions they yield. Sounds sweet in themselves and sweet in their combinations, which yield to unfatigued ears intense pleasure, become, at the end of a long concert, not oniy wearisome but, if there is no escape from them, causes of irritation. The like holds down even to such simple sensations as those of heat and cold. The fire so delightful on a winter’s day is, in hot weather, oppressive; and pleasure is then taken in the cold water from which, in winter, there would be shrinking. Indeed, experiences lasting over but a few moments suffice to show how relative to the states of the structures are pleasurable sensations of these kinds; for it is observable that on dipping the cold hand into hot water, the agreeable feeling gradually diminishes as the hand warms.

These few instances will carry home the truth, manifest enough to all who observe, that the receipt of each agreeable sensation depends primarily on the existence of a structure which is called into play; and, secondarily on the condition of that structure, as fitting it or unfitting it for activity.

§ 66. The truth that emotional pleasures are made possible, partly by the existence of correlative structures and partly by the states of those structures, is equally undeniable.

Observe the animal which, leading a life demanding solitary habits, has an adapted organization, and it gives no sign of need for the presence of its kind. Observe, conversely a gregarious animal separated from the herd, and you see marks of unhappiness while the separation continues, and equally distinct marks of joy on joining its companions. In the one case there is no nervous structure which finds its sphere of action in the gregarious state; and in the other case such a structure exists. As was implied by instances cited in the last chapter for another purpose, animals leading lives involving particular kinds of activities, have become so constituted that pursuance of those activities, exercising the correlative structures, yields the associated pleasures. Beasts of prey confined in dens, show us by their pacings from side to side the endeavor to obtain, as well as they can, the satisfactions that accompany roaming about in their natural habitats; and that gratification in the expenditure of their locomotive energies shown us by porpoises playing round a vessel, is shown us by the similarly unceasing excursions from end to end of its cell which a captured porpoise makes. The perpetual hoppings of the canary from bar to bar of its cage, and the ceaseless use of claws and bill in climbing about its perch by the parrot, are other activities which, severally related to the needs of the species, have severally themselves become sources of agreeable feelings. Still more clearly are we shown by the efforts which a caged beaver makes to build with such sticks and pieces of wood as are at hand, how dominant in its nature has become the building instinct; and how apart from any advantage gained, it gets gratification by repeating, as well as it can, the processes of construction it is organized to carry on. The cat which, lacking something to tear with her claws, pulls at the mat with them, the confined giraffe which, in default of branches to lay hold of wears out the upper angles of the doors to its house by continually grasping them with its prehensile tongue, the rhinoceros which, having no enemy to fight, ploughs up the ground with his horn, all yield us analogous evidence. Clearly these various actions performed by these various creatures are not intrinsically pleasurable; for they differ more or less in each species and are often utterly unlike. The pleasurableness is simply in the exercise of nervomuscular structures adapted to the performance of the actions.

Though races of men are contrasted with one another so much less than genera and orders of animals are, yet, as we saw in the last chapter, along with visible differences there go invisible differences, with accompanying likings for different modes of life. Among some, as the Mantras, the love of unrestrained action and the disregard of companionship, are such that they separate if they quarrel, and hence live scattered; while among others, as the Damaras, there is little tendency to resist, but instead, an admiration for any one who assumes power over them. Already when exemplifying the indefiniteness of happiness as an end of action, I have referred to the unlike ideals of life pursued by the nomadic and the settled, the warlike and the peaceful–unlike ideals which imply unlikenesses of nervous structures caused by the inherited effects of unlike habits accumulating through generations. These contrasts, various in their kinds and degrees among the various types of mankind, everyone can supplement by analogous contrasts observable among those around. The occupations some delight in are to those otherwise constituted intolerable; and men’s hobbies, severally appearing to themselves quite natural, often appear to their friends ludicrous and almost insane: facts which alone might make us see that the pleasurableness of actions of this or that kind, is due not to anything in the natures of the actions but to the existence of faculties which find exercise in them.

It must be added that each pleasurable emotion, like each pleasurable sensation, is relative not only to a certain structure but also to the state of that structure. The parts called into action must have had proper rest–must be in a condition fit for action; not in the condition which prolonged action produces. Be the order of emotion what it may an unbroken continuity in the receipt of it eventually brings satiety. The pleasurable consciousness becomes less and less vivid, and there arises the need for a temporary cessation during which the parts that have been active may recover their fitness for activity; and during which also, the activities of other parts and receipt of the accompanying emotions may find due place.

§ 67. I have insisted on these general truths with perhaps needless iteration, to prepare the reader for more fully recognizing a corollary that is practically ignored. Abundant and clear as is the evidence, and forced though it is daily on everyone’s attention, the conclusions respecting life and conduct which should be drawn, are not drawn; and so much at variance are these conclusions with current beliefs, that enunciation of them causes a stare of incredulity Pervaded as all past thinking has been, and as most present thinking is, by the assumption that the nature of every creature has been specially created for it, and that human nature, also specially created, is, like other natures, fixed–pervaded too as this thinking has been, and is, by the allied assumption that the agreeableness of certain actions depends on their essential qualities, while other actions are by their essential qualities made disagreeable; it is difficult to obtain a hearing for the doctrine that the kinds of action which are now pleasurable will, under conditions requiring the change, cease to be pleasurable, while other kinds of action will become pleasurable. Even those who accept the doctrine of evolution mostly hear with skepticism, or at best with nominal faith, the inferences to be drawn from it respecting the humanity of the future.

And yet as shown in myriads of instances indicated by the few above given, those natural processes which have produced multitudinous forms of structure adapted to multitudinous forms of activity have simultaneously made these forms of activity pleasurable. And the inevitable implication is that within the limits imposed by physical laws, there will be evolved, in adaptation to any new sets of conditions that may be established, appropriate structures of which the functions will yield their respective gratifications.

When we have got rid of the tendency to think that certain modes of activity are necessarily pleasurable because they give us pleasure, and that other modes which do not please us are necessarily unpleasing; we shall see that the remolding of human nature into fitness for the requirements of social life, must eventually make all needful activities pleasurable, while it makes displeasurable all activities at variance with these requirements. When we have come fully to recognize the truth that there is nothing intrinsically more gratifying in the efforts by which wild animals are caught, than in the efforts expended in rearing plants, and that the combined actions of muscles and senses in rowing a boat are not by their essential natures more productive of agreeable feeling than those gone through in reaping corn, but that everything depends on the cooperating emotions, which at present are more in accordance with the one than with the other; we shall infer that along with decrease of those emotions for which the social state affords little or no scope, and increase of those which it persistently exercises, the things now done with dislike from a sense of obligation will be done with immediate liking, and the things desisted from as a matter of duty will be desisted from because they are repugnant.

This conclusion, alien to popular beliefs and in ethical speculation habitually ignored, or at most recognized but partially and occasionally will be thought by the majority so improbable that I must give further justification of it: enforcing the a priori argument by an a posteriori one. Small as is the attention given to the fact, yet is the fact conspicuous that the corollary above drawn from the doctrine of evolution at large, coincides with the corollary which past and present changes in human nature force on us. The leading contrasts of character between savage and civilized, are just those contrasts to be expected from the process of adaptation.

The life of the primitive man is passed mainly in the pursuit of beasts, birds, and fish, which yields him a gratifying excitement; but though to the civilized man the chase gives gratification, this is neither so persistent nor so general. There are among us keen sportsmen; but there are many to whom shooting and fishing soon become wearisome; and there are not a few to whom they are altogether indifferent or even distasteful. Conversely the power of continued application which in the primitive man is very small, has among ourselves become considerable. It is true that most are coerced into industry by necessity; but there are sprinkled throughout society men to whom active occupation is a need–men who are restless when away from business and miserable when they eventually give it up; men to whom this or that line of investigation is so attractive, that they devote themselves to it day after day year after year; men who are so deeply interested in public affairs that they pass lives of labor in achieving political ends they think advantageous, hardly giving themselves the rest necessary for health. Yet again, and still more strikingly does the change become manifest when we compare undeveloped with developed humanity in respect of the conduct prompted by fellow feeling. Cruelty rather than kindness is characteristic of the savage, and is in many cases a source of marked gratification to him; but though among the civilized are some in whom this trait of the savage survives, yet a love of inflicting pain is not general, and besides numbers who show benevolence, there are those who devote their whole time and much of their money to philanthropic ends, without thought of reward either here or hereafter. Clearly these major, along with many minor, changes of nature, conform to the law set forth. Activities appropriate to their needs which give pleasures to savages have ceased to be pleasurable to many of the civilized; while the civilized have acquired capacities for other appropriate activities and accompanying pleasures which savages had no capacities for.

Now, not only is it rational to infer that changes like those which have been going on during civilization, will continue to go on, but it is irrational to do otherwise. Not he who believes that adaptation will increase is absurd, but he who doubts that it will increase is absurd. Lack of faith in such further evolution of humanity as shall harmonize its nature with its conditions, adds but another to the countless illustrations of inadequate consciousness of causation. One who, leaving behind both primitive dogmas and primitive ways of looking at things, has, while accepting scientific conclusions acquired those habits of thought which science generates, will regard the conclusion above drawn as inevitable. He will find it impossible to believe that the processes which have heretofore so molded all beings to the requirements of their lives that they get satisfactions in fulfilling them, will not hereafter continue so molding them. He will infer that the type of nature to which the highest social life affords a sphere such that every faculty has its due amount, and no more than the due amount, of function and accompanying gratification, is the type of nature toward which progress cannot cease till it is reached. Pleasure being producible by the exercise of any structure which is adjusted to its special end, he will see the necessary implication to be that, supposing it consistent with the maintenance of life, there is no kind of activity which will not become a source of pleasure if continued; and that therefore pleasure will eventually accompany every mode of action demanded by social conditions.

This corollary I here emphasize because it will presently play an important part in the argument.

[I-187]

CHAPTER XI.

EGOISM VERSUS ALTRUISM.↩

§ 68. If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems o unbelief, self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

Of self-evident truths so dealt with, the one which here concerns us is that a creature must live before it can act. From this it is a corollary that the acts by which each maintains his own life must, speaking generally precede in imperativeness all other acts of which he is capable. For if it be asserted that these other acts must precede in imperativeness the acts which maintain life; and if this, accepted as a general law of conduct, is conformed to by all; then by postponing the acts which maintain life to the other acts which life makes possible, all must lose their lives. That is to say ethics has to recognize the truth, recognized in unethical thought, that egoism comes before altruism. The acts required for continued self-preservation, including the enjoyment of benefits achieved by such acts, are the first requisites to universal welfare. Unless each duly cares for himself, his care for all others is ended by death; and if each thus dies, there remain no others to be cared for.

This permanent supremacy of egoism over altruism, made manifest by contemplating existing life, is further made manifest by contemplating life in course of evolution.

§ 69. Those who have followed with assent the recent course of thought, do not need telling that throughout past eras, the life, vast in amount and varied in kind, which has overspread the earth, has progressed in subordination to the law that every individual shall gain by whatever aptitude it has for fulfilling the conditions to its existence. The uniform principle has been that better adaptation shall bring greater benefit; which greater benefit, while increasing the prosperity of the better adapted, shall increase also its ability to leave offspring inheriting more or less its better adaptation. And, by implication, the uniform principle has been that the ill adapted, disadvantaged in the struggle for existence, shall bear the consequent evils: either disappearing when its imperfections are extreme, or else rearing fewer offspring, which, inheriting its imperfections, tend to dwindle away in posterity

It has been thus with innate superiorities; it has been thus also with acquired ones. All along the law has been that increased function brings increased power; and that therefore such extra activities as aid welfare in any member of a race, produce in its structures greater ability to carry on such extra activities: the derived advantages being enjoyed by it to the heightening and lengthening of its life. Conversely as lessened function ends in lessened structure, the dwindling of unused faculties has ever entailed loss of power to achieve the correlative ends: the result of inadequate fulfillment of the ends being diminished ability to maintain life. And by inheritance, such functionally produced modifications have respectively furthered or hindered survival in posterity

As already said, the law that each creature shall take the benefits and the evils of its own nature, be they those derived from ancestry or those due to self-produced modifications, has been the law under which life has evolved thus far; and it must continue to be the law however much further life may evolve. Whatever qualifications this natural course of action may now or hereafter undergo, are qualifications that cannot, without fatal results, essentially change it. Any arrangements which in a considerable degree prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority or shield inferiority from the evils it entails–any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to be superior; are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress of organization and the reaching of a higher life.

But to say that each individual shall reap the benefits brought to him by his own powers, inherited and acquired, is to enunciate egoism as an ultimate principle of conduct. It is to say that egoistic claims must take precedence of altruistic claims.

§ 70. Under its biological aspect this proposition cannot be contested by those who agree in the doctrine of evolution; but probably they will not at once allow that admission of it under its ethical aspect is equally unavoidable. While, as respects development of life, the well-working of the universal principle described is sufficiently manifest; the well-working of it as respects increase of happiness may not be seen at once. But the two cannot be disjoined.

Incapacity of every kind and of whatever degree, causes unhappiness directly and indirectly–direcily by the pain consequent on the overtaxing of inadequate faculty and indirectly by the nonfulfillment, or imperfect fulfillment, of certain conditions to welfare. Conversely capacity of every kind sufficient for the requirement, conduces to happiness immediately and remotely–immediately by the pleasure accompanying the normal exercise of each power that is up to its work, and remotely by the pleasures which are furthered by the ends achieved. A creature that is weak or slow of foot, and so gets food only by exhausting efforts or escapes enemies with difficulty suffers the pains of overstrained powers, of unsatisfied appetites, of distressed emotions; while the strong and swift creature of the same species delights in its efficient activities, gains more fully the satisfactions yielded by food as well as the renewed vivacity this gives, and has to bear fewer and smaller pains in defending itself against foes or escaping from them. Similarly with duller and keener senses, or higher and lower degrees of sagacity. The mentally inferior individual of any race suffers negative and positive miseries; while the mentally superior individual receives negative and positive gratifications. Inevitably then, this law in conformity with which each member of a species takes the consequences of its own nature; and in virtue of which the progeny of each member, participating in its nature, also takes such consequences; is one that tends ever to raise the aggregate happiness of the species, by furthering the multiplication of the happier and hindering that of the less happy.

All this is true of human beings as of other beings. The conclusion forced on us is that the pursuit of individual happiness within those limits prescribed by social conditions, is the first requisite to the attainment of the greatest general happiness. To see this it needs but to contrast one whose self-regard has maintained bodily well-being, with one whose regardlessness of self has brought its natural results; and then to ask what must be the contrast between two societies formed of two such kinds of individuals.

Bounding out of bed after an unbroken sleep, singing or whistling as he dresses, coming down with beaming face ready to laugh on the smallest provocation, the healthy man of high powers, conscious of past successes and by his energy quickness, resource, made confident of the future, enters on the day’s business not with repugnance but with gladness; and from hour to hour experiencing satisfactions from work effectually done, comes home with an abundant surplus of energy remaining for hours of relaxation. Far otherwise is it with one who is enfeebled by great neglect of self. Already deficient, his energies are made more deficient by constant endeavors to execute tasks that prove beyond his strength, and by the resulting discouragement. Besides the depressing consciousness of the immediate future, there is the depressing consciousness of the remoter future, with its probability of accumulated difficulties and diminished ability to meet them. Hours of leisure which, rightly passed, bring pleasures that raise the tide of life and renew the powers of work, cannot be utilized: there is not vigor enough for enjoyments involving action, and lack of spirits prevents passive enjoyments from being entered upon with zest. In brief, life becomes a burden. Now if, as must be admitted, in a community composed of individuals like the first the happiness will be relatively great, while in one composed of individuals like the last there will be relatively little happiness, or rather much misery; it must be admitted that conduct causing the one result is good and conduct causing the other is bad.

But diminutions of general happiness are produced by inadequate egoism in several other ways. These we will successively glance at.

§ 71. If there were no proofs of heredity–if it were the rule that the strong are usually begotten by the weak while the weak usually descend from the strong, that vivacious children form the families of melancholy parents while fathers and mothers with overflowing spirits mostly have dull progeny that from stolid peasants there ordinarily come sons of high intelligence while the sons of the cultured are commonly fit for nothing but following the plough–if there were no transmission of gout, scrofula, insanity and did the diseased habitually give birth to the healthy and the healthy to the diseased, writers on ethics might be justified in ignoring those effects of conduct which are felt by posterity through the natures they inherit.

As it is, however, the current ideas concerning the relative claims of egoism and altruism are vitiated by the omission of this all-important factor. For if health, strength and capacity are usually transmitted; and if disease, feebleness, stupidity. generally reappear in descendants; then a rational altruism requires insistence on that egoism which is shown by receipt of the satisfactions accompanying preservation of body and mind in the best state. The necessary implication is that blessings are provided for offspring by due self-regard, while disregard of self carried too far provides curses. When, indeed, we remember how commonly it is remarked that high health and overflowing spirits render any lot in life tolerable, while chronic ailments make gloomy a life most favorably circumstanced, it becomes amazing that both the world at large and writers who make conduct their study should ignore the terrible evils which disregard of personal well-being infficts on the unborn, and the incalculable good laid up for the unborn by attention to personal well-being. Of all beques’s of parents to children the most valuable is a sound constitution. Though a man’s body is not a property that can be inherited, yet his constitution may fitly be compared to an entailed estate; and if he rightly understands his duty to posterity he will see that he is bound to pass on that estate uninjured if not improved. To say this is to say that he must be egoistic to the extent of satisfying all those desires associated with the due performance of functions. Nay it is to say more. It is to say that he must seek in due amounts the various pleasures which life offers. For beyond the effect these have in raising the tide of life and maintaining constitutional vigor, there is the effect they have in preserving and increasing a capacity of receiving enjoyment. Endowed with abundant energies and various tastes, some can get gratifications of many kinds on opportunities hourly occurring; while others are so inert, and so uninterested in things around, that they cannot even take the trouble to amuse themselves. And unless heredity be denied, the inference must be that due acceptance of the miscellaneous pleasures life offers, conduces to the capacity for enjoyment in posterity; and that persistence in dull monotonous lives by parents, diminishes the ability of their descendants to make the best of what gratifications fall to them.

§ 72. Beyond the decrease of general happiness which results in this indirect way if egoism is unduly subordinated, there is a decrease of general happiness which results in a direct way He who carries self-regard far enough to keep himself in good health and high spirits, in the first place thereby becomes an immediate source of happiness to those around, and in the second place maintains the ability to increase their happiness by altruistic actions. But one whose bodily vigor and mental health are undermined by self-sacrifice carried too far, in the first place becomes to those around a cause of depression, and in the second place renders himself incapable, or less capable, of actively furthering their welfare.

In estimating conduct we must remember that there are those who by their joyousness beget joy in others, and that there are those who by their melancholy cast a gloom on every circle they enter. And we must remember that by display of overflowing happiness a man of the one kind may add to the happiness of others more than by positive efforts to benefit them; and that a man of the other kind may decrease their happiness more by his presence than he increases it by his actions. Full of vivacity the one is ever welcome. For his wife he has smiles and jocose speeches; for his children stores of fun and play; for his friends pleasant talk interspersed with the sallies of wit that come from buoyancy Contrariwise, the other is shunned. The irritability resulting now from ailments, now from failures caused by feebleness, his family has daily to bear. Lacking adequate energy for joining in them, he has at best but a tepid interest in the amusements of his children; and he is called a wet blanket by his friends. Little account as our ethical reasonings take note of it, yet is the fact obvious that since happiness and misery are infectious, such regard for self as conduces to health and high spirits is a benefaction to others, and such disregard of self as brings on suffering, bodily or mental, is a malefaction to others. The duty of making one’s self agreeable by seeming to be pleased, is, indeed, often urged; and thus to gratify friends is applauded so long as self-sacrificing effort is implied. But though display of real happiness gratifies friends far more than display of sham happiness, and has no drawback in the shape either of hypocrisy or of strain, yet it is not thought a duty to fulfill the conditions which favor the display of real happiness. Nevertheless, if quantity of happiness produced is to be the measure, the last is more imperative than the first.

And then, as above indicated, beyond this primary series of effects produced on others there is a secondary series of effects. The adequately egoistic individual retains those powers which make altruistic activities possible. The individual who is inadequately egoistic, loses more or less of his ability to be altruistic. The truth of the one proposition is self-evident; and the truth of the other is daily forced on us by examples. Note a few of them. Here is a mother who, brought up in the insane fashion usual among the cultivated, has a physique not strong enough for suckling her infant, but who, knowing that its natural food is the best, and anxious for its welfare, continues to give it milk for a longer time than her system will bear. Eventually the accumulating reaction tells. There comes exhaustion running, it may be, into illness caused by depletion; occasionally ending in death, and often entailing chronic weakness. She becomes, perhaps for a time, perhaps permanently incapable of carrying on household affairs; her other children suffer from the loss of maternal attention; and where the income is small, payments for nurse and doctor tell injuriously on the whole family Instance, again, what not unfrequently happens with the father. Similarly prompted by a high sense of obligation, and misled by current moral theories into the notion that self-denial may rightly be carried to any extent, he daily continues his office work for long hours regardless of hot head and cold feet; and debars himself of social pleasures, for which he thinks he can afford neither time nor money What comes of this entirely unegoistic course? Eventually a sudden collapse, sleeplessness, inability to work. That rest which he would not give himself when his sensations prompted, he has now to take in long measure. The extra earnings laid by for the benefit of his family are quickly swept away by costly journeys in aid of recovery and by the many expenses which illness entails. Instead of increased ability to do his duty by his offspring, there comes now inability Lifelong evils on them replace hoped–for goods. And so is it, too, with the social effects of inadequate egoism. All grades furnish examples of the mischiefs, positive and negative, inflicted on society by excessive neglect of self. Now the case is that of a laborer who, conscientiously continuing his work under a broiling sun, spite of violent protest from his feelings, dies of sunstroke; and leaves his family a burden to the parish. Now the case is that of a clerk whose eyes permanently fail from overstraining, or who, daily writing for hours after his fingers are painfully cramped, is attacked with "scrivener’s palsy" and, unable to write at all, sinks with aged parents into poverty which friends are called on to mitigate. And now the case is that of a man devoted to public ends who, shattering his health by ceaseless application, fails to achieve all he might have achieved by a more reasonable apportionment of his time between labor on behalf of others and ministration to his own needs.

§ 73. In one further way is the undue subordination of egoism to altruism injurious. Both directly and indirectly unselfishness pushed to excess generates selfishness.

Consider first the immediate effects. That one man may yield up to another a gratification, it is needful that the other shall accept it; and where the gratification is of a kind to which their respective claims are equal, or which is no more required by the one than by the other, acceptance implies a readiness to get gratification at another’s cost. The circumstances and needs of the two being alike, the transaction involves as much culture of egoism in the last as it involves culture of altruism in the first. It is true that not unfrequently difference between their means or difference between their appetites for a pleasure which the one has had often and the other rarely divests the acceptance of this character; and it is true that in other cases the benefactor manifestly takes so much pleasure in giving pleasure, that the sacrifice is partial, and the reception of it not wholly selfish. But to see the effect above indicated we must exclude such inequalities, and consider what happens where wants are approximately alike and where the sacrifices, not reciprocated at intervals, are perpetually on one side. So restricting the inquiry all can name instances verifying the alleged result. Everyone can remember circles in which the daily surrender of benefits by the generous to the greedy has caused increase of greediness; until there has been produced an unscrupulous egoism intolerable to all around. There are obvious social effects of kindred nature. Most thinking people now recognize the demoralization caused by indiscriminate charity They see how in the mendicant there is, besides destruction of the normal relation between labor expended and benefit obtained, a genesis of the expectation that others shall minister to his needs; showing itself sometimes in the venting of curses on those who refuse.

Next consider the remote results. When the egoistic claims are so much subordinated to the altruistic as to produce physical mischief, the tendency is towards a relative decrease in the number of the altruistic, and therefore an increased predominance of the egoistic. Pushed to extremes, sacrifice of self for the benefit of others, leads occasionally to death before the ordinary period of marriage; leads sometimes to abstention from marriage, as in sisters of charity; leads sometimes to an ill-health or a loss of attractiveness which prevents marriage; leads sometimes to nonacquirement of the pecuniary means needed for marriage; and in all these cases, therefore, the unusually altruistic leave no descendants. Where the postponement of personal welfare to the welfare of others has not been carried so far as to prevent marriage, it yet not unfrequently occurs that the physical degradation resulting from years of self-neglect causes infertility; so that again the most altruistically natured leave no like-natured posterity. And then in less marked and more numerous cases, the resulting enfeeblement shows itself by the production of relatively weak offspring; of whom some die early while the rest are less likely than usual to transmit the parental type to future generations. Inevitably then, by this dying out of the especially unegoistic, there is prevented that desirable mitigation of egoism in the average nature which would else have taken place. Such disregard of self as brings down bodily vigor below the normal level, eventually produces in the society a counterbalancing excess of regard for self.

§ 74. That egoism precedes altruism in order of imperativeness, is thus clearly shown. The acts which make continued life possible, must, on the average, be more peremptory than all those other acts which life makes possible; including the acts which benefit others. Turning from life as existing to life as evolving, we are equally shown this. Sentient beings have progressed from low to high types, under the law that the superior shall profit by their superiority and the inferior shall suffer from their inferiority Conformity to this law has been, and is still, needful, not only for the continuance of life but for the increase of happiness; since the superior are those having faculties better adjusted to the requirements–faculties, therefore, which bring in their exercise greater pleasure and less pain.

More special considerations join these more general ones in showing us this truth. Such egoism as preserves a vivacious mind in a vigorous body furthers the happiness of descendants, whose inherited constitutions make the labors of life easy and its pleasures keen; while, conversely, unhappiness is entailed on posterity by those who bequeath them constitutions injured by self-neglect. Again, the individual whose well-conserved life shows itself in overflowing spirits, becomes, by his mere existence, a source of pleasure to all around; while the depression which commonly accompanies ill-health diffuses itself through family and among friends. A further contrast is that whereas one who has been duly regardful of self retains the power of being helpful to others, there results from self-abnegation in excess, not only an inability to help others but the infliction of positive burdens on them. Lastly we come upon the truth that undue altruism increases egoism; both directly in contemporaries and indirectly in posterity

And now observe that though the general conclusion enforced by these special conclusions, is at variance with nominally accepted beliefs, it is not at variance with actually accepted beliefs. While opposed to the doctrine which men are taught should be acted upon, it is in harmony with the doctrine which they do act upon and dimly see must be acted upon. For omitting such abnormalities of conduct as are instanced above, everyone, alike by deed and word, implies that in the business of life personal welfare is the primary consideration. The laborer looking for wages in return for work done, no less than the merchant who sells goods at a profit, the doctor who expects fees for advice, the priest who calls the scene of his ministrations "a living," assumes as beyond question the truth that selfishness, carried to the extent of enforcing his claims and enjoying the returns his efforts bring, is not only legitimate but essential. Even persons who avow a contrary conviction prove by their acts that it is inoperative. Those who repeat with emphasis the maxim "Love your neighbor as yourself" do not render up what they possess so as to satisfy the desires of all as much as they satisfy their own desires. Nor do those whose extreme maxim is "Live for others" differ appreciably from people around in their regards for personal welfare, or fail to appropriate their shares of life’s pleasures. In short, that which is above set forth as the belief to which scientific ethics leads us, is that which men do really believe, as distinguished from that which they believe they believe.

Finally it may be remarked that a rational egoism, so far from implying a more egoistic human nature, is consistent with a human nature that is less egoistic. For excesses in one direction do not prevent excesses in the opposite direction; but rather, extreme deviations from the mean on one side lead to extreme deviations on the other side. A society in which the most exalted principles of self-sacrifice for the benefit of neighbors are enunciated, may be a society in which unscrupulous sacrifice of alien fellow creatures is not only tolerated but applauded. Along with professed anxiety to spread these exalted principles among heathens, there may go the deliberate fastening of a quarrel upon them with a view to annexing their territory Men who every Sunday have listened approvingly to injunctions carrying the regard for other men to an impracticable extent, may yet hire themselves out to slay at the word of command, any people in any part of the world, utterly indifferent to the right or wrong of the matter fought about. And as in these cases transcendent altruism in theory coexists with brutal egoism in practice, so, conversely a more qualified altruism may have for its concomitant a greatly moderated egoism. For asserting the due claims of self, is, by implication, drawing a limit beyond which the claims are undue; and is, by consequence, bringing into greater clearness the claims of others.

[I-201]

CHAPTER XII.

ALTRUISM VERSUS EGOISM.↩

§ 75. If we define altruism as being all action which, in the norma course of things, benefits others instead of benefiting self, then, from the dawn of life, altruism has been no less essential than egoism. Though primarily it is dependent on egoism, yet secondarily egoism is dependent on it.

Under altruism in this comprehensive sense, I take in the acts by which offspring are preserved and the species maintained. Moreover, among these acts must be included not such only as are accompanied by consciousness, but also such as conduce to the welfare of offspring without mental representation of the welfare–acts of automatic altruism as we may call them. Nor must there be left out those lowest altruistic acts which subserve race maintenance without implying even automatic nervous processes–acts not in the remotest sense psychical, but in a literal sense physical. Whatever action, unconscious or conscious, involves expenditure of individual life to the end of increasing life in other individuals, is unquestionably altruistic in a sense, if not in the usual sense; and it is here needful to understand it in this sense that we may see how conscious altruism grows out of unconscious altruism.

The simplest beings habitually multiply by spontaneous fission. Physical altruism of the lowest kirid, differentiating from physical egoism, may in this case be considered as not yet independent of it. For since the two halves which before fission constituted the individual, do not on dividing disappear, we must say that though the individuality of the parent infusorium or other protozoon is lost in ceasing to be single, yet the old individual continues to exist in each of the new individuals. When, however, as happens generally with these smallest animals, an interval of quiescence ends in the breaking up of the whole body into minute parts, each of which is the germ of a young one, we see the parent entirely sacrificed in forming progeny.

Here might be described how among creatures of higher grades, by fission or gemmation, parents bequeath parts of their bodies, more or less organized, to form offspring at the cost of their own individualities. Numerous examples might also be given of the ways in which the development of ova is carried to the extent of making the parental body little more than a receptacle for them: the implication being that the accumulations of nutriment which parental activities have laid up, are disposed of for the benefit of posterity And then might be dwelt on the multitudinous cases where, as generally throughout the insect world, maturity having been reached and a new generation provided for, life ends: death follows the sacrifices made for progeny

But leaving these lower types in which the altruism is physical only or in which it is physical and automatically–psychical only let us ascend to those in which it is also, to a considerable degree, conscious. Though in birds and mammals such parental activities as are guided by instinct, are accompanied by either no representations or but vague representations of the benefits which the young receive; yet there are also in them actions which we may class as altruistic in the higher sense. The agitation which creatures of these classes show when their young are in danger, joined often with efforts on their behalf, as well as the grief displayed after loss of their young, make it manifest that in them parental altruism has a concomitant of emotion.

Those who understand by altruism only the conscious sacrifice of self to others among human beings, will think it strange, or even absurd, to extend its meaning so widely But the justification for doing this is greater than has thus far appeared. I do not mean merely that in the course of evolution, there has been a progress through infinitesimal gradations from purely physical and unconscious sacrifices of the individual for the welfare of the species, up to sacrifices consciously made. I mean that from first to last the sacrifices are, when reduced to their lowest terms, of the same essential nature: to the last, as at first, there is involved a loss of bodily substance. When a part of the parental body is detached in the shape of gemmule, or egg, or foetus, the material sacrifice is conspicuous; and when the mother yields milk by absorbing which the young one grows, it cannot be questioned that there is also a material sacrifice. But though a material sacrifice is not manifest when the young are benefited by activities on their behalf; yet, as no effort can be made without an equivalent waste of tissue, and as the bodily loss is proportionate to the expenditure that takes place without reimbursement in food consumed, it follows that efforts made in fostering offspring do really represent a part of the parental substance; which is now given indirectly instead of directly.

Self-sacrifice, then, is no less primordial than self-preservation. Being in its simple physical form absolutely necessary for the continuance of life from the beginning; and being extended under its automatic form, as indispensable to maintenance of race in types considerably advanced; and being developed to its semiconscious and conscious forms, along with the continued and complicated attendance by which the offspring of superior creatures are brought to maturity; altruism has been evolving simultaneously with egoism. As was pointed out in an early chapter, the same superiorities which have enabled the individual to preserve itself better, have enabled it better to preserve the individuals derived from it; and each higher species, using its improved faculties primarily for egoistic benefit, has spread in proportion as it has used them secondarily for altruistic benefit.

The imperativeness of altruism as thus understood, is, indeed, no less than the imperativeness of egoism was shown to be in the last chapter. For while, on the one hand, a falling short of normal egoistic acts entails enfeeblement or loss of life, and therefore loss of ability to perform altruistic acts; on the other hand, such defect of altruistic acts as causes death of offspring or inadequate development of them, involves disappearance from future generations of the nature that is not altruistic enough–so decreasing the average egoism. In short, every species is continually purifying itself from the unduly egoistic individuals, while there are being lost to it the unduly altruistic individuals.

§ 76. As there has been an advance by degrees from unconscious parental altruism to conscious parental altruism of the highest kind, so has there been an advance by degrees from the altruism of the family to social altruism.

A fact to be first noted is that only where altruistic relations in the domestic group have reached highly developed forms, do there arise conditions making possible full development of altruistic relations in the political group. Thibes in which promiscuity prevails or in which the marital relations are transitory and tribes in which polyandry entails in another way indefinite relationships, are incapable of much organization. Nor do peoples who are habitually polygamous, show themselves able to take on those high forms of social cooperation which demand due subordination of self to others. Only where monogamic marriage has become general and eventually universal~niy where there have consequently been established the closest ties of blood–only where family altruism has been most fostered, has social altruism become conspicuous. It needs but to recall the compound forms of the Aryan family as described by Sir Henry Maine and others, to see that family feeling, first extending itself to the gens and the tribe, and afterwards to the society formed of related tribes, prepared the way for fellow feeling among citizens not of the same stock.

Recognizing this natural transition, we are here chiefly concerned to observe that throughout the latter stages of the progress, as throughout the former, increase of egoistic satisfactions has depended on growth of regard for the satisfactions of others. On contemplating a line of successive parents and offspring, we see that each, enabled while young to live by the sacrifices predecessors make for it, itself makes, when adult, equivalent sacrifices for successors; and that in default of this general balancing of benefits received by benefits given, the line dies out. Similarly it is manifest that in a society each generation of members, indebted for such benefits as social organization yields them to preceding generations, who have by their sacrifices elaborated this organization, are called on to make for succeeding generations such kindred sacrifices as shall at least maintain this organization, if they do not improve it: the alternative being decay and eventual dissolution of the society implying gradual decrease in the egoistic satisfactions of its members.

And now we are prepared to consider the several ways in which, under social conditions, personal welfare depends on due regard for the welfare of others. Already the conclusions to be drawn have been foreshadowed. As in the chapter on the biological view were implied the inferences definitely set forth in the last chapter; so in the chapter on the sociological view were implied the inferences to be definitely set forth here. Sundry of these are trite enough; but they must nevertheless be specified, since the statement would be incomplete without them.

§ 77. First to be dealt with comes that negative altruism implied by such curbing of the egoistic impulses as prevents direct aggression.

As before shown, if men instead of living separately are to unite for defense or for other purposes, they must severally reap more good than evil from the union. On the average, each must lose less from the antagonisms of those with whom he is associated, than he gains by the association. At the outset, therefore, that increase of egoistic satisfactions which the social state brings, can be purchased only by altruism sufficient to cause some recognition of others’ claims: if not a voluntary recognition, still, a compulsory recognition.

While the recognition is but of that lowest kind due to dread of retaliation, or of prescribed punishment, the egoistic gain from association is small; and it becomes considerable only as the recognition becomes voluntary–that is, more altruistic. Where, as among some of the wild Australians, there exists no limit to the right of the strongest, and the men fight to get possession of women while the wives of one man fight among themselves about him, the pursuit of egoistic satisfactions is greatly impeded. Besides the bodily pain occasionally given to each by conflict, and the more or less of subsequent inability to achieve personal ends, there is the waste of energy entailed in maintaining readiness for self-defense, and there is the accompanying occupation of consciousness by emotions that are on the average of cases disagreeable. Moreover, the primary end of safety in presence of external foes is ill-attained in proportion as there are internal animosities; such furtherance of satisfactions as industrial cooperation brings cannot be had; and there is little motive to labor for extra benefits when the products of labor are insecure. And from this early stage to comparatively late stages, we may trace in the wearing of arms, in the carrying on of family feuds, and in the taking of daily precautions for safety. the ways in which the egoistic satisfactions of each are diminished by deficiency of that altruism which checks overt injury of others.

The private interests of the individual are on the average better subserved, not only in proportion as he himself refrains from direct aggression, but also, on the average, in proportion as he succeeds in diminishing the aggression of his fellows on one another. The prevalence of antagonisms among those around, impedes the activities carried on by each in pursuit of satisfactions; and by causing disorder makes the beneficial results of activities more doubtful. Hence, each profits egoistically from the growth of an altruism which leads each to aid in preventing or diminishing others’ violence.

The like holds when we pass to that altruism which restrains the undue egoism displayed in breaches of contract. General acceptance of the maxim that honesty is the best policy implies general experience that gratification of the self-regarding feelings is eventually furthered by such checking of them as maintains equitable dealings. And here, as before, each is personally interested in securing good treatment of his fellows by one another. For in countless ways evils are entailed on each by the prevalence of fraudulent transactions. As everyone knows, the larger the number of a shopkeeper’s bills left unpaid by some customers, the higher must be the prices which other customers pay. The more manufacturers lose by defective raw materials or by carelessness of workmen, the more must they charge for their fabrics to buyers. The less trustworthy people are, the higher rises the rate of interest, the larger becomes the amount of capital hoarded, the greater are the impediments to industry. The further traders and people in general go beyond their means, and hypothecate the property of others in speculation, the more serious are those commercial panics which bring disasters on multitudes and injuriously affect all.

This introduces us to yet a third way in which such personal welfare as results from the proportioning of benefits gained to labors given, depends on the making of certain sacrifices for social welfare. The man who, expending his energies wholly on private affairs refuses to take trouble about public affairs, pluming himself on his wisdom in minding his own business, is blind to the fact that his own business is made possible only by maintenance of a healthy social state, and that he loses all round by defective governmental arrangements. Where there are many like-minded with himself–where, as a consequence, offices come to be filled by political adventurers and opinion is swayed by demagogues–where bribery vitiates the administration of the law and makes fraudulent state-transactions habitual; heavy penalties fall on the community at large, and, among others, on those who have thus done everything for self and nothing for society. Their investments are insecure; recovery of their debts is difficult; and even their lives are less safe than they would otherwise have been.

So that on such altruistic actions as are implied, first in being just, second in seeing justice done between others, and third in upholding and improving the agencies by which justice is administered, depend, in large measure, the egoistic satisfactions of each.

§ 78. But the identification of personal advantage with the advantage of fellow citizens is much wider than this. In various other ways the well-being of each rises and falls with the well-being of all.

A weak man left to provide for his own wants, suffers by getting smaller amounts of food and other necessaries than he might get were he stronger. In a community formed by weak men, who divide their labors and exchange the products, all suffer evils from the weakness of their fellows. The quantity of each kind of product is made deficient by the deficiency of laboring power; and the share each gets for such share of his own product as he can afford to give, is relatively small. Just as the maintenance of paupers, hospital patients, inmates of asylums, and others who consume but do not produce, leaves to be divided among producers a smaller stock of commodities than would exist were there no incapables; so must there be left a smaller stock of commodities to be divided, the greater the number of inefficient producers, or the greater the average deficiency of producing power. Hence, whatever decreases the strength of men in general restricts the gratifications of each by making the means to them dearer.

More directly and more obviously does the bodily well-being of his fellows concern him; for their bodily ill-being, when it takes certain shapes, is apt to bring similar bodily ill-being on him. If he is not himself attacked by cholera, or smallpox or typhus, when it invades his neighborhood, he often suffers a penalty through his belongings. Under conditions spreading it, his wife catches diphtheria, or his servant is laid up with scarlet fever, or his children take now this and now that infectious disorder. Add together the immediate and remote evils brought on him year after year by epidemics, and it becomes manifest that his egoistic satisfactions are greatly furthered by such altruistic activities as render disease less prevalent.

With the mental, as well as with the bodily states of fellow citizens, his enjoyments are in multitudinous ways bound up. Stupidity like weakness raises the cost of commodities. Where farming is unimproved, the prices of food are higher than they would else be; where antiquated routine maintains itself in trade, the needless expense of distribution weighs on all; where there is no inventiveness, everyone loses the benefits which improved appliances diffuse. Other than economic evils come from the average unintelligence–periodically through the manias and panics that arise because traders rush in herds all to buy or all to sell; and habitually through the maladministration of justice, which people and rulers alike disregard while pursuing this or that legislative will-o’-the-wisp. Closer and clearer is the dependence of his personal satisfactions on others’ mental states, which each experiences in his household. Unpunctuality and want of system are perpetual sources of annoyance. The unskillfulness of the cook causes frequent vexation and occasional indigestion. Lack of forethought in the housemaid leads to a fall over a bucket in a dark passage. And inattention to a message or forgetfulness in delivering it, entails failure in an important engagement. Each, therefore, benefits egoistically by such altruism as aids in raising the average intelligence. I do not mean such altruism as taxes ratepayers that children’s minds may be filled with dates, and names, and gossip about kings, and narratives of battles, and other useless information, no amount of which will make them capable workers or good citizens; but I mean such altruism as helps to spread a knowledge of the nature of things and to cultivate the power of applying that knowledge.

Yet again, each has a private interest in public morals and profits by improving them. Not in large ways only by aggressions and breaches of contract, by adulterations and short measures, does each suffer from the general unconscientiousness; but in more numerous small ways. Now it is through the untruthfulness of one who gives a good character to a bad servant; now it is by the recklessness of a laundress who, using bleaching agents to save trouble in washing, destroys his linen; now it is by the acted falsehood of railway passengers who, by dispersed coats, make him believe that all the seats in a compartment are taken when they are not. Yesterday the illness of his child due to foul gases, led to the discovery of a drain that had become choked because it was ill-made by a dishonest builder under supervision of a careless or bribed surveyor. Today workmen employed to rectify it bring on him cost and inconvenience by dawdling; and their low standard of work, determined by the unionist principle that the better workers must not discredit the worse by exceeding them in efficiency, he may trace to the immoral belief that the unworthy should fare as well as the worthy. Tomorrow it turns out that business for the plumber has been provided by damage which the bricklayers have done.

Thus the improvement of others, physically, intellectually and morally personally concerns each; since their imperfections tell in raising the cost of all the commodities he buys, in increasing the taxes and rates he pays, and in the losses of time, trouble, and money daily brought on him by others’ carelessness, stupidity. or unconscientiousness.

§ 79. Very obvious are certain more immediate connections between personal welfare and ministration to the welfare of those around. The evils suffered by those whose behavior is unsympathetic, and the benefits to self which unselfish conduct brings, show these.

That anyone should have formulated his experience by saying that the conditions to success are a hard heart and a sound digestion, is marvellous considering the many proofs that success, even of a material kind, greatly depending as it does on the good offices of others, is furthered by whatever creates goodwill in others. The contrast between the prosperity of those who to but moderate abilities join natures which beget friendships by their kindliness, and the adversity of those who, though possessed of superior faculties and greater acquirements, arouse dislikes by their hardness or indifference, should force upon all the truth that egoistic enjoyments are aided by altruistic actions.

This increase of personal benefit achieved by benefiting others, is but partially achieved where a selfish motive prompts the seemingly unselfish act: it is fully achieved only where the act is really unselfish. Though services rendered with the view of some time profiting by reciprocated services, answer to a certain extent; yet, ordinarily they answer only to the extent of bringing equivalents of reciprocated services. Those which bring more than equivalents are those not prompted by any thoughts of equivalents. For obviously it is the spontaneous outflow of good nature, not in the larger acts of life only but in all its details, which generates in those around the attachments prompting unstinted benevolence.

Besides furthering prosperity, other-regarding actions conduce to self-regarding gratifications by generating a genial environment. With the sympathetic being everyone feels more sympathy than with others. All conduct themselves with more than usual amiability to a person who hourly discloses a lovable nature. Such a one is practically surrounded by a world of better people than one who is less attractive. If we contrast the state of a man possessing all the material means to happiness, but isolated by his absolute egoism, with the state of an altruistic man relatively poor in means but rich in friends, we may see that various gratifications not to be purchased by money, come in abundance to the last and are inaccessible to the first.

While, then, there is one kind of other-regarding action, furthering the prosperity of fellow citizens at large, which admits of being deliberately pursued from motives that are remotely self-regarding–the conviction being that personal well-being depends in large measure on the well-being of society–there is an additional kind of other-regarding action having in it no element of conscious self-regard, which nevertheless conduces greatly to egoistic satisfactions.

§ 80. Yet other modes exist in which egoism unqualified by altruism habitually fails. It diminishes the totality of egoistic pleasure by diminishing in several directions the capacity for pleasure.

Self-gratifications, considered separately or in the aggregate, lose their intensities by that too great persistence in them which results if they are made the exclusive objects of pursuit. The law that function entails waste, and that faculties yielding pleasure by their action cannot act incessantly without exhaustion and accompanying satiety has the implication that intervals during which altruistic activities absorb the energies, are intervals during which the capacity for egoistic pleasure is recovering its full degree. The sensitiveness to purely personal enjoyments is maintained at a higher pitch by those who minister to the enjoyment of others, than it is by those who devote themselves wholly to personal enjoyments.

This which is manifest even while the tide of life is high, becomes still more manifest as life ebbs. It is in maturity and old age that we especially see how as egoistic pleasures grow faint, altruistic actions come in to revive them in new forms. The contrast between the child’s delight in the novelties daily revealed, and the indifference which comes as the world around grows familiar, until in adult life there remain comparatively few things that are greatly enjoyed, draws from all the reflection that as years go by pleasures pall. And to those who think, it becomes clear that only through sympathy can pleasures be indirectly gained from things that have ceased to yield pleasures directly. In the gratifications derived by parents from the gratifications of their offspring, this is conspicuously shown. Trite as is the remark that men live afresh in their children, it is needful here to set it down as reminding us of the way in which, as the egoistic satisfactions in life fade, altruism renews them while it transfigures them.

We are thus introduced to a more general consideration–the egoistic aspect of altruistic pleasure. Not, indeed, that this is the place for discussing the question whether the egoistic element can be excluded from altruism; nor is it the place for distinguishing between the altruism which is pursued with a foresight of the pleasurable feeling to be achieved through it, and the altruism which, though it achieves this pleasurable feeling, does not make pursuit of it a motive. Here we are concerned with the fact that, whether knowingly or unknowingly gained, the state of mind accompanying altruistic action, being a pleasurable state, is to be counted in the sum of pleasures which the individual can receive; and in this sense cannot be other than egoistic. That we must so regard it is proved on observing that this pleasure, like pleasures in general, conduces to the physical prosperity of the ego. As every other agreeable emotion raises the tide of life, so does the agreeable emotion which accompanies a benevolent deed. As it cannot be denied that the pain caused by the sight of suffering, depresses the vital functions–sometimes even to the extent of arresting the heart’s action, as in one who faints on seeing a surgical operation; so neither can it be denied that the joy felt in witnessing others’ joy exalts the vital functions. Hence, however much we may hesitate to class altruistic pleasure as a higher kind of egoistic pleasure, we are obliged to recognize the fact that its immediate effects in augmenting life and so furthering personal well-being, are like those of pleasures that are directly egoistic. And the corollary drawn must be that pure egoism is, even in its immediate results, less successfully egoistic than is the egoism duly qualified by altruism which, besides achieving additional pleasures, achieves also, through raised vitality a greater capacity for pleasures in general.

That the range of aesthetic gratifications is wider for the altruistic nature than for the egoistic nature, is also a truth not to be overlooked. The joys and sorrows of human beings form a chief element in the subject matter of art; and evidently the pleasures which art gives increase as the fellow feeling with these joys and sorrows strengthens. If we contrast early poetry occupied mainly with war and gratifying the savage instincts by descriptions of bloody victories, with the poetry of modern times, in which the sanguinary forms but a small part while a large part, dealing with the gentler affections, enlists the feelings of readers on behalf of the weak; we are shown that with the development of a more altruistic nature, there has been opened a sphere of enjoyment inaccessible to the callous egoism of barbarous times. So, too, between the fiction of the past and the fiction of the present, there is the difference that while the one was almost exclusively occupied with the doings of the ruling classes, and found its plots in their antagonisms and deeds of violence, the other, chiefly taking stories of peaceful life for its subjects, and to a considerable extent the life of the humbler classes, discloses a new world of interest in the everyday pleasures and pains of ordinary people. A like contrast exists between early and late forms of plastic art. When not representing acts of worship, the wall sculptures and wall paintings of the Assyrians and Egyptians, or the decorations of temples among the Greeks, represented deeds of conquest; whereas in modern times, while the works which glorify destructive activities are less numerous, there are an increasing number of works gratifying to the kindlier sentiments of spectators. To see that those who care nothing about the feelings of other beings are, by implication, shut out from a wide range of aesthetic pleasures, it needs but to ask whether men who delight in dogfights may be expected to appreciate Beethoven’s Adelaida, or whether Tennyson’s In Memoriam would greatly move a gang of convicts.

§ 81. From the dawn of life, then, egoism has been dependent upon altruism as altruism has been dependent upon egoism; and in the course of evolution the reciprocal services of the two have been increasing.

The physical and unconscious self-sacrifice of parents to form offspring, which the lowest living things display from hour to hour, shows us in its primitive form the altruism which makes possible the egoism of individual life and growth. As we ascend to higher grades of creatures, this parental altruism becomes a direct yielding up of only part of the body, joined with an increasing contribution from the remainder in the shape of tissue wasted in efforts made on behalf of progeny This indirect sacrifice of substance, replacing more and more the direct sacrifice as parental altruism becomes higher, continues to the last to represent also altruism which is other than parental; since this, too, implies loss of substance in making efforts that do not bring their return in personal aggrandizement.

After noting how among mankind parental altruism and family altruism pass into social altruism, we observed that a society, like a species, survives only on condition that each generation of its members shall yield to the next, benefits equivalent to those it has received from the last. And this implies that care for the family must be supplemented by care for the society

Fullness of egoistic satisfactions in the associated state, depending primarily on maintenance of the normal relation between efforts expended and benefits obtained, which underlies all life, implies an altruism which both prompts equitable conduct and prompts the enforcing of equity. The well-being of each is involved with the well-being of all in sundry other ways. Whatever conduces to their vigor concerns him; for it diminishes the cost of everything he buys. Whatever conduces to their freedom from disease concerns him; for it diminishes his own liability to disease. Whatever raises their intelligence concerns him; for inconveniences are daily entailed on him by others’ ignorance or folly. Whatever raises their moral characters concerns him; for at every turn he suffers from the average unconscientiousness.

Much more directly do his egoistic satisfactions depend on those altruistic activities which enlist the sympathies of others. By alienating those around, selfishness loses the unbought aid they can render; shuts out a wide range of social enjoyments; and fails to receive those exaltations of pleasure and mitigations of pain, which come from men’s fellow feeling with those they like.

Lastly undue egoism defeats itself by bringing on an incapacity for happiness. Purely egoistic gratifications are rendered less keen by satiety, even in the earlier part of life, and almost disappear in the later; the less satiating gratifications of altruism are missed throughout life, and especially in that latter part when they largely replace egoistic gratifications; and there is a lack of susceptibility to aesthetic pleasures of the higher orders.

An indication must be added of the truth, scarcely at all recognized, that this dependence of egoism upon altruism ranges beyond the limits of each society and tends ever towards universality. That within each society it becomes greater as social evolution, implying increase of mutual dependence, progresses, needs not be shown; and it is a corollary that as fast as the dependence of societies on one another is increased by commercial intercourse, the internal welfare of each becomes a matter of concern to the others. That the impoverishment of any country diminishing both its producing and consuming powers, tells detrimentally on the people of countries trading with it, is a commonplace of political economy. Moreover, we have had of late years, abundant experience of the industrial derangements through which distress is brought on nations not immediately concerned, by wars between other nations. And if each community has the egoistic satisfactions of its members diminished by aggressions of neighboring communities on one another, still more does it have them diminished by its own aggressions. One who marks how in various parts of the world, the unscrupulous greed of conquest cloaked by pretenses of spreading the blessings of British rule and British religion, is now reacting to the immense detriment of the industrial classes at home, alike by increasing expenditure and paralyzing trade, may see that these industrial classes, absorbed in questions about capital and labor, and thinking themselves unconcerned in our doings abroad, are suffering from lack of that wide-reaching altruism which should insist on just dealings with other peoples, civilized or savage. And he may also see that beyond these immediate evils, they will for a generation to come suffer the evils that must flow from resuscitating the type of social organization which aggressive activities produce, and from the lowered moral tone which is its accompaniment.

[I-219]

CHAPTER XIII.

TRIAL AND COMPROMISE.↩

§ 82. In the foregoing two chapters the case on behalf of egoism and the case on behalf of altruism have been stated. The two conflict; and we have now to consider what verdict ought to be given.

If the opposed statements are severally valid, or even if each of them is valid in part, the influence must be that pure egoism and pure altruism are both illegitimate. If the maxim "Live for self" is wrong, so also is the maxim "Live for others." Hence a compromise is the only possibility.

This conclusion, though already seeming unavoidable, I do not here set down as proved. The purpose of this chapter is to justify it in full; and I enunciate it at the outset because the arguments used will be better understood, if the conclusion to which they converge is in the reader’s view.

How shall we so conduct the discussion as most clearly to bring out this necessity for a compromise? Perhaps the best way will be that of stating one of the two claims in its extreme form, and observing the implied absurdities. To deal thus with the principle of pure selfishness, would be to waste space. Every one sees that an unchecked satisfaction of personal desires from moment to moment, in absolute disregard of all other beings, would cause universal conflict and social dissolution. The principle of pure unselfishness, less obviously mischievous, may therefore better be chosen.

There are two aspects under which the doctrine that others’ happiness is the true ethical aim presents itself. The "others" may be conceived personally as individuals with whom we stand in direct relations; or they may be conceived impersonally as constituting the community. Insofar as the self-abnegation implied by pure altruism is concerned, it matters not in which sense "others" is used. But criticism will be facilitated by distinguishing between these two forms of it. We will take the last form first.

§ 83. This commits us to an examination of "the greatest happiness principle," as enunciated by Bentham and his followers. The doctrine that "the general happiness" ought to be the object of pursuit, is not, indeed, overtly identified with pure altruism. But as if general happiness is the proper end of action, the individual actor must regard his own share of it simply as a unit in the aggregate, no more to be valued by him than any other unit, it results that since this unit is almost infinitesimal in comparison with the aggregate, his action, if directed exclusively to achievement of general happiness, is, if not absolutely altruistic, as nearly so as may be. Hence the theory which makes general happiness the immediate object of pursuit, may rightly be taken as one form of the pure altruism to be here criticized.

Both as justifying this interpretation and as furnishing a definite proposition with which to deal, let me set out by quoting a passage from Mr. Mill’s Utilitarianism:

The Greatest-Happiness Principle is a mere form of words without rational signification, unless one person’s happiness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as much as another’s. Those conditions being supplied, Bentham’s dictum, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary [P. 91.]

Now though the meaning of "greatest happiness" as an end, is here to a certain degree defined, the need for further definition is felt the moment we attempt to decide on ways of regulating conduct so as to attain the end. The first question which arises is–Must we regard this "greatest happiness principle" as a principle of guidance for the community in its corporate capacity or as a principle of guidance for its members separately considered, or both? If the reply is that the principle must be taken as a guide for governmental action rather than for individual action, we are at once met by the inquiry–What is to be the guide for individual action? If individual action is not to be regulated solely for the purpose of achieving "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," some other principle of regulation for individual action is required; and "the greatest happiness principle" fails to furnish the needful ethical standard. Should it be rejoined that the individual in his capacity of political unit, is to take furtherance of general happiness as his end, giving his vote or otherwise acting on the legislature with a view to this end, and that in so far guidance is supplied to him, there comes the further inquiry–Whence is to come guidance for the remainder of individual conduct, constituting by far the greater part of it? If this private part of individual conduct is not to have general happiness as its direct aim, then an ethical standard other than that offered has still to be found.

Hence, unless pure altruism as thus formulated confesses its inadequacy, it must justify itself as a sufficient rule for all conduct, individual and social. We will first deal with it as the alleged right principle of public policy; and then as the alleged right principle of private action.

§ 84. On trying to understand precisely the statement that when taking general happiness as an end, the rule must be, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," there arises the idea of distribution. We can form no idea of distribution without thinking of something distributed and recipients of this something. That we may clearly conceive the proposition we must clearly conceive both these elements of it. Let us take first the recipients.

"Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one." Does this mean that, in respect of whatever is portioned out, each is to have the same share whatever his character, whatever his conduct? Shall he if passive have as much as if active? Shall he if useless have as much as if useful? Shall he if criminal have as much as if virtuous? If the distribution is to be made without reference to the natures and deeds of the recipients, then it must be shown that a system which equalizes, as far as it can, the treatment of good and bad, will be beneficial. If the distribution is not to be indiscriminate, then the formula disappears. The something distributed must be apportioned otherwise than by equal division. There must be adjustment of amounts to deserts; and we are left in the dark as to the mode of adjustment–we have to find other guidance.

Let us next ask what is the something to be distributed? The first idea which occurs is that happiness itself must be divided out among all. Taken literally, the notions that the greatest happiness should be the end sought, and that in apportioning it everybody should count for one and nobody for more than one, imply that happiness is something that can be cut up into parts and handed round. This, however, is an impossible interpretation. But after recognizing the impossibility of it, there returns the question–What is it in respect of which everybody is to count for one and nobody for more than one?

Shall the interpretation be that the concrete means to happiness are to be equally divided? Is it intended that there shall be distributed to all in equal portions the necessaries of life, the appliances to comfort, the facilities for amusement? As a conception simply, this is more defensible. But passing over the question of policy–passing over the question whether greatest happiness would ultimately be secured by such a process (which it obviously would not) it turns out on examination that greatest happiness could not even proximately be so secured. Differences of age, of growth, of constitutional need, differences of activity and consequent expenditure, differences of desires and tastes, would entail the inevitable result that the material aids to happiness which each received would be more or less unadapted to his requirements. Even if purchasing power were equally divided, the greatest happiness would not be achieved if everybody counted for one and nobody for more than one; since, as the capacities for utilizing the purchased means to happiness would vary both with the constitution and the stage of life, the means which would approximately suffice to satisfy the wants of one would be extremely insufficient to satisfy the wants of another, and so the greatest total of happiness would not be obtained: means might be unequally apportioned in a way that would produce a greater total.

But now if happiness itself cannot be cut up and distributed equally, and if equal division of the material aids to happiness would not produce greatest happiness, what is the thing to be thus apportioned?–what is it in respect of which everybody is to count for one and nobody for more than one? There seems but a single possibility. There remains to be equally distributed nothing but the conditions under which each may pursue happiness. The limitations to action–the degrees of freedom and restraint, shall be alike for all. Each shall have as much liberty to pursue his ends as consists with maintaining like liberties to pursue their ends by others; and one as much as another shall have the enjoyment of that which his efforts, carried on within these limits, obtain. But to say that in respect of these conditions everybody shall count for one and nobody for more than one, is simply to say that equity shall be enforced.

Thus considered as a principle of public policy, Bentham’s principle, when analyzed, transforms itself into the principle he slights. Not general happiness becomes the ethical standard by which legislative action is to be guided, but universal justice. And so the altruistic theory under this form collapses.

§ 85. From examining the doctrine that general happiness should be the end of public action, we pass now to examine the doctrine that it should be the end of private action.

It is contended that from the standpoint of pure reason, the happiness of others has no less a claim as an object of pursuit for each than personal happiness. Considered as parts of a total, happiness felt by self and like happiness felt by another, are of equal values; and hence it is inferred that, rationally estimated, the obligation to expend effort for others’ benefit, is as great as the obligation to expend effort for one’s own benefit. Holding that the utilitarian system of morals, rightly understood, harmonizes with the Christian maxim "Love your neighbor as yourself," Mr. Mill says that "as between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator" (p. 24). Let us consider the alternative interpretations which may be given to this statement.

Suppose, first, that a certain quantum of happiness has in some way become available, without the special instrumentality of A, B, C, or D, constituting the group concerned. Then the proposition is that each shall be ready to have this quantum of happiness as much enjoyed by one or more of the others as by himself. The disinterested and benevolent spectator would clearly in such a case, rule that no one ought to have more of the happiness than another. But here, assuming as we do that the quantum of happiness has become available without the agency of any among the group, simple equity dictates as much. No one having in any way established a claim different from the claims of others, their claims are equal; and due regard for justice by each will not permit him to monopolize the happiness.

Now suppose a different case. Suppose that the quantum of happiness has been made available by the efforts of one member of the group. Suppose that A has acquired by labor some material aid to happiness. He decides to act as the disinterested and benevolent spectator would direct. What will he decide?–what would the spectator direct? Let us consider the possible suppositions; taking first the least reasonable.

The spectator may be conceived as deciding that the labor expended by A in acquiring this material aid to happiness, originates no claim to special use of it; but that it ought to be given to B, C, or D, or that it ought to be divided equally among B, C, and D, or that it ought to be divided equally among all members of the group, including A who has labored for it. And if the spectator is conceived as deciding thus today he must be conceived as deciding thus day after day; with the result that one of the group expends all the effort, getting either none of the benefit or only his numerical share, while the others get their shares of the benefit without expending any efforts. That A might conceive the disinterested and benevolent spectator to decide in this way and might feel bound to act in conformity with the imagined decision, is a strong supposition; and probably it will be admitted that such kind of impartiality so far from being conducive to the general happiness, would quickly be fatal to everyone. But this is not all. Action in pursuance of such a decision would in reality be negatived by the very principle enunciated. For not only A, but also B, C, and D have to act on this principle. Each of them must behave as he conceives an impartial spectator would decide. Does B conceive the impartial spectator as awarding to him, B, the product of A’s labor? Then the assumption is that B conceives the impartial spectator as favoring himself, B, more than A conceives him as favoring himself, A; which is inconsistent with the hypothesis. Does B, in conceiving the impartial spectator, exclude his own interests as completely as A does? Then how can he decide so much to his own advantage, so partially as to allow him to take from A an equal share of the benefit gained by A’s labor, towards which he and the rest have done nothing?

Passing from this conceivable, though not credible, decision of the spectator, here noted for the purpose of observing that habitual conformity to it would be impossible, there remains to be considered the decision which a spectator really impartial would give. He would say that the happiness, or material aid to happiness, which had been purchased by A’s labor, was to be taken by A. He would say that B, C, and D had no claims to it, but only to such happiness, or aids to happiness, as their respective labors had purchased. Consequently A, acting as the imaginary impartial spectator would direct, is, by this test, justified in appropriating such happiness or aid to happiness as his own efforts have achieved.

And so under its special form as under its general form, the principle is true only in so far as it embodies a disguised justice. Analysis again brings out the result that making "general happiness" the end of action, really means maintaining what we call equitable relations among individuals. Decline to accept in its vague form "the greatest-happiness principle," and insist on knowing what is the implied conduct, public or private, and it turns out that the principle is meaningless save as indirectly asserting that the claims of each should be duly regarded by all. The utilitarian altruism becomes a duly qualified egoism.

§ 86. Another point of view from which to judge the altruistic theory may now be taken. If, assuming the proper object of pursuit to be general happiness, we proceed rationally we must ask in what different ways the aggregate, general happiness, may be composed; and must then ask what composition of it will yield the largest sum.

Suppose that each citizen pursues his own happiness independently not to the detriment of others but without active concern for others; then their united happinesses constitute a certain sum–a certain general happiness. Now suppose that each, instead of making his own happiness the object of pursuit, makes the happiness of others the object of pursuit; then, again, there results a certain sum of happiness. This sum must be less than, or equal to, or greater than, the first. If it is admitted that this sum is either less than the first or only equal to it, the altruistic course of action is confessedly either worse than, or no better than, the egoistic. The assumption must be that the sum of happiness obtained is greater. Let us observe what is involved in this assumption.

If each pursues exclusively the happiness of others; and if each is also a recipient of happiness (which he must be, for otherwise no aggregate happiness can be formed out of their individual happinesses); then the implication is that each gains the happiness due to altruistic action exclusively; and that in each this is greater in amount than the egoistic happiness obtainable by him, if he devoted himself to pursuit of it. Leaving out of consideration for a moment these relative amounts of the two, let us note the conditions to the receipt of altruistic happiness by each. The sympathetic nature gets pleasure by giving pleasure; and the proposition is that if the general happiness is the object of pursuit, each will be made happy by witnessing others’ happiness. But what in such case constitutes the happiness of others? These others are also, by the hypothesis, pursuers and receivers of altruistic pleasure. The genesis of altruistic pleasure in each is to depend on the display of pleasures by others; which is again to depend on the display of pleasures by others; and so on perpetually. Where, then, is the pleasure to begin? Obviously there must be egoistic pleasure somewhere, before there can be the altruistic pleasure caused by sympathy with it. Obviously therefore, each must be egoistic in due amount, even if only with the view of giving others the possibility of being altruistic. So far from the sum of happiness being made greater if all make greatest happiness the exclusive end, the sum disappears entirely.

How absurd is the supposition that the happiness of all can be achieved without each pursuing his own happiness, will be best shown by a physical simile. Suppose a cluster of bodies, each of which generates heat; and each of which is, therefore, while a radiator of heat to those around, also a receiver of heat from them. Manifestly each will have a certain proper heat irrespective of that which it gains from the rest; and, each will have a certain heat gained from the rest irrespective of its proper heat. What will happen? So long as each of the bodies continues to be a generator of heat, each continues to maintain a temperature partly derived from itself and partly derived from others. But if each ceases to generate heat for itself and depends on the heat radiated to it by the rest, the entire cluster becomes cold. Well, the self-generated heat stands for egoistic pleasure; the heat radiated and received stands for sympathetic pleasure; and the disappearance of all heat if each ceases to be an originator of it, corresponds to the disappearance of all pleasure if each ceases to originate it egoistically.

A further conclusion may be drawn. Besides the implication that before altruistic pleasure can exist, egoistic pleasure must exist, and that if the rule of conduct is to be the same for all, each must be egoistic in due degree; there is the implication that, to achieve the greatest sum of happiness, each must be more egoistic than altruistic. For, speaking generally, sympathetic pleasures must ever continue less intense than the pleasures with which there is sympathy. Other things equal, ideal feelings cannot be as vivid as real feelings. It is true that those having strong imaginations may especially in cases where the affections are engaged, feel the moral pain, if not the physical pain of another, as keenly as the actual sufferer of it, and may participate with like intensity in another’s pleasure: sometimes even mentally representing the received pleasure as greater than it really is, and so getting reflex pleasure greater than the recipients’ direct pleasure. Such cases, however, and cases in which even apart from exaltation of sympathy caused by attachment, there is a body of feeling sympathetically aroused equal in amount to the original feeling, if not greater, are necessarily exceptional. For in such cases the total consciousness includes many other elements besides the mentally represented pleasure or pain–notably the luxury of pity and the luxury of goodness; and genesis of these can occur but occasionally: they could not be habitual concomitants of sympathetic pleasures if all pursued these from moment to moment. In estimating the possible totality of sympathetic pleasures, we must include nothing beyond the representations of the pleasures others experience. And unless it be asserted that we can have others’ states of consciousness perpetually reproduced in us more vividly than the kindred states of consciousness are aroused in ourselves by their proper personal causes, it must be admitted that the totality of altruistic pleasures cannot become equal to the totality of egoistic pleasures. Hence, beyond the truth that before there can be altruistic pleasures there must be the egoistic pleasures from sympathy with which they arise, there is the truth that, to obtain the greatest sum of altruistic pleasures, there must be a greater sum of egoistic pleasures.

§ 87. That pure altruism is suicidal may be yet otherwise demonstrated. A perfectly moral law must be one which becomes perfectly practicable as human nature becomes perfect. If its practicableness decreases as human nature improves; and if an ideal human nature necessitates its impracticability; it cannot be the moral law sought.

Now opportunities for practicing altruism are numerous and great in proportion as there is weakness, or incapacity or imperfection. If we pass beyond the limits of the family, in which a sphere for self-sacrificing activities must be preserved as long as offspring have to be reared; and if we ask how there can continue a social sphere for self-sacrificing activities; it becomes obvious that the continued existence of serious evils, caused by prevalent defects of nature, is implied. As fast as men adapt themselves to the requirements of social life, so fast will the demands for efforts on their behalf diminish. And with arrival at finished adaptation, when all persons are at once completely self-conserved and completely able to fulfill the obligations which society imposes on them, those occasions for postponement of self to others which pure altruism contemplates, disappear.

Such self-sacrifices become, indeed, doubly impracticable. Carrying on successfully their several lives, men not only cannot yield to those around the opportunities for giving aid, but aid cannot ordinarily be given them without interfering with their normal activities, and so diminishing their pleasures. Like every inferior creature, led by its innate desires spontaneously to do all that its life requires, man, when completely molded to the social state, must have desires so adjusted to his needs that he fulfills the needs in gratifying the desires. And if his desires are severally gratified by the performance of required acts, none of these can be performed for him without balking his desires. Acceptance from others of the results of their activities can take place only on condition of relinquishing the pleasures derived from his own activities. Diminution rather than increase of happiness would result, could altruistic action in such case be enforced.

And here, indeed, we are introduced to another baseless assumption which the theory makes.

§ 88. The postulate of utilitarianism as formulated in the statements above quoted, and of pure altruism as otherwise expressed, involves the belief that it is possible for happiness, or the means to happiness, or the conditions to happiness, to be transferred. Without any specified limitation the proposition taken for granted is, that happiness in general admits of detachment from one and attachment to another–that surrender to any extent is possible by one and appropriation to any extent is possible by another. But a moment’s thought shows this to be far from the truth. On the one hand, surrender carried to a certain point is extremely mischievous and to a further point fatal; and on the other hand, much of the happiness each enjoys is self-generated and can neither be given nor received.

To assume that egoistic pleasures may be relinquished to any extent, is to fall into one of those many errors of ethical speculation which result from ignoring the truths of biology. When taking the biological view of ethics we saw that pleasures accompany normal amounts of functions, while pains accompany defects or excesses of functions; further, that complete life depends on complete discharge of functions, and therefore on receipt of the correlative pleasures. Hence, to yield up normal pleasures is to yield up so much life; and there arises the question–to what extent may this be done? If he is to continue living, the individual must take certain amounts of those pleasures which go along with fulfillment of the bodily functions, and must avoid the pains which entire nonfulfillment of them entails. Complete abnegation means death; excessive abnegation means illness; abnegation less excessive means physical degradation and consequent loss of power to fulfill obligations, personal and other. When, therefore, we attempt to specialize the proposal to live not for self-satisfaction but for the satisfaction of others, we meet with the difficulty that beyond a certain limit this cannot be done. And when we have decided what decrease of bodily welfare, caused by sacrifice of pleasures and acceptance of pains, it is proper for the individual to make, there is forced on us the fact that the portion of happiness, or means to happiness, which it is possible for him to yield up for redistribution, is a limited portion.

Even more rigorous on another side is the restriction put upon the transfer of happiness, or the means to happiness. The pleasures gained by efficient action–by successful pursuit of ends, cannot by any process be parted with, and cannot in any way be appropriated by another. The habit of arguing about general happiness sometimes as though it were a concrete product to be portioned out, and sometimes as though it were coextensive with the use of those material aids to pleasure which may be given and received, has caused inattention to the truth that the pleasures of achievement are not transferable. Alike in the boy who has won a game of marbles, the athlete who has performed a feat, the statesman who has gained a party triumph, the inventor who has devised a new machine, the man of science who has discovered a truth, the novelist who has well delineated a character, the poet who has finely rendered an emotion, we see pleasures which must, in the nature of things, be enjoyed exclusively by those to whom they come. And if we look at all such occupations as men are not impelled to by their necessities–if we contemplate the various ambitions which play so large a part in life; we are reminded that so long as the consciousness of efficiency remains a dominant pleasure, there will remain a dominant pleasure which cannot be pursued altruistically but must be pursued egoistically.

Cutting off, then, at the one end, those pleasures which are inseparable from maintenance of the physique in an uninjured state; and cutting off at the other end the pleasures of successful action; the amount that remains is so greatly diminished, as to make untenable the assumption that happiness at large admits of distribution after the manner which utilitarianism assumes.

§ 89. In yet one more way may be shown the inconsistency of this transfigured utilitarianism which regards its doctrine as embodying the Christian maxim "Love your neighbor as yourself," and of that altruism which, going still further, enunciates the maxim "Live for others."

A right rule of conduct must be one which may with advantage be adopted by all. "Act according to that maxim only which you can wish, at the same time, to become a universal law" says Kant. And clearly a passing over needful qualifications of this maxim, we may accept it to the extent of admitting that a mode of action which becomes impracticable as it approaches universality must be wrong. Hence, if the theory of pure altruism, implying that effort should be expended for the benefit of others and not for personal benefit, is defensible, it must be shown that it will produce good results when acted upon by all. Mark the consequences if all are purely altruistic.

First, an impossible combination of moral attributes is implied. Each is supposed by the hypothesis to regard self so little and others so much, that he willingly sacrifices his own pleasures to give pleasures to them. But if this is a universal trait, and if action is universally congruous with it, we have to conceive each as being not only a sacrificer but also one who accepts sacrifices. While he is so unselfish as willingly to yield up the benefit for which he has labored, he is so selfish as willingly to let others yield up to him the benefits they have labored for. To make pure altruism possible for all, each must be at once extremely unegoistic and extremely egoistic. As a giver, he must have no thought for self; as a receiver, no thought for others. Evidently this implies an inconceivable mental constitution. The sympathy which is so solicitous for others as willingly to injure self in benefiting them, cannot at the same time be so regardless of others as to accept benefits which they injure themselves in giving.

The incongruities that emerge if we assume pure altruism to be universally practiced, may be otherwise exhibited thus. Suppose that each, instead of enjoying such pleasures as come to him, or such consumable appliances to pleasure as he has worked for, or such occasions for pleasure as reward his efforts, relinquishes these to a single other, or adds them to a common stock from which others benefit; what will result? Different answers may be given according as we assume that there are, or are not, additional influences brought into play. Suppose there are no additional influences. Then, if each transfers to another his happiness, or means to happiness, or occasions for happiness, while some one else does the like to him, the distribution of happiness is, on the average, unchanged; or if each adds to a common stock his happiness, or means to happiness, or occasions for happiness, from which common stock each appropriates his portion, the average state is still, as before, unchanged. The only obvious effect is that transactions must be gone through in the redistribution; and loss of time and labor must result. Now suppose some additional influence which makes the process beneficial; what must it be? The totality can be increased only if the acts of transfer increase the quantity of that which is transferred. The happiness, or that which brings it, must be greater to one who derives it from another’s efforts, than it would have been had his own efforts procured it; or otherwise, supposing a fund of happiness, or of that which brings it, has been formed by contributions from each, then each, in appropriating his share, must find it larger than it would have been had no such aggregation and dispersion taken place. To justify belief in such increase two conceivable assumptions may be made. One is that though the sum of pleasures, or of pleasure-yielding things, remains the same yet the kind of pleasure, or of pleasure-yielding things, which each receives in exchange from another, or from the aggregate of others, is one which he appreciates more than that for which he labored. But to assume this is to assume that each labors directly for the thing which he enjoys less, rather than for the thing which he enjoys more, which is absurd. The other assumption is that while the exchanged or redistributed pleasure of the egoistic kind, remains the same in amount for each, there is added to it the altruistic pleasure accompanying the exchange. But this assumption is clearly inadmissible if, as is implied, the transaction is universal–is one through which each becomes giver and receiver to equal extents. For if the transfer of pleasures, or of pleasure-yielding things, from one to another or others, is always accompanied by the consciousness that there will be received from him or them an equivalent; there results merely a tacit exchange, either direct or roundabout. Each becomes altruistic in no greater degree than is implied by being equitable; and each, having nothing to exalt his happiness, sympathetically or otherwise, cannot be a source of sympathetic happiness to others.

§ 90. Thus, when the meanings of its words are inquired into, or when the necessary implications of its theory are examined, pure altruism, in whatever form expressed, commits its adherents to various absurdities.

If "the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or in other words, "the general happiness," is the proper end of action, then not only for all public action but for all private action, it must be the end; because, otherwise, the greater part of action remains unguided. Consider its fitness for each. If corporate action is to be guided by the principle, with its interpreting comment–"everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one"–there must be an ignoring of all differences of character and conduct, merits and demerits, among citizens, since no discrimination is provided for; and moreover, since that in respect of which all are to count alike cannot be happiness itself, which is indistributable, and since equal sharing of the concrete means to happiness, besides failing utimately would fail proximately to produce the greatest happiness; it results that equal distribution of the conditions under which happiness may be pursued is the only tenable meaning: we discover in the principle nothing but a roundabout insistence on equity. If, taking happiness at large as the aim of private action, the individual is required to judge between his own happiness and that of others as an impartial spectator would do, we see that no supposition concerning the spectator save one which suicidally ascribes partiality to him, can bring out any other result than that each shall enjoy such happiness, or appropriate such means to happiness, as his own efforts gain: equity is again the sole content. When, adopting another method, we consider how the greatest sum of happiness may be composed, and, recognizing the fact that equitable egoism will produce a certain sum, ask how pure altruism is to produce a greater sum; we are shown that if all, exclusively pursuing altruistic pleasures, are so to produce a greater sum of pleasures, the implication is that altruistic pleasures, which arise from sympathy, can exist in the absence of egoistic pleasures with which there may be sympathy–an impossibility; and another implication is that if, the necessity for egoistic pleasures being admitted, it is said that the greatest sum of happiness will be attained if all individuals are more altruistic than egoistic, it is indirectly said that as a general truth, representative feelings are stronger than presentative feelings–another impossibility. Again the doctrine of pure altruism assumes that happiness may be to any extent transferred or redistributed; whereas the fact is that pleasures of one order cannot be transferred in large measure without results which are fatal or extremely injurious, and that pleasures of another order cannot be transferred in any degree. Further, pure altruism presents this fatal anomaly; that while a right principle of action must be more and more practiced as men improve, the altruistic principle becomes less and less practicable as men approach an ideal form, because the sphere for practicing it continually decreases. Finally its self-destructiveness is made manifest on observing that for all to adopt it as a principle of action, which they must do if it is a sound principle, implies that all are at once extremely unegoistic and extremely egoistic–ready to injure self for others’ benefit, and ready to accept benefit at the cost of injury to others: traits which cannot coexist.

The need for a compromise between egoism and altruism is thus made conspicuous. We are forced to recognize the claims which his own well-being has on the attention of each by noting how, in some directions we come to a deadlock, in others to contradictions, and in others to disastrous results, if they are ignored. Conversely it is undeniable that disregard of others by each, carried to a great extent is fatal to society, and carried to a still greater extent is fatal to the family, and eventually to the race. Egoism and altruism are therefore coessential.

§ 91. What form is the compromise between egoism and altruism to assume? how are their respective claims to be satisfied in due degree?

It is a truth insisted on by moralists and recognized in common life, that the achievement of individual happiness is not proportionate to the degree in which individual happiness is made the object of direct pursuit; but there has not yet become current the belief that, in like manner, the achievement of general happiness is not proportionate to the degree in which general happiness is made the object of direct pursuit. Yet failure of direct pursuit in the last case is more reasonably to be expected than in the first.

When discussing the relations of means and ends, we saw that as individual conduct evolves, its principle becomes more and more that of making fulfillment of means the proximate end, and leaving the ultimate end, welfare or happiness, to come as a result. And we saw that when general welfare or happiness is the ultimate end, the same principle holds even more rigorously; since the ultimate end under its impersonal form, is less determinate than under its personal form, and the difficulties in the way of achieving it by direct pursuit still greater. Recognizing, then, the fact that corporate happiness still more than individual happiness, must be pursued not directly but indirectly the first question for us is–What must be the general nature of the means through which it is to be achieved.

It is admitted that self-happiness is, in a measure, to be obtained by furthering the happiness of others. May it not be true that, conversely general happiness is to be obtained by furthering self-happiness? If the well-being of each unit is to be reached partly through his care for the well-being of the aggregate, is not the well-being of the aggregate to be reached partly through the care of each unit for himself? Clearly, our conclusion must be that general happiness is to be achieved mainly through the adequate pursuit of their own happinesses by individuals; while, reciprocally the happinesses of individuals are to be achieved in part by their pursuit of the general happiness.

And this is the conclusion embodied in the progressing ideas and usages of mankind. This compromise between egoism and altruism has been slow establishing itself; and towards recognition of its propriety, men’s actual beliefs, as distinguished from their nominal beliefs, have been gradually approaching. Social evolution has been bringing about a state in which the claims of the individual to the proceeds of his activities, and to such satisfactions as they bring, are more and more positively asserted; at the same time that insistence on others’ claims, and habitual respect for them, have been increasing. Among the rudest savages personal interests are very vaguely distinguished from the interests of others. In early stages of civilization, the proportioning of benefits to efforts is extremely rude: slaves and serfs get for work, arbitrary amounts of food and shelter: exchange being infrequent, there is little to develop the idea of equivalence. But as civilization advances and status passes into contract, there comes daily experience of the relation between advantages enjoyed and labor given: the industrial system maintaining, through supply and demand, a due adjustment of the one to the other. And this growth of voluntary cooperation–this exchange of services under agreement, has been necessarily accompanied by decrease of aggressions one upon another, and increase of sympathy: leading to exchange of services beyond agreement. That is to say, the more distinct assertions of individual claims and more rigorous apportioning of personal enjoyments to efforts expended, has gone hand in hand with growth of that negative altruism shown in equitable conduct and that positive altruism shown in gratuitous aid.

A higher phase of this double change has in our own times become conspicuous. If, on the one hand, we note the struggles for political freedom, the contests between labor and capital, the judicial reforms made to facilitate enforcement of rights, we see that the tendency still is towards complete appropriation by each of whatever benefits are due to him, and consequent exclusion of his fellows from such benefits. On the other hand, if we consider what is meant by the surrender of power to the masses, the abolition of class privileges, the efforts to diffuse knowledge, the agitations to spread temperance, the multitudinous philanthropic societies; it becomes clear that regard for the well-being of others is increasing pari passu with the taking of means to secure personal well-being.

What holds of the relations within each society holds to some extent, if to a less extent, of the relations between societies. Though to maintain national claims, real or imaginary, often of a trivial kind, the civilized still make war on one another; yet their several nationalities are more respected than in past ages. Though by victors portions of territory are taken and money compensations exacted; yet conquest is not now, as of old, habitually followed by entire appropriation of territories and enslavement of peoples. The individualities of societies are in a larger measure preserved. Meanwhile the altruistic intercourse is greater: aid is rendered on occasions of disaster by flood, by fire, by famine, or otherwise. And in international arbitration as lately exemplified, implying the recognition of claims by one nation upon another, we see a further progress in this wider altruism. Doubtless there is much to be said by way of setoff; for in the dealings of the civilized with the uncivilized, little of this progress can be traced. It may be urged that the primitive rule "Life for life" has been developed by us into the rule ``For one life many lives," as in the cases of Bishop Patteson and Mr. Birch; but then there is the qualifying fact that we do not torture our prisoners or mutilate them. If it be said that as the Hebrews thought themselves warranted in seizing the lands God promised to them, and in some cases exterminating the inhabitants, so we, to fulfill the "manifest intention of Providence," dispossess inferior races whenever we want their territories; it may be replied that we do not kill many more than seems needful, and tolerate the existence of those who submit. And should any one point out that as Attila, while conquering or destroying peoples and nations, regarded himself as "the scourge of God," punishing men for their sins, so we, as represented by a High Commissioner and a priest he quotes, think ourselves called on to chastise with rifles and cannon, heathens who practice polygamy; there is the rejoinder that not even the most ferocious disciple of the teacher of mercy would carry his vengeance so far as to depopulate whole territories and erase scores of cities. And when, on the other hand, we remember that there is an Aborigines Protection Society, that there are commissioners in certain colonies appointed to protect native interests, and that in some cases the lands of natives have been purchased in ways which, however unfair, have implied some recognition of their claims; we may say that little as the compromise between egoism and altruism has progressed in international affairs, it has still progressed somewhat in the direction indicated.

[I-242]

CHAPTER XIV.

CONCILIATION.↩

§ 92. As exhibited in the last chapter, the compromise between the claims of self and the claims of others seems to imply permanent antagonism between the two. The pursuit by each of his own happiness while paying due regard to the happiness of his fellows, apparently necessitates the ever-recurring question–how far must the one end be sought and how far the other? suggesting, if not discord in the life of each, still, an absence of complete harmony This is not the inevitable inference however.

When, in the Principles of Sociology, Part III, the phenomena of race-maintenance among living things at large were discussed, that the development of the domestic relations might be the better understood, it was shown that during evolution there has been going on a conciliation between the interests of the species, the interests of the parents, and the interests of the offspring. Proof was given that as we ascend from the lowest forms of life to the highest, race-maintenance is achieved with a decreasing sacrifice of life, alike of young individuals and of adult individuals, and also with a decreasing sacrifice of parental lives to the lives of offspring. We saw that, with the progress of civilization, like changes go on among human beings; and that the highest domestic relations are those in which the conciliation of welfare within the family becomes greatest, while the welfare of the society is best subserved. Here it remains to be shown that a kindred conciliation has been, and is, taking place between the interests of each citizen and the interests of citizens at large; tending ever towards a state in which the two become merged in one, and in which the feelings answering to them respectively fall into complete concord.

In the family group, even as we observe it among many inferior vertebrates, we see that the parental sacrifice, now become so moderate in amount as to consist with long-continued parental life, is not accompanied by consciousness of sacrifice; but, contrariwise, is made from a direct desire to make it: the altruistic labors on behalf of young are carried on in satisfaction of parental instincts. If we trace these relations up through the grades of mankind, and observe how largely love rather than obligation prompts the care of children, we see the conciliation of interests to be such that achievement of parental happiness coincides with securing the happiness of offspring: the wish for children among the childless, and the occasional adoption of children, showing how needful for attainment of certain egoistic satisfactions are these altruistic activities. And further evolution, causing along with higher nature diminished fertility, and therefore smaller burdens on parents, may be expected to bring a state in which, far more than now the pleasures of adult life will consist in raising offspring to perfection while simultaneously furthering the immediate happiness of offspring.

Now though altruism of a social kind, lacking certain elements of parental altruism, can never attain the same level; yet it may be expected to attain a level at which it will be like parental altruism in spontaneity–a level such that ministration to others’ happiness will become a daily need–a level such that the lower egoistic satisfactions will be continually subordinated to this higher egoistic satisfaction, not by any effort to subordinate them, but by the preference for this higher egoistic satisfaction whenever it can be obtained.

Let us consider how the development of sympathy which must advance as fast as conditions permit, will bring about this state.

§ 93. We have seen that during the evolution of life, pleasures and pains have necessarily been the incentives to and deterrents from, actions which the conditions of existence demanded and negatived. An implied truth to be here noted is, that faculties which, under given conditions, yield partly pain and partly pleasure, cannot develop beyond the limit at which they yield a surplus of pleasure: if beyond that limit more pain than pleasure results from exercise of them, their growth must be arrested.

Through sympathy both these forms of feeling are excited. Now a pleasurable consciousness is aroused on witnessing pleasure; now a painful consciousness is aroused on witnessing pain. Hence, if beings around him habitually manifest pleasure and but rarely pain, sympathy yields to its possessor a surplus of pleasure; while, contrariwise, if little pleasure is ordinarily witnessed and much pain, sympathy yields a surplus of pain to its possessor. The average development of sympathy must, therefore, be regulated by the average manifestations of pleasure and pain in others. If the life usually led under given social conditions is such that suffering is daily inflicted, or is daily displayed by associates, sympathy cannot grow: to assume growth of it is to assume that the constitution will modify itself in such way as to increase its pains and therefore depress its energies; and is to ignore the truth that bearing any kind of pain gradually produces insensibility to that pain, or callousness. On the other hand, if the social state is such that manifestations of pleasure predominate, sympathy will increase; since sympathetic pleasures, adding to the totality of pleasures enhancing vitality, conduce to the physical prosperity of the most sympathetic, and since the pleasures of sympathy exceeding its pains in all, lead to an exercise of it which strengthens it.

The first implication is one already more than once indicated. We have seen that along with habitual militancy and under the adapted type of social organization, sympathy cannot develop to any considernable height. The destructive activities carried on against external enemies sear it; the state of feeling maintained causes within the society itself frequent acts of aggression or cruelty; and further, the compulsory cooperation characterizing the militant regime necessarily represses sympathy–exists only on condition of an unsympathetic treatment of some by others.

But even could the militant regime forthwith end, the hindrances to development of sympathy would still be great. Though cessation of war would imply increased adaptation of man to social life, and decrease of sundry evils, yet there would remain much nonadaptation and much consequent unhappiness. In the first place, that form of nature which has generated and still generates wars, though by implication raised to a higher form, would not at once be raised to so high a form that there would cease all injustices and the pains they cause. For a considerable period after predatory activities had ended, the defects of the predatory nature would continue: entailing their slowly diminishing evils. In the second place, the ill-adjustment of the human constitution to the pursuits of industrial life, must long persist, and may be expected to survive in a measure the cessation of wars: the required modes of activity must remain for innumerable generations in some degree displeasurable. And in the third place, deficiencies of self-control such as the improvident show us, as well as those many failures of conduct due to inadequate foresight of consequences, though less marked than now could not fail still to produce suffering.

Nor would even complete adaptation, if limited to disappearance of the nonadaptations just indicated, remove all sources of those miseries which, to the extent of their manifestation, check the growth of sympathy. For while the rate of multiplication continues so to exceed the rate of mortality as to cause pressure on the means of subsistence, there must continue to result much unhappiness; either from balked affections or from overwork and stinted means. Only as fast as fertility diminishes, which we have seen it must do along with further mental development (Principles of Biology, secs. 367—77), can there go on such diminution of the labors required for efficiently supporting self and family that they will not constitute a displeasurable tax on the energies.

Gradually then, and only gradually as these various causes of unhappiness become less can sympathy become greater. Life would be intolerable if, while the causes of misery remained as they now are, all men were not only in a high degree sensitive to the pains, bodily and mental, felt by those around and expressed in the faces of those they met, but were unceasingly conscious of the miseries everywhere being suffered as consequences of war, crime, misconduct, misfortune, improvidence, incapacity. But, as the molding and remolding of man and society into mutual fitness progresses, and as the pains caused by unfitness decrease, sympathy can increase in presence of the pleasures that come from fitness. The two changes are indeed so related that each furthers the other. Such growth of sympathy as conditions permit, itself aids in lessening pain and augmenting pleasure; and the greater surplus of pleasure that results makes possible further growth of sympathy.

§ 94. The extent to which sympathy may develop when the hindrances are removed, will be better conceived after observing the agencies through which it is excited, and setting down the reasons for expecting those agencies to become more efficient. Two factors have to be considered–the natural language of feeling in the being sympathized with, and the power of interpreting that language in the being who sympathizes. We may anticipate development of both.

Movements of the body and facial changes are visible effects of feeling which, when the feeling is strong, are uncontrollable. When the feeling is less strong however, be it sensational or emotional, they may be wholly or partially repressed; and there is a habit, more or less constant, of repressing them: this habit being the concomitant of a nature such that it is often undesirable that others should see what is felt. So necessary with our existing characters and conditions are concealments thus prompted, that they have come to form a part of moral duty; and concealment for its own sake is often insisted upon as an element in good manners. All this is caused by the prevalence of feelings at variance with social good–feelings which cannot be shown without producing discords or estrangements. But in proportion as the egoistic desires fall more under control of the altruistic, and there come fewer and slighter impulses of a kind to be reprobated, the need for keeping guard over facial expression and bodily movement will decrease, and these will with increasing clearness convey to spectators the mental state. Nor is this all. Restrained as its use is, this language of the emotions is at present prevented from growing. But as fast as the emotions become such that they may be more candidly displayed, there will go, along with the habit of display, development of the means of display; so that besides the stronger emotions, the more delicate shades and smaller degrees of emotion will visibly exhibit themselves: the emotional language will become at once more copious, more varied, more definite. And obviously sympathy will be proportionately facilitated.

An equally important, if not a more important, advance of kindred nature, is to be anticipated. The vocal signs of sentient states will simultaneously evolve further. Loudness of tone, pitch of tone, quality of tone, and change of tone, are severally marks of feeling; and, combined in different ways and proportions, serve to express different amounts and kinds of feelings. As elsewhere pointed out, cadences are the comments of the emotions on the propositions of the intellect.[13] Not in excited speech only, but in ordinary speech, we show by ascending and descending intervals, by degrees of deviation from the medium tone, as well as by place and strength of emphasis, the kind of sentiency which accompanies the thought expressed. Now the manifestation of feeling by cadence, like its manifestation by visible changes, is at present under restraint; the motives for repression act in the one case as they act in the other. A double effect is produced. This audible language of feeling is not used up to the limit of its existing capacity; and it is to a considerable degree misused, so as to convey other feelings than those which are felt. The result of this disuse and misuse is to check that evolution which normal use would cause. We must infer, then, that as moral adaptation progresses, and there is decreasing need for concealment of the feelings, their vocal signs will develop much further. Though it is not to be supposed that cadences will ever convey emotions as exactly as words convey thoughts, yet it is quite possible that the emotional language of the future may rise as much above our present emotional language, as our intellectual language has already risen above the intellectual language of the lowest races.

A simultaneous increase in the power of interpreting both visible and audible signs of feeling must be taken into account. Among those around we see differences both of ability to perceive such signs and of ability to conceive the implied mental states and their causes: here, a stolidity unimpressed by a slight facial change or altered tone of voice, or else unable to imagine what is felt; and there, a quick observation and a penetrating intuition, making instantly comprehensible the state of mind and its origin. If we suppose both these faculties exalted–both a more delicate perception of the signs and a strengthened constructive imagination–we shall get some idea of the deeper and wider sympathy that will hereafter arise. More vivid representations of the feelings of others, implying ideal excitements of feelings approaching to real excitements, must imply a greater likeness between the feelings of the sympathizer and those of the sympathized with; coming near to identity.

By simultaneous increase of its subjective and objective factors, sympathy may thus, as the hindrances diminish, rise above that now shown by the sympathetic as much as in them it has risen above that which the callous show.

§ 95. What must be the accompanying evolution of conduct? What must the relations between egoism and altruism become as this form of nature is neared?

A conclusion drawn in the chapter on the relativity of pleasures and pains, and there emphasized as one to be borne in mind, must now be recalled. It was pointed out that, supposing them to be consistent with continuance of life, there are no activities which may not become sources of pleasure, if surrounding conditions require persistence in them. And here it is to be added, as a corollary that if the conditions require any class of activities to be relatively great, there will arise a relatively great pleasure accompanying that class of activities. What bearing have these general inferences on the special question before us?

That alike for public welfare and private welfare sympathy is essential, we have seen. We have seen that cooperation and the benefits which it brings to each and all, become high in proportion as the altruistic, that is the sympathetic, interests extend. The actions prompted by fellow feeling are thus to be counted among those demanded by social conditions. They are actions which maintenance and further development of social organization tend ever to increase; and therefore actions with which there will be joined an increasing pleasure. From the laws of life it must be concluded that unceasing social discipline will so mold human nature, that eventually sympathetic pleasures will be spontaneously pursued to the fullest extent advantageous to each and all. The scope for altruistic activities will not exceed the desire for altruistic satisfactions.

In natures thus constituted, though the altruistic gratifications must remain in a transfigured sense egoistic, yet they will not be egoistically pursued–will not be pursued from egoistic motives. Though pleasure will be gained by giving pleasure, yet the thought of the sympathetic pleasure to be gained will not occupy consciousness, but only the thought of the pleasure given. To a great extent this is so now. In the truly sympathetic, attention is so absorbed with the proximate end, others’ happiness, that there is none given to the prospective self-happiness which may ultimately result. An analogy will make the relation clear.

A miser accumulates money not deliberately saying to himself–"I shall by doing this get the delight which possession gives." He thinks only of the money and the means of getting it; and he experiences incidentally the pleasure that comes from possession. Owning property is that which he revels in imagining, and not the feeling which owning property will cause. Similarly, one who is sympathetic in the highest sense, is mentally engaged solely in representing pleasure as experienced by another; and pursues it for the benefit of that other, forgetting any participation he will have in it. Subjectively considered, then, the conciliation of egoism and altruism will eventually become such that though the altruistic pleasure, as being a part of the consciousness of one who experiences it, can never be other than egoistic, it will not be consciously egoistic.

Let us now ask what must happen in a society composed of persons constituted in this manner.

§ 96. The opportunities for that postponement of self to others which constitutes altruism as ordinarily conceived, must, in several ways, be more and more limited as the highest state is approached.

Extensive demands on the benevolent, presuppose much unhappiness. Before there can be many and large calls on some for efforts on behalf of others, there must be many others in conditions needing help–in conditions of comparative misery. But, as we have seen above, the development of fellow feeling can go on only as fast as misery decreases. Sympathy can reach its full height only when there have ceased to be frequent occasions for anything like serious self-sacrifice.

Change the point of view and this truth presents itself under another aspect. We have already seen that with the progress of adaptation each becomes so constituted that he cannot be helped without in some way arresting a pleasurable activity. There cannot be a beneficial interference between faculty and function when the two are adjusted. Consequently in proportion as mankind approach complete adjustment of their natures to social needs, there must be fewer and smaller opportunities for giving aid.

Yet again, as was pointed out in the last chapter, the sympathy which prompts efforts for others’ welfare must be gained by self-injury on the part of others; and must, therefore, cause aversion to accept benefits derived from their self-injuries. What is to be inferred? While each when occasion offers is ready anxious even, to surrender egoistic satisfactions; others, similarly natured, cannot but resist the surrender. If anyone, proposing to treat himself more hardly than a disinterested spectator would direct, refrains from appropriating that which is due, others, caring for him if he will not care for himself, must necessarily insist that he shall appropriate it. General altruism then, in its developed form, must inevitably resist individual excesses of altruism. The relation at present familiar to us will be inverted; and instead of each maintaining his own claims, others will maintain his claims for him: not, indeed, by active efforts, which will be needless, but by passively resisting any undue yielding up of them. There is nothing in such behavior which is not even now to be traced in our daily experiences as beginning. In business transactions among honorable men, there is usually a desire on either side that the other shall treat himself fairly. Not unfrequently there is a refusal to take something regarded as the other’s due, but which the other offers to give up. In social intercourse, too, the cases are common in which those who would surrender their shares of pleasure are not permitted by the rest to do so. Further development of sympathy cannot but make this mode of behaving increasingly general and increasingly genuine.

Certain complex restraints on excesses of altruism exist, which, in another way force back the individual upon a normal egoism. Two may here be noted. In the first place, self-abnegations often repeated imply on the part of the actor a tacit ascription of relative selfishness to others who profit by the self-abnegations. Even with men as they are, there occasionally arises a feeling among those for whom sacrifices are frequently made, that they are being insulted by the assumption that they are ready to receive them; and in the mind of the actor also, there sometimes grows up a recognition of this feeling on their part, and a consequent check on his too great or too frequent surrenders of pleasure. Obviously in more developed natures, this kind of check must act still more promptly. In the second place, when, as the hypothesis implies, altruistic pleasures have reached a greater intensity than they now possess, each person will be debarred from undue pursuit of them by the consciousness that other persons, too, desire them, and that scope for others’ enjoyment of them must be left. Even now may be observed among groups of friends, where some competition in amiability is going on, relinquishments of opportunities for self-abnegation that others may have them. "Let her give up the gratification, she will like to do so"; "Let him undertake the trouble, it will please him"; are suggestions which from time to time illustrate this consciousness. The most developed sympathy will care for the sympathetic satisfactions of others as well as for their selfish satisfactions. What may be called a higher equity will refrain from trespassing on the spheres of others’ altruistic activities, as a lower equity refrains from trespassing on the spheres of their egoistic activities. And by this checking of what may be called an egoistic altruism, undue sacrifices on the part of each must be prevented.

What spheres, then, will eventually remain for altruism as it is commonly conceived? There are three. One of them must to the last continue large in extent; and the others must progressively diminish, though they do not disappear. The first is that which family-life affords. Always there must be a need for subordination of self-regarding feelings to other-regarding feelings in the rearing of children. Though this will diminish with diminution in the number to be reared, yet it will increase with the greater elaboration and prolongation of the activities on their behalf. But as shown above, there is even now partially effected a conciliation such that those egoistic satisfactions which parenthood yields are achieved through altruistic activities–a conciliation tending ever towards completeness. An important development of family-altruism must be added: the reciprocal care of parents by children during old age–a care becoming lighter and better fulfilled, in which a kindred conciliation may be looked for. Pursuit of social welfare at large must afford hereafter, as it does now scope for the postponement of selfish interests to unselfish interests, but a continuallylessening scope; because as adaptation to the social state progresses, the needs for those regulative actions by which social life is made harmonious become less. And here the amount of altruistic actionwhich each undertakes must inevitably be kept within moderate bounds by others; for if they are similarly altruistic, they will not allow some to pursue public ends to their own considerable detriment that the rest may profit. In the private relations of men, opportunities for self-sacrifice prompted by sympathy must ever in some degree, though eventually in a small degree, be afforded by accidents, diseases, and misfortunes in general; since, however near to completeness the adaptation of human nature to the conditions of existence at large, physical and social, may become, it can never reach completeness. Flood, fire, and wreck must to the last yield at intervals opportunities for heroic acts; and in the motives to such acts, anxiety for others will be less alloyed with love of admiration than now. Extreme, however, as may be the eagerness for altruistic action on the rare occasions hence arising, the amount falling to the share of each must, for the reasons given, be narrowly limited. But though in the incidents of ordinary life, postponements of self to others in large ways must become very infrequent, daily intercourse will still furnish multitudinous small occasions for the activity of fellow feeling. Always each may continue to further the welfare of others by warding off from them evils they cannot see, and by aiding their actions in ways unknown to them; or, conversely putting it, each may have, as it were, supplementary eyes and ears in other persons, which perceive for him things he cannot perceive himself: so perfecting his life in numerous details, by making its adjustments to environing actions complete.

§ 97. Must it then follow that eventually, with this diminution of the spheres for it, altruism must diminish in total amount? By no means. Such a conclusion implies a misconception.

Naturally under existing conditions, with suffering widely diffused and so much of effort demanded from the more fortunate in succoring the less fortunate, altruism is understood to mean only self-sacrifice; or, at any rate, a mode of action which, while it brings some pleasure, has an accompaniment of self-surrender that is not pleasurable. But the sympathy which prompts denial of self to please others, is a sympathy which also receives pleasure from their pleasures when they are otherwise originated. The stronger the fellow feeling which excites efforts to make others happy, the stronger is the fellow feeling with their happiness however caused.

In its ultimate form, then, altruism will be the achievement of gratification through sympathy with those gratifications of others which are mainly produced by their activities of all kinds successfully carried on–sympathetic gratification which costs the receiver nothing, but is a gratis addition to his egoistic gratifications. This power of representing in idea the mental states of others, which, during the process of adaptation has had the function of mitigating suffering, must, as the suffering falls to a minimum, come to have almost wholly the function of mutually exalting men’s enjoyments by giving everyone a vivid intuition of his neighbor’s enjoyments. While pain prevails widely it is undesirable that each should participate much in the consciousness of others; but with an increasing predominance of pleasure, participation in others’ consciousnesses becomes a gain of pleasure to all.

And so there will disappear that apparently permanent opposition between egoism and altruism, implied by the compromise reached in the last chapter. Subjectively looked at, the conciliation will be such that the individual will not have to balance between self-regarding impulses and other-regarding impulses; but, instead, those satisfactions of other-regarding impulses which involve self-sacrifice, becoming rare and much prized, will be so unhesitatingly preferred that the competition of self-regarding impulses with them will scarcely be felt. And the subjective conciliation will also be such that though altruistic pleasure will be attained, yet the motive of action will not consciously be the attainment of altruistic pleasure; but the idea present will be the securing of others’ pleasures. Meanwhile, the conciliation objectively considered will be equally complete. Though each, no longer needing to maintain his egoistic claims, will tend rather when occasion offers to surrender them, yet others, similarly natured, will not permit him in any large measure to do this; and that fulfillment of personal desires required for completion of his life will thus be secured to him: though not now egoistic in the ordinary sense, yet the effects of due egoism will be achieved. Nor is this all. As, at an earlier stage, egoistic competition, first reaching a compromise such that each claims no more than his equitable share, afterward rises to a conciliation such that each insists on the taking of equitable shares by others; so, at the latest stage, altruistic competition, first reaching a compromise under which each restrains himself from taking an undue share of altruistic satisfactions, eventually rises to a conciliation under which each takes care that others shall have their opportunities for altruistic satisfactions: the highest altruism being that which ministers not to the egoistic satisfactions of others only but also to their altruistic satisfactions.

Far off as seems such a state, yet every one of the factors counted on to produce it may already be traced in operation among those of highest natures. What now in them is occasional and feeble, may be expected with further evolution to become habitual and strong; and what now characterizes the exceptionally high may be expected eventually to characterize all. For that which the best human nature is capable of, is within the reach of human nature at large.

§ 98. That these conclusions will meet with any considerable acceptance is improbable. Neither with current ideas nor with current sentiments are they sufficiently congruous.

Such a view will not be agreeable to those who lament the spreading disbelief in eternal damnation; nor to those who follow the apostle of brute force in thinking that because the rule of the strong hand was once good it is good for all time; nor to those whose reverence for one who told them to put up the sword, is shown by using the sword to spread his doctrine among heathens. From the ten thousand priests of the religion of love, who are silent when the nation is moved by the religion of hate, will come no sign of assent; nor from their bishops who, far from urging the extreme precept of the master they pretend to follow, to turn the other cheek when one is smitten, vote for acting on the principle–strike lest ye be struck. Nor will any approval be felt by legislators who, after praying to be forgiven their trespasses as they forgive the trespasses of others, forthwith decide to attack those who have not trespassed against them; and who, after a Queen’s Speech has invoked "the blessing of Almighty God" on their councils, immediately provide means for committing political burglary.

But though men who profess Christianity and practice paganism can feel no sympathy with such a view, there are some, classed as antagonists to the current creed, who may not think it absurd to believe that a rationalized version of its ethical principles will eventually be acted upon.

[I-258]

CHAPTER XV.

ABSOLUTE ETHICS AND RELATIVE ETHICS↩

§ 99. As applied to ethics, the word "absolute" will by many be supposed to imply principles of right conduct that exist out of relation to life as conditioned on the earth–out of relation to time and place, and independent of the universe as now visible to us–"eternal" principles, as they are called. Those, however, who recall the doctrine set forth in First Principles, will hesitate to put this interpretation on the word. Right, as we can think it, necessitates the thought of not right, or wrong, for its correlative; and hence, to ascribe rightness to the acts of the Power manifested through phenomena, is to assume the possibility that wrong acts may be committed by this Power. But how come there to exist, apart from this Power, conditions of such kind that subordination of its acts to them makes them right and insubordination wrong? How can Unconditioned Being be subject to conditions beyond itself?

If, for example, any one should assert that the Cause of things, conceived in respect of fundamental moral attributes as like ourselves, did right in producing a universe which, in the course of immeasurable time, has given origin to beings capable of pleasure, and would have done wrong in abstaining from the production of such a universe; then, the comment to be made is that, imposing the moral ideas generated in his finite consciousness, upon the Infinite Existence which transcends consciousness, he goes behind that Infinite Existence and prescribes for it principles of action.

As implied in foregoing chapters, right and wrong as conceived by us can exist only in relation to the actions of creatures capable of pleasures and pains; seeing that analysis carries us back to pleasures and pains as the elements out of which the conceptions are framed.

But if the word "absolute," as used above, does not refer to the Unconditioned Being–if the principles of action distinguished as absolute and relative concern the conduct of conditioned beings; in what way are the words to be understood? An explanation of their meanings will be best conveyed by a criticism on the current conceptions of right and wrong.

§ 100. Conversations about the affairs of life habitually imply the belief that every deed named may be placed under the one head or the other. In discussing a political question, both sides take it for granted that some line of action may be chosen which is right, while all other lines of action are wrong. So, too, is it with judgments on the doings of individuals: each of these is approved or disapproved on the assumption that it is definitely classable as good or bad. Even where qualifications are admitted, they are admitted with an implied idea that some such positive characterization is to be made.

Nor is it in popular thought and speech only that we see this. If not wholly and definitely yet partially and by implication, the belief is expressed by moralists. In his Methods of Ethics (1st ed., p. 6) Mr. Sidgwick says: "That there is in any given circumstances some one thing which ought to be done and that this can be known, is a fundamental assumption, made not by philosophers only but by all men who perform any processes of moral reasoning."[14] In this sentence there is specifically asserted only the last of the above propositions; namely, that, in every case, what "ought to be done" "can be known." But though that "which ought to be done" is not distinctly identified with "the right," it may be inferred, in the absence of any indication to the contrary, that Mr. Sidgwick regards the two as identical; and doubtless, in so conceiving the postulates of moral science, he is at one with most, if not all, who have made it a subject of study. At first sight, indeed, nothing seems more obvious than that if actions are to be judged at all, these postulates must be accepted. Nevertheless, they may both be called in question, and I think it may be shown that neither of them is tenable. Instead of admitting that there is in every case a right and a wrong, it may be contended that in multitudinous cases no right, properly so-called, can be alleged, but only a least wrong; and further, it may be contended that in many of these cases where there can be alleged only a least wrong, it is not possible to ascertain with any precision which is the least wrong.

A great part of the perplexities in ethical speculation arise from neglect of this distinction between right and least wrong–between the absolutely right and the relatively right. And many further perplexities are due to the assumption that it can, in some way be decided in every case which of two courses is morally obligatory.

§ 101. The law of absolute right can take no cognizance of pain, save the cognizance implied by negation. Pain is the correlative of some species of wrong–some kind of divergence from that course of action which perfectly fulfills all requirements. If, as was shown in an early chapter, the conception of good conduct always proves, when analyzed, to be the conception of a conduct which produces a surplus of pleasure somewhere; while, conversely the conduct conceived as bad proves always to be that which inflicts somewhere a surplus of either positive or negative pain; then the absolutely good, the absolutely right, in conduct, can be that only which produces pure pleasure–pleasure unalloyed with pain anywhere. By implication, conduct which has any concomitant of pain, or any painful consequence, is partially wrong; and the highest claim to be made for such conduct is, that it is the least wrong which, under the conditions, is possible–the relatively right.

The contents of preceding chapters imply throughout that, considered from the evolution point of view the acts of men during the transition which has been, is still, and long will be, in progress, must, in most cases, be of the kind here classed as least wrong. In proportion to the incongruity between the natures men inherit from the presocial state, and the requirements of social life, must be the amount of pain entailed by their actions, either on themselves or on others. In so far as pain is suffered, evil is inflicted; and conduct which inflicts any evil cannot be absolutely good.

To make clear the distinction here insisted upon between that perfect conduct which is the subject matter of absolute ethics, and that imperfect conduct which is the subject matter of relative ethics, some illustrations must be given.

§ 102. Among the best examples of absolutely right actions to be named, are those arising where the nature and the requirements have been molded to one another before social evolution began. Two will here suffice.

Consider the relation of a healthy mother to a healthy infant. Between the two there exists a mutual dependence which is a source of pleasure to both. In yielding its natural food to the child, the mother receives gratification; and to the child there comes the satisfaction of appetite–a satisfaction which accompanies furtherance of life, growth, and increasing enjoyment. Let the relation be suspended, and on both sides there is suffering. The mother experiences both bodily pain and mental pain; and the painful sensation borne by the child, brings as its results physical mischief and some damage to the emotional nature. Thus the act is one that is to both exclusively pleasurable, while abstention entails pain on both; and it is consequently of the kind we here call absolutely right. In the parental relations of the father we are furnished with a kindred example. If he is well constituted in body and mind, his boy, eager for play finds in him a sympathetic response; and their frolics, giving mutual pleasure, not only further the child’s physical welfare but strengthen that bond of good feeling between the two which makes subsequent guidance easier. And then if, repudiating the stupidities of early education as at present conceived and unhappily state-enacted, he has rational ideas of mental development, and sees that the secondhand knowledge gained through books should begin to supplement the firsthand knowledge gained by direct observation, only when a good stock of this has been acquired, he will, with active sympathy aid in that exploration of the surrounding world which his boy pursues with delight; giving and receiving gratification from moment to moment while furthering ultimate welfare. Here, again, are actions of a kind purely pleasurable alike in their immediate and remote effects–actions absolutely right.

The intercourse of adults yields, for the reason assigned, relatively few cases that fall completely within the same category./ In their transactions from hour to hour, more or less of deduction from pure gratification is caused on one or other side by imperfect fitness to the requirements. The pleasures men gain by laboring in their vocations and receiving in one form or other returns for their services, usually have the drawback that the labors are in a considerable degree displeasurable. Cases, however, do occur where the energies are so abundant that inaction is irksome; and where the daily work, not too great in duration, is of a kind appropriate to the nature; and where, as a consequence, pleasure rather than pain is a concomitant. When services yielded by such a one are paid for by another similarly adapted to his occupation, the entire transaction is of the kind we are here considering: exchange under agreement between two so constituted, becomes a means of pleasure to both, with no setoff of pain. Bearing in mind the form of nature which social discipline is producing, as shown in the contrast between savage and civilized, the implication is that ultimately men’s activities at large will assume this character. Remembering that in the course of organic evolution, the means to enjoyment themselves eventually become sources of enjoyment; and that there is no form of action which may not through the development of appropriate structures become pleasurable; the inference must be that industrial activities carried on through voluntary cooperation, will in time acquire the character of absolute rightness as here conceived. Already indeed, something like such a state has been reached among certain of those who minister to our aesthetic gratifications. The artist of genius–poet, painter, or musician–is one who obtains the means of living by acts that are directly pleasurable to him, while they yield, immediately or remotely pleasures to others. Once more, among absolutely right acts may be named certain of those which we class as benevolent. I say certain of them, because such benevolent acts as entail submission to pain, positive or negative, that others may receive pleasure, are, by the definition, excluded. But there are benevolent acts of a kind yielding pleasure solely. Some one who has slipped is saved from falling by a bystander; a hurt is prevented and satisfaction is felt by both. A pedestrian is choosing a dangerous route, or a fellow passenger is about to alight at the wrong station, and, warned against doing so, is saved from evil: each being, as a consequence, gratified. There is a misunderstanding between friends, and one who sees how it has arisen, explains: the result being agreeable to all. Services to those around in the small affairs of life, may be, and often are, of a kind which there is equal pleasure in giving and receiving. Indeed, as was urged in the last chapter, the actions of developed altruism must habitually have this character. And so, in countless ways suggested by these few men may add to one another’s happiness without anywhere producing unhappiness–ways which are therefore absolutely right.

In contrast with these consider the many actions which from hour to hour are gone through, now with an accompaniment of some pain to the actor and now bringing results that are partially painful to others, but which nevertheless are imperative. As implied by antithesis with cases above referred to, the wearisomeness of productive labor as ordinarily pursued, renders it in so far wrong; but then far greater suffering would result, both to the laborer and his family and therefore far greater wrong would be done, were this wearisomeness not borne. Though the pains which the care of many children entail on a mother, form a considerable setoff from the pleasures secured by them to her children and herself; yet the miseries, immediate and remote, which neglect would entail so far exceed them, that submission to such pains up to the limit of physical ability to bear them, becomes morally imperative as being the least wrong. A servant who fails to fulfill an agreement in respect of work, or who is perpetually breaking crockery or who pilfers, may have to suffer pain from being discharged; but since the evil is to be borne by all concerned if incapacity or misconduct is tolerated, not in one case only but habitually must be much greater, such infliction of pain is warranted as a means to preventing greater pain. Withdrawal of custom from a tradesman whose charges are too high, or whose commodities are inferior, or who gives short measure, or who is unpunctual, decreases his welfare, and perhaps injures his belongings; but as saving him from these evils would imply bearing the evils his conduct causes, and as such regard for his well-being would imply disregard of the well-being of some more worthy or more efficient tradesman to whom the custom would else go, and as, chiefly general adoption of the implied course, having the effect that the inferior would not suffer from their inferiority nor the superior gain by their superiority would produce universal misery. withdrawal is justified–the act is relatively right.

§ 103. I pass now to the second of the two propositions above enunciated. After recognizing the truth that a large part of human conduct is not absolutely right, but only relatively right, we have to recognize the further truth that in many cases where there is no absolutely right course, but only courses that are more or less wrong, it is not possible to say which is the least wrong. Recurrence to the instances just given will show this.

There is a point up to which it is relatively right for a parent to carry self-sacrifice for the benefit of offspring; and there is a point beyond which self-sacrifice cannot be pushed without bringing, not only on himself or herself but also on the family evils greater than those to be prevented by the self-sacrifice. Who shall say where this point is? Depending on the constitutions and needs of those concerned, it is in no two cases the same, and cannot be by anyone more than guessed. The transgressions or shortcomings of a servant vary from the trivial to the grave, and the evils which discharge may bring range through countless degrees from slight to serious. The penalty may be inflicted for a very small offense, and then there is wrong done; or after numerous grave offenses it may not be inflicted, and again there is wrong done. How shall be determined the degree of transgression beyond which to discharge is less wrong than not to discharge? In like manner with the shopkeeper’s misdemeanors. No one can sum up either the amount of positive and negative pain which tolerating them involves, or the amount of positive and negative pain involved by not tolerating them; and in medium cases no one can say where the one exceeds the other.

In men’s wider relations frequently occur circumstances under which a decision one or other way is imperative, and yet under which not even the most sensitive conscience helped by the clearest judgment, can decide which of the alternatives is relatively right. Two examples will suffice. Here is a merchant who loses by the failure of a man indebted to him. Unless he gets help he himself will fail; and if he fails he will bring disaster not only on his family but on all who have given him credit. Even if by borrowing he is enabled to meet immediate engagements, he is not safe; for the time is one of panic, and others of his debtors by going to the wall may put him in further difficulties. Shall he ask a friend for a loan? On the one hand, is it not wrong forthwith to bring on himself, his family and those who have business relations with him, the evils of his failure? On the other hand, is it not wrong to hypothecate the property of his friend, and lead him too, with his belongings and dependents, into similar risks? The loan would probably tide him over his difficulty; in which case would it not be unjust to his creditors did he refrain from asking it? Contrariwise, the loan would very possibly fail to stave off his bankruptcy; in which case is not his action in trying to obtain it, practically fraudulent? Though in extreme cases it may be easy to say which course is the least wrong, how is it possible in all those medium cases where even by the keenest man of business the contingencies cannot be calculated? Take, again, the difficulties that not infrequently arise from antagonism between family duties and social duties. Here is a tenant farmer whose political principles prompt him to vote in opposition to his landlord. If, being a Liberal, he votes for a Conservative, not only does he by his act say that he thinks what he does not think, but he may perhaps assist what he regards as bad legislation: his vote may by chance turn the election, and on a Parliamentary division a single member may decide the fate of a measure. Even neglecting, as too improbable, such serious consequences, there is the manifest truth that if all who hold like views with himself, are similarly deterred from electoral expression of them, there must result a different balance of power and a different national policy: making it clear that only by adherence of all to their political principles, can the policy he thinks right be maintained. But now, on the other hand, how can he absolve himself from responsibility for the evils which those depending on him may suffer if he fulfills what appears to be a peremptory public duty? Is not his duty to his children even more peremptory? Does not the family precede the state; and does not the welfare of the state depend on the welfare of the family? May he, then, take a course which, if the threats uttered are carried out, will eject him from his farm; and so cause inability perhaps temporary perhaps prolonged, to feed his children. The contingent evils are infinitely varied in their ratios. In one case the imperativeness of the public duty is great and the evil that may come on dependents small; in another case the political issue is of trivial moment and the possible injury which the family may suffer is great; and between these extremes there are all gradations. Further, the degrees of probability of each result, public and private, ranging from the nearly certain to the almost impossible. Admitting, then, that it is wrong to act in a way likely to injure the state; and admitting that it is wrong to act in a way likely to injure the family; we have to recognize the fact that in countless cases no one can decide by which of the alternative courses the least wrong is likely to be done.

These instances will sufficiently show that in conduct at large, including men’s dealings with themselves, with their families, with their friends, with their debtors and creditors, and with the public, it usually happens that whatever course is taken entails some pain somewhere; forming a deduction from the pleasure achieved, and making the course in so far not absolutely right. Further, they will show that throughout a considerable part of conduct, no guiding principle, no method of estimation, enables us to say whether a proposed course is even relatively right; as causing, proximately and remotely specially and generally the greatest surplus of good over evil.

§ 104. And now we are prepared for dealing in a systematic way with the distinction between absolute ethics and relative ethics.

Scientific truths, of whatever order, are reached by eliminating perturbing or conflicting factors, and recognizing only fundamental factors. When, by dealing with fundamental factors in the abstract, not as presented in actual phenomena but as presented in ideal separation, general laws have been ascertained, it becomes possible to draw inferences in concrete cases by taking into account incidental factors. But it is only by first ignoring these and recognizing the essential elements alone, that we can discover the essential truths sought. Take, in illustration, the progress of mechanics from its empirical form to its rational form.

All have occasional experience of the fact that a person pushed on one side beyond a certain degree, loses his balance and falls. It is observed that a stone flung or an arrow shot, does not proceed in a straight line, but comes to the earth after pursuing a course which deviates more and more from its original course. When trying to break a stick across the knee, it is found that success is easier if the stick is seized at considerable distances from the knee on each side than if seized close to the knee. Daily use of a spear draws attention to the truth that by thrusting its point under a stone and depressing the shaft, the stone may be raised the more readily the further away the hand is towards the end. Here, then, are sundry experiences, eventually grouped into empirical generalizations, which serve to guide conduct in certain simple cases. How does mechanical science evolve from these experiences? To reach a formula expressing the powers of the lever, it supposes a lever which does not, like the stick, admit of being bent, but is absolutely rigid; and it supposes a fulcrum not having a broad surface, like that of one ordinarily used, but a fulcrum without breadth; and it supposes that the weight to be raised bears on a definite point, instead of bearing over a considerable portion of the lever. Similarly with the leaning body, which, passing a certain inclination, overbalances. Before the truth respecting the relations of center of gravity and base can be formulated, it must be assumed that the surface on which the body stands is unyielding; that the edge of the body itself is unyielding; and that its mass, while made to lean more and more, does not change its form–conditions not fulfilled in the cases commonly observed. And so, too, is it with the projectile: determination of its course by deduction from mechanical laws, primarily ignores all deviations caused by its shape and by the resistance of the air. The science of rational mechanics is a science which consists of such ideal truths, and can come into existence only by thus dealing with ideal cases. It remains impossible so long as attention is restricted to concrete cases presenting all the complications of friction, plasticity, and so forth. But now after disentangling certain fundamental mechanical truths, it becomes possible by their help to guide actions better; and it becomes possible to guide them still better when, as presently happens, the complicating elements from which they have been disentangled are themselves taken into account. At an advanced stage, the modifying effects of friction are allowed for, and the inferences are qualified to the requisite extent. The theory of the pulley is corrected in its application to actual cases by recognizing the rigidity of cordage; the effects of which are formulated. The stabilities of masses, determinable in the abstract by reference to the centers of gravity of the masses in relation to the bases, come to be determined in the concrete by including also their characters in respect of cohesion. The courses of projectiles having been theoretically settled as though they moved through a vacuum, are afterwards settled in more exact correspondence with fact by taking into account atmospheric resistance. And thus we see illustrated the relation between certain absolute truths of mechanical science, and certain relative truths which involve them. We are shown that no scientific establishment of relative truths is possible, until the absolute truths have been formulated independently We see that mechanical science fitted for dealing with the real, can arise only after ideal mechanical science has arisen.

All this holds of moral science. As by early and rude experiences there were inductively reached, vague but partially true notions respecting the overbalancing of bodies, the motions of missiles, the actions of levers; so by early and rude experiences there were inductively reached, vague but partially true notions respecting the effects of men’s behavior on themselves, on one another, and on society: to a certain extent serving in the last case, as in the first, for the guidance of conduct. Moreover, as this rudimentary mechanical knowledge, though still remaining empirical, becomes during early stages of civilization at once more definite and more extensive; so during early stages of civilization these ethical ideas, still retaining their empirical character, increase in precision and multiplicity. But just as we have seen that mechanical knowledge of the empirical sort can evolve into mechanical science, only by first omitting all qualifying circumstances, and generalizing in absolute ways the fundamental laws of forces; so here we have to see that empirical ethics can evolve into rational ethics only by first neglecting all complicating incidents, and formulating the laws of right action apart from the obscuring effects of special conditions. And the final implication is that just as the system of mechanical truths, conceived in ideal separation as absolute, becomes applicable to real mechanical problems in such way that making allowance for all incidental circumstances there can be reached conclusions far nearer to the truth than could otherwise be reached; so, a system of ideal ethical truths, expressing the absolutely right, will be applicable to the questions of our transitional state in such ways that, allowing for the friction of an incomplete life and imperfection of existing natures, we may ascertain with approximate correctness what is the relatively right.

§ 105. In a chapter entitled "Definition of Morality" in Social Statics, I contended that the moral law, properly so-called, is the law of the perfect man–is the formula of ideal conduct–is the statement in all cases of that which should be, and cannot recognize in its propositions any elements implying existence of that which should not be. Instancing questions concerning the right course to be taken in cases where wrong has already been done, I alleged that the answers to such questions cannot be given "on purely ethical principles." I argued that–

No conclusions can lay claim to absolute truth, but such as depend upon truths that are themselves absolute. Before there can be exactness in an inference, there must be exactness in the antecedent propositions. A geometrician requires that the straight lines with which he deals shall be veritably straight: and that his circles, and ellipses, and parabolas shall agree with precise definition–shall perfectly and invariably answer to specified equations. If you put to him a question in which these conditions are not complied with, he tells you that it cannot be answered. So likewise is it with the philosophical moralist. He treats solely of the straight man. He determines the properties of the straight man; describes how the straight man comports himself; shows in what relationship he stands to other straight men; shows how a community of straight men is constituted. Any deviation fromstrict rectitude he is obliged wholly to ignore. It cannot be admitted into his premises without vitiating all his conclusions. A problem in which a crooked man forms one of the elements is insoluble by him.

Referring to this view, specifically in the first edition of the Methods of Ethics but more generally in the second edition, Mr. Sidgwick says:

Those who take this view adduce the analogy of Geometry to show that Ethics ought to deal with ideally perfect human relations, just as Geometry treats of ideally perfect lines and circles. But the most irregular line has definite spatial relations with which Geometry does not refuse to deal: though of course they are more complex than those of a straight line. So in Astronomy, it would be more convenient for purposes of study if the stars moved in circles, as was once believed: but the fact that they move not in circles but in ellipses, and even in imperfect and perturbed ellipses, does not take them out of the sphere of scientific investigation: by patience and industry we have learnt how to reduce to principles and calculate even these more complicated motions. It is, no doubt, a convenient artifice for purposes of instruction to assume that the planets move in perfect ellipses (or even–at an earlier stage of study–in circles): we thus allow the individual’s knowledge to pass through the same gradations in accuracy as that of the race has done. But what we want, as astronomers, to know is the actual motion of the stars and its causes: and similarly as moralists we naturally inquire what ought to be done in the actual world in which we live. [P. 19, 2nd ed.]

Beginning with the first of these two statements, which concerns geometry I must confess myself surprised to find my propositions called in question; and after full consideration I remain at a loss to understand Mr. Sidgwick’s mode of viewing the matter. When, in a sentence preceding those quoted above, I remarked on the impossibility of solving "mathematically a series of problems respecting crooked lines and broken-backed curves," it never occurred to me that I should be met by the direct assertion that "geometry does not refuse to deal" with "the most irregular line." Mr. Sidgwick states that an irregular line, say such as a child makes in scribbling, has "definite spatial relations." What meaning does he here give to the word "definite." If he means that its relations to space at large are definite in the sense that by an infinite intelligence they would be definable; the reply is that to an infinite intelligence all spatial relations would be definable: there could be no indefinite spatial relations–the word "definite" thus ceasing to mark any distinction. If, on the other hand, when saying that an irregular line has "definite spatial relations," he means relations knowable definitely by human intelligence; there still comes the question, how is the word "definite" to be understood? Surely anything distinguished as definite admits of being defined; but how can we define an irregular line? And if we cannot define the irregular line itself, how can we know its "spatial relations" definitely? And how in the absence of definition, can geometry deal with it? If Mr. Sidgwick means that it can be dealt with by the "method of limits," then the reply is that in such case, not the line itself is dealt with geometrically but certain definite lines artificially put in quasi-definite relations to it: the indefinite becomes cognizable only through the medium of the hypothetically definite.

Turning to the second illustration, the rejoinder to be made is that in so far as it concerns the relations between the ideal and the real, the analogy drawn does not shake but strengthens my argument. For whether considered under its geometrical or under its dynamical aspect, and whether considered in the necessary order of its development or in the order historically displayed, astronomy shows us throughout, that truths respecting simple, theoretically exact relations, must be ascertained before truths respecting the complex and practically inexact relations that actually exist, can be ascertained. As applied to the interpretation of planetary movements, we see that the theory of cycles and epicycles was based on preexisting knowledge of the circle: the properties of an ideal curve having been learned, a power was acquired of giving some expression to the celestial motions. We see that the Copernican interpretation expressed the facts in terms of circular movements otherwise distributed and combined. We see that Kepler’s advance from the conception of circular movements to the conception of elliptic movements, was made possible by comparing the facts as they are with the facts as they would be were the movements circular. We see that the subsequently learned deviations from elliptic movements, were learned only through the presupposition that the movements are elliptical. And we see, lastly, that even now predictions concerning the exact positions of planets, after taking account of perturbations, imply constant references to ellipses that are regarded as their normal or average orbits for the time being. Thus, ascertainment of the actual truths has been made possible only by preascertainment of certain ideal truths. To be convinced that by no other course could the actual truths have been ascertained, it needs only to suppose any one saying that it did not concern him, as an astronomer, to know anything about the properties of circles and ellipses, but that he had to deal with the solar system as it exists, to which end it was his business to observe and tabulate positions and directions and to be guided by the facts as he found them. So, too, is it if we look at the development of dynamical astronomy The first proposition in Newton’s Principia deals with the movement of a single body round a single center of force; and the phenomena of central motion are first formulated in a case which is not simply ideal, but in which there is no specification of the force concerned: detachment from the real is the greatest possible. Again, postulating a principle of action conforming to an ideal law, the theory of gravitation deals with the several problems of the solar system in fictitious detachment from the rest; and it makes certain fictitious assumptions, such as that the mass of each body concerned is concentrated in its center of gravity. Only later, after establishing the leading truths by this artifice of disentangling the major factors from the minor factors, is the theory applied to the actual problems in their ascending degrees of complexity; taking in more and more of the minor factors. And if we ask whether the dynamics of the solar system could have been established in any other way we see that here, too, simple truths holding under ideal conditions, have to be ascertained before real truths existing under complex conditions can be ascertained.

The alleged necessary precedence of absolute ethics over relative ethics is thus, I think, further elucidated. One who has followed the general argument thus far, will not deny that an ideal social being may be conceived as so constituted that his spontaneous activities are congruous with the conditions imposed by the social environment formed by other such beings. In many places, and in various ways, I have argued that conformably with the laws of evolution in general, and conformably with the laws of organization in particular, there has been, and is, in progress, an adaptation of humanity to the social state, changing it in the direction of such as ideal congruity. And the corollary before drawn and here repeated, is that the ultimate man is one in whom this process has gone so far as to produce a correspondence between all the promptings of his nature and all the requirements of his life as carried on in society. If so, it is a necessary implication that there exists an ideal code of conduct formulating the behavior of the completely adapted man in the completely evolved society. Such a code is that here called absolute ethics as distinguished from relative ethics–a code the injunctions of which are alone to be considered as absolutely right in contrast with those that are relatively right or least wrong; and which, as a system of ideal conduct, is to serve as a standard for our guidance in solving, as well as we can, the problems of real conduct.

§ 105a. A clear conception of this matter is so important that I must be excused for bringing in aid of it a further illustration, more obviously appropriate as being furnished by organic science instead of by inorganic science. The relation between morality proper and morality as commonly conceived, is analogous to the relation between physiology and pathology; and the course usually pursued by moralists is much like the course of one who studies pathology without previous study of physiology.

Physiology describes the various functions which, as combined, constitute and maintain life; and in treating of them it assumes that they are severally performed in right ways, in due amounts, and in proper order: it recognizes only healthy functions. If it explains digestion, it supposes that the heart is supplying blood and that the visceral nervous system is stimulating the organs immediately concerned. If it gives a theory of the circulation, it assumes that blood has been produced by the combined actions of the structures devoted to its production, and that it is properly aerated. If the relations between respiration and the vital processes at large are interpreted, it is on the presupposition that the heart goes on sending blood, not only to the lungs and to certain nervous centers, but to the diaphragm and intercostal muscles. Physiology ignores failures in the actions of these several organs. It takes no account of imperfections, it neglects derangements, it does not recognize pain, it knows nothing of vital wrong. It simply formulates that which goes on as a result of complete adaptation of all parts to all needs. That is to say in relation to the inner actions constituting bodily life, physiological theory has a position like that which ethical theory under its absolute form as above conceived, has to the outer actions constituting conduct. The moment cognizance is taken of excess of function, or arrest of function, or defect of function, with the resulting evil, physiology passes into pathology. We begin now to take account of wrong actions in the inner life analogous to the wrong actions in the outer life taken account of by ordinary theories of morals.

The antithesis thus drawn, however, is but preliminary. After observing the fact that there is a science of vital actions normally carried on, which ignores abnormal actions; we have more especially to observe that the science of abnormal actions can reach such definiteness as is possible to it, only on condition that the science of normal actions has previously become definite; or rather let us say that pathological science depends for its advances on previous advances made by physiological science. The very conception of disordered action implies a preconception of well-ordered action. Before it can be decided that the heart is beating faster or slower than it should, its healthy rate of beating must be learned; before the pulse can be recognized as too weak or too strong, its proper strength must be known; and so throughout. Even the rudest and most empirical ideas of diseases, presuppose ideas of the healthy states from which they are deviations; and obviously the diagnosis of diseases can become scientific, only as fast as there arises scientific knowledge of organic actions that are undiseased.

Similarly, then, is it with the relation between absolute morality or the law of perfect right in human conduct, and relative morality which, recognizing wrong in human conduct, has to decide in what way the wrong deviates from the right, and how the right is to be most nearly approached. When, formulating normal conduct in an ideal society we have reached a science of absolute ethics, we have simultaneously reached a science which, when used to interpret the phenomena of real societies in their transitional states, full of the miseries due to nonadaptation (which we may call pathological states) enables us to form approximately true conclusions respecting the natures of the abnormalities, and the courses which tend most in the direction of the normal.

§ 106. And now let it be observed that the conception of ethics thus set forth, strange as many will think it, is one which really lies latent in the beliefs of moralists at large. Though not definitely acknowledged it is vaguely implied in many of their propositions.

From early times downwards we find in ethical speculations, references to the ideal man, his acts, his feelings, his judgments. When Socrates said that well-doing is the thing to be chiefly studied, and that he achieved it who devoted to the study searching and labor, he made the actions of the superior man his standard, since he gave no other. Plato, in Minos, asserts that "the authoritative rescripts or laws are those laid down by the artists or men of knowledge in that department"; and the doctrine contained in Laches is that only "the One Wise Man" can estimate the good or evil, or the comparative value of two alternative ends in each individual case": an ideal man is postulated. Aristotle says: "For it is the man whose condition, whether moral or bodily is in each case perfect who in each case judges rightly and at once perceives the truth. . . . And herein it is that the perfect man may be said to differ most widely from all others, in that in all such cases he at once perceives the truth, being, as it were, the rule and measure of its application." While observing that the Stoics, like other ancient philosophers, failing to distinguish properly between intellect and feeling, identified wisdom with goodness, we see that they, too, made the perfect man the measure of rectitude. And Epicurus, also, regards the wise man as the only one who can achieve a happy life–"he alone knows how to do the right thing in the right way."

If in modern times, influenced by theological dogmas concerning human sinfulness, and by a theory of divinely prescribed conduct, moralists have not so frequently referred to an ideal, yet various references are traceable. We may see one in the dictum of Kant–"Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." For this implies the thought of a society in which the maxim is acted upon by all and universal benefit recognized as the effect: there is a conception of ideal conduct under ideal conditions. And though Mr. Sidgwick, in the quotation above made from him, implies that ethics is concerned with man as he is, rather than with man as he should be; yet, in elsewhere speaking of ethics as dealing with conduct as it should be, rather than with conduct as it is, he postulates ideal conduct and indirectly the ideal man. On his first page, speaking of ethics along with jurisprudence and politics, he says that they are distinguished "by the characteristic that they attempt to determine not the actual but the ideal–what ought to exist, not what does exist."

It requires only that these various conceptions of an ideal conduct and of an ideal humanity, should be made consistent and definite, to bring them into agreement with the conception above set forth. At present such conceptions are habitually vague. The ideal man having been conceived in terms of the current morality, is thereupon erected into a moral standard by which the goodness of actions may be judged; and the reasoning becomes circular. To make the ideal man serve as a standard, he has to be defined in terms of the conditions which his nature fulfills–in terms of those objective requirements which must be met before conduct can be right; and the common defect of these conceptions of the ideal man, is that they suppose him out of relation to such conditions.

All the above references to him, direct or indirect, imply that the ideal man is supposed to live and act under existing social conditions. The tacit inquiry is, not what his actions would be under circumstances altogether changed, but what they would be under present circumstances. And this inquiry is futile for two reasons. The coexistence of a perfect man and an imperfect society is impossible; and could the two coexist, the resulting conduct would not furnish the ethical standard sought. In the first place, given the laws of life as they are, and a man of ideal nature cannot be produced in a society consisting of men having natures remote from the ideal. As well might we expect a child of English type to be born among Negroes, as expect that among the organically immoral, one who is organically moral will arise. Unless it be denied that character results from inherited structure, it must be admitted that since, in any society, each individual descends from a stock which, traced back a few generations, ramifies everywhere through the society, and participates in its average nature, there must, nothwithstanding marked individual diversities, be preserved such community as prevents anyone from reaching an ideal form while the rest remain far below it. In the second place, ideal conduct such as ethical theory is concerned with, is not possible for the ideal man in the midst of men otherwise constituted. An absolutely just or perfectly sympathetic person, could not live and act according to his nature in a tribe of cannibals. Among people who are treacherous and utterly without scruple, entire truthfulness and openness must bring ruin. If all around recognize only the law of the strongest, one whose nature will not allow him to inflict pain on others, must go to the wall. There requires a certain congruity between the conduct of each member of a society and other's conduct. A mode of action entirely alien to the prevailing modes of action, cannot be successfully persisted in-must eventuate in death itself, or posterity, or both.

Hence it is manifest that we must consider the ideal man as existing in the ideal social state. On the evolution-hypothesis, the two presuppose one another; and only when they coexist, can there exist that ideal conduct which absolute ethics has to formulate, and which relative ethics has to take as the standard by which to estimate divergencies from right, or degrees of wrong.

[I-281]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE SCOPE OF ETHICS.↩

§ 107. At the outset it was shown that as the conduct with which ethics deals, is a part of conduct at large, conduct at large must be understood before this part can be understood. After taking a general view of conduct, not human only but subhuman, and not only as existing but as evolving, we saw that ethics has for its subject matter the most highly evolved conduct as displayed by the most highly evolved being, man–is a specification of those traits which his conduct assumes on reaching its limit of evolution. Conceived thus as comprehending the laws of right living at large, ethics has a wider field than is commonly assigned to it. Beyond the conduct commonly approved or reprobated as right or wrong, it includes all conduct which furthers or hinders, in either direct or indirect ways, the welfare of self or others.

As foregoing chapters in various places imply, the entire field of ethics includes the two great divisions, personal and social. There is a class of actions directed to personal ends, which are to be judged in their relations to personal well-being, considered apart from the well-being of others: though they secondarily affect fellow men these primarily affect the agent himself, and must be classed as intrinsically right or wrong according to their beneficial or detrimental effects on him. There are actions of another class which affect fellow men immediately and remotely and which, though their results to self are not to be ignored, must be judged as good or bad mainly by their results to others. Actions of this last class fall into two groups. Those of the one group achieve ends in ways that do or do not unduly interfere with the pursuit of ends by others–actions which, because of this difference, we call respectively unjust or just. Those forming the other group are of a kind which influence the states of others without directly interfering with the relations between their labors and the results, in one way or the other–actions which we speak of as beneficent or maleficent. And the conduct which we regard as beneficent is itself subdivisible according as it shows us a self-repression to avoid giving pain, or an expenditure of effort to give pleasure–negative beneficence and positive beneficence.

Each of these divisions and subdivisions has to be considered first as a part of absolute ethics and then as a part of relative ethics. Having seen what its injunctions must be for the ideal man under the implied ideal conditions, we shall be prepared to see how such injunctions are to be most nearly fulfilled by actual men under existing conditions.

§ 108. For reasons already pointed out, a code of perfect personal conduct can never be made definite. Many forms of life, diverging from one another in considerable degrees, may be so carried on in society as entirely to fulfill the conditions to harmonious cooperation. And if various types of men adapted to various types of activities, may thus lead lives that are severally complete after their kinds, no specific statement of the activities universally required for personal well-being is possible.

But though the particular requirements to be fulfilled for perfect individual well-being, must vary along with variations in the material conditions of each society, certain general requirements have to be fulfilled by the individuals of all societies. An average balance between waste and nutrition has universally to be preserved. Normal vitality implies a relation between activity and rest falling within moderate limits of variation. Continuance of the society depends on satisfaction of those primarily personal needs which result in marriage and parenthood. Perfection of individual life hence implies certain modes of action which are approximately alike in all cases, and which therefore become part of the subject matter of ethics.

That it is possible to reduce even this restricted part to scientific definiteness, can scarcely be said. But ethical requirements may here be to such extent affiliated upon physical necessities, as to give them a partially scientific authority. It is clear that between the expenditure of bodily substance in vital activities, and the taking in of materials from which this substance may be renewed, there is a direct relation. It is clear, too, that there is a direct relation between the wasting of tissue by effort, and the need for those cessations of effort during which repair may overtake waste. Nor is it less clear that between the rate of mortality and the rate of multiplication in any society, there is a relation such that the last must reach a certain level before it can balance the first, and prevent disappearance of the society. And it may be inferred that pursuits of other leading ends are, in like manner, determined by certain natural necessities, and from these derive their ethical sanctions. That it will ever be practicable to lay down precise rules for private conduct in conformity with such requirements, may be doubted. But the function of absolute ethics in relation to private conduct will have been discharged, when it has produced the warrant for its requirements as generally expressed; when it has shown the imperativeness of obedience to them; and when it has thus taught the need for deliberately considering whether the conduct fulfills them as well as may be.

Under the ethics of personal conduct considered in relation to existing conditions, have to come all questions concerning the degree in which immediate personal welfare has to be postponed, either to ultimate personal welfare or to the welfare of others. As now carried on, life hourly sets the claims of present self against the claims of future self, and hourly brings individual interests face to face with the interests of other individuals, taken singly or as associated. In many of such cases the decisions can be nothing more than compromises; and ethical science, here necessarily empirical, can do no more than aid in making compromises that are the least objectionable. To arrive at the best compromise in any case, implies correct conceptions of the alternative results of this or that course. And, consequently, in so far as the absolute ethics of individual conduct can be made definite, it must help us to decide between conflicting personal requirements, and also between the needs for asserting self and the needs for subordinating self.

§ 109. From that division of ethics which deals with the right regulation of private conduct, considered apart from the effects directly produced on others, we pass now to that division of ethics which, considering exclusively the effects of conduct on others, treats of the right regulation of it with a view to such effects.

The first set of regulations coming under this head are those concerning what we distinguish as justice. Individual life is possible only on condition that each organ is paid for its action by an equivalent of blood, while the organism as a whole obtains from the environment assimilable matters that compensate for its efforts; and the mutual dependence of parts in the social organism, necessitates that, alike for its total life and the lives of its units, there similarly shall be maintained a due proportion between returns and labors: the natural relation between work and welfare shall be preserved intact. Justice, which formulates the range of conduct and limitations to conduct hence arising, is at once the most important division of ethics and the division which admits of the greatest definiteness. That principle of equivalence which meets us when we seek its roots in the laws of individual life, involves the idea of measure; and on passing to social life, the same principle introduces us to the conception of equity or equalness, in the relations of citizens to one another: the elements of the questions arising are quantitative, and hence the solutions assume a more scientific form. Though, having to recognize differences among individuals due to age, sex, or other cause, we cannot regard the members of a society as absolutely equal, and therefore cannot deal with problems growing out of their relations with that precision which absolute equality might make possible; yet, considering them as approximately equal in virtue of their common human nature, and dealing with questions of equity on this supposition, we may reach conclusions of a sufficiently definite kind.

This division of ethics considered under its absolute form, has to define the equitable relations among perfect individuals who limit one another’s spheres of action by coexisting, and who achieve their ends by cooperation. It has to do much more than this. Beyond justice between man and man, justice between each man and the aggregate of men has to be dealt with by it. The relations between the individual and the state, considered as representing all individuals, have to be deduced–an important and a relatively difficult matter. What is the ethical warrant for governmental authority? To what ends may it be legitimately exercised? How far may it rightly be carried? Up to what point is the citizen bound to recognize the collective decisions of other citizens, and beyond what point may he properly refuse to obey them.

These relations, private and public, considered as maintained under ideal conditions, having been formulated, there come to be dealt with the analogous relations under real conditions–absolute justice being the standard, relative justice has to be determined by considering how near an approach may under present circumstances, be made to it. As already implied in various places, it is impossible during stages of transition which necessitate ever-changing compromises, to fulfill the dictates of absolute equity; and nothing beyond empirical judgments can be formed of the extent to which they may be, at any given time, fulfilled. While war continues and injustice is done between societies, there cannot be anything like complete justice within each society. Militant organization no less than militant action, is irreconcilable with pure equity; and the inequity implied by it inevitably ramifies throughout all social relations. But there is at every stage in social evolution, a certain range of variation within which it is possible to approach nearer to, or diverge further from, the requirements of absolute equity. Hence these requirements have ever to be kept in view that relative equity may be ascertained.

§ 110. Of the two subdivisions into which beneficence falls, the negative and the positive, neither can be specialized. Under ideal conditions the first of them has but a nominal existence; and the second of them passes largely into a transfigured form admitting of but general definition.

In the conduct of the ideal man among ideal men, that self-regulation which has for its motive to avoid giving pain, practically disappears. No one having feelings which prompt acts that disagreeably affect others, there can exist no code of restraints referring to this division of conduct.

But though negative beneficence is only a nominal part of absolute ethics, it is an actual and considerable part of relative ethics. For while men’s natures remain imperfectly adapted to social life, there must continue in them impulses which, causing in some cases the actions we name unjust, cause in other cases the actions we name unkind–unkind now in deed and now in word; and in respect of these modes of behavior which, though not aggressive, give pain, there arise numerous and complicated problems. Pain is sometimes given to others simply by maintaining an equitable claim; pain is at other times given by refusing a request; and again at other times by maintaining an opinion. In these and numerous cases suggested by them, there have to be answered the questions whether, to avoid inflicting pain, personal feelings should be sacrificed, and how far sacrificed. Again, in cases of another class, pain is given not by a passive course but by an active course. How far shall a person who has misbehaved be grieved by showing aversion to him? Shall one whose action is to be reprobated, have the reprobation expressed to him or shall nothing be said? Is it right to annoy by condemning a prejudice which another displays? These and kindred queries have to be answered after taking into account the immediate pain given, the possible benefit caused by giving it, and the possible evil caused by not giving it. In solving problems of this class, the only help absolute ethics gives, is by enforcing the consideration that inflicting more pain than is necessitated by proper self-regard, or by desire for another’s benefit, or by the maintenance of a general principle, is unwarranted.

Of positive beneficence under its absolute form nothing more specific can be said than that it must become coextensive with whatever sphere remains for it; aiding to complete the life of each as a recipient of services and to exalt the life of each as a renderer of services. As with a developed humanity the desire for it by everyone will so increase, and the sphere for exercise of it so decrease, as to involve an altruistic competition, analogous to the existing egoistic competition, it may be that absolute ethics will eventually include what we before called a higher equity prescribing the mutual limitations of altruistic activities.

Under its relative form, positive beneficence presents numerous problems, alike important and difficult, admitting only of empirical solutions. How far is self-sacrifice for another’s benefit to be carried in each case?–a question which must be answered differently according to the character of the other, the needs of the other, and the various claims of self and belongings which have to be met. To what extent under given circumstances shall private welfare be subordinated to public welfare?–a question to be answered after considering the importance of the end and the seriousness of the sacrifice. What benefit and what detriment will result from gratuitous aid yielded to another?–a question in each case implying an estimate of probabilities. Is there any unfair treatment of sundry others, involved by more than fair treatment of this one other? Up to what limit may help be given to the existing generation of the inferior, without entailing mischief on future generations of the superior? Evidently to these and many kindred questions included in this division of relative ethics, approximately true answers only can be given.

But though here absolute ethics, by the standard it supplies, does not greatly aid relative ethics, yet, as in other cases, it aids somewhat by keeping before consciousness an ideal conciliation of the various claims involved; and by suggesting the search for such compromise among them, as shall not disregard any but shall satisfy all to the greatest extent practicable.

[I-289]

APPENDIX TO PART I.

THE CONCILIATION.↩

[While searching for some memoranda, I have discovered the rough draft of a chapter belonging to this work. Whether it was that, when writing out at length the part of the argument it belongs to, I was led to put aside this chapter as having a form unfitting it for incorporation, or whether it was that I had mislaid it, I cannot now remember. The last supposition is, I think, the more probable; since this rough draft contains matter which, had it been before me, I should have embodied.

Partly because certain of the arguments it contains yield further support to the general conclusion drawn, and partly because such of its arguments as answer to those included in the text are set forth in another way, I have decided here to append this omitted chapter. "The Data of Ethics," as finally elaborated, was based on a manuscript dictated to a shorthand amanuensis, and written out by him in a series of copybooks, one to each chapter: an arrangement which, I suspect, accidentally led to the omission indicated. As, on reading this rough draft, I find that it is fairly coherent and expressed with adequate clearness, I have thought it well to print it just as it stands. In a few places where the shorthand writer failed to interpret his notes, I have supplied, in square brackets, what I suppose were the missing words; and in some other cases I have corrected errors that were obviously due to misunderstanding or to transcription.]

In the last two chapters have been enunciated the claims of egoism and altruism respectively. Each has been insisted upon so strongly that, taken alone, it would seem to go far toward the repudiation of the other. The usual tendency in ethical speculation is not to recognize in full both factors, as essential to human happiness, but to insist almost exclusively upon the one or the other. Or rather I should say that, in almost all cases, ignoring the egoistic factor, the insistence has been upon the altruistic one.

At first sight it seems that there is some inconsistency in the position here taken. To enunciate the legitimacy of egoism in the way done, possibly caused the reader to think that the higher morality was being denied by the assertion of a system of selfishness. Contrariwise, reading by itself the subsequent chapter, he might, if one who had before appreciated the claims of egoism, be led to suppose that egoism was being ignored, and the tacit assertion made that egoistic gratifications were to be achieved through fulfillment of altruistic obligations. And finding that each of the chapters to a considerable extent seems to conflict with the other, he will incline to allege an incongruity of doctrine. If he does not go farther, he will at any rate be inclined to say that the doctrine implies a necessary incompleteness–implies that there can be no such thing as a life in which all requirements are fully satisfied. That process of evolution set forth in preceding chapters, will appear to be negatived by such incompatibility between the conflicting claims of self and others; so that it cannot end in an entire equilibrium between human nature and its conditions. Taking by itself the chapter on egoism versus altruism, it would seem that for the imperative welfare of the individual, and of those belonging to him, and of those afterwards descending from him, there must be such subordination of the claims of others, as from time to time deducts from their welfare or diminishes the total happiness. On the other hand, reading by itself the chapter on altruism versus egoism, it seems to be an inevitable corollary that self-abnegation–that is, the abandonment of a gratification or the submission to a pain due to the craving unsatisfied, is more or less demanded of all, that there may be maintained that social state which, by its prosperity, conduces to the egoistic welfare of each, and that there may be also achieved the character and the capacity which are the means to their egoistic gratifications; and that thus the pursuit of altruistic ends must of necessity entail egoistic deprivations. Or, to put the matter briefly, it seems to be clear that there must be everywhere a certain large percentage of sacrifice–sacrifice of others to self or sacrifice of self to others; and that, in so far as there is sacrifice, there is a submission to pain, positive or negative, and therefore a necessary failure in the working out of [a] nature capable of complete life–that is, complete happiness.

Here there remains to be shown the invalidity of this conclusion. On tracing upwards the process of evolution to a higher stage, we shall see that this conflict between egoism and altruism, which now constitutes the crux in all ethical speculation, is transitional, and is in process of gradual disappearance.

Already in seeking clues for the interpretation of the future, we have gone back to the past; and that we may understand the past have carried our inquiry back to the beginning. In seeking a right interpretation of egoism we set out with life in its earlier stages, and observed the truth that a predominant egoism, through which each achieved the benefits of its own superiority, was the condition not only to the maintenance of life from the beginning, but a condition to the maintenance of each species, and therefore to the evolution of higher species. Similarly, when seeking for an ultimate basis for the claims of altruism, we observed, on going back to its root, that from the beginning altruism has been coessential; in so far that the continued egoism of generation after generation has been made possible only through the altruism which sacrifices, physically and otherwise, a portion of the life of each generation for the next. Here we may with advantage pursue, in seeking the ultimate conciliation of egoism and altruism, the same course. If we similarly go back to the beginning, we shall get a clue to the method by which the conciliation, already in certain directions achieved, will in the future be carried out to the full.

For how is there effected that conciliation of the egoism and altruism, coessential as we have seen, by which each race, and life on the globe as a whole, have been maintained and evolved? How is there achieved that conciliation between the egoism of the parent, which is essential to production and fostering of offspring, and the altruism by which that fostering is effected? The answer is perfectly simple. There has from the beginning been arising, and has arisen more and more to a higher and higher stage, such constitution in each creature, as entailed egoistic gratification in performing the altruistic action.

If we glance afresh at the cases before indicated, in which there is a self-sacrifice of parent for the benefit of offspring, we observe that throughout, this self-sacrifice is made in gratification of a powerful instinct, and is a source of pleasure, and the negation of it an extreme pain. Not to dwell on cases, even low down among invertebrate animals, where, as even with molluscs, great labor is taken in safe laying of ova, or, as in the case of the spider, the ova are carried about and protected till they are hatched–cases which show us even there that this expenditure of labor by which other beings are benefited, is itself done in fulfillment of an instinct which is only to be satisfied by the act, and is therefore in that sense egoistic; we have this relation forced upon us distinctly when we come to the more highly organized and intelligent creatures. If we ask how it is that there are gone through by a pair of birds, all the labors of nest-building, the denial of activity implied by incubation, the activity of the male in feeding the female while sitting, and the prolonged labors of both in subsequently bringing food to the young; the answer is that all these actions are carried on under the promptings of certain inherited and organized cravings, which make the successive activities sources of gratification. And it needs but to observe the signs of distress consequent on danger to the young to get a measure of the degree of pleasure taken in performing these acts that are directly beneficial to others and at the same time pleasurable to self. Evidently this conciliation between the requirements of egoism and altruism has from the beginning been growing in extent and completeness–necessarily has been doing so–since the higher the type of creature evolved, the more the young becomes dependent upon the parent and the more involved the requirements to be fulfilled in fostering them, and therefore the more continuous and more varied the activities carried on by adults in behalf of the young.

And this conciliation which we see has gone hand-in-hand with evolution, is a conciliation which we see has reached a high degree in the human race. It needs not here to dwell on parental sacrifices as prompted by parental affections. It needs not to dwell on the amount of positive pleasure which the mother derives from daily witnessing that welfare of her offspring which her self-sacrificing efforts achieve; nor does it need to dwell upon the intensity of the unhappiness which from time to time results if illness threatens or death destroys, and if, as a consequence, the mother, no longer called on to make these daily sacrifices, is at the same time defrauded of the pleasures those sacrifices brought. All that needs to be more especially indicated in further insisting on this great fact is that during the evolution of the human race itself there has been a marked further progress in this conciliation; so that whereas during savage life the sacrifices made on the part of both parents are less varied and persistent, they endure for a shorter period, and that among the civilized the labors of both parents, gone through in rearing and education, much more complex, are prolonged over a greater number of years, and the labors gone through in accumulating the means for setting them up in life, and often the injury to health borne in providing them with fortunes, are such as to make it manifest that a large part of the pleasure of daily life is achieved in the process of sacrificing personal ends for the benefit of offspring.

In all which illustrations the one truth to be observed and carried with us is that there gradually evolves with the evolution of a higher life an organic altruism which, in relation to a certain limited class of other beings, works to the effect of making what we call self-sacrifice not a sacrifice in the ordinary sense of the word, but an act which brings more pleasure than pain–an act which has for its accompaniment an altruistic gratification which outweighs the egoistic gratification lost; and this, otherwise stated, implies that as the altruistic gratification is egoistically expressed, egoism and altruism coalesce.

That which has been in course of achievement in respect of the limited group of beings constituting a family in the course of the evolution of life, and has now, in the human race, been in very large measure achieved, has been in course of achievement, and is to a comparatively small extent achieved, with those larger groups constituting societies. The conciliation between egoism and altruism under their aspects as ordinarily understood, is slowly coming about by analogous conciliation of the egoistic and altruistic gratifications.

Only those whose creed prompts them to believe in the unalterable badness of human nature, and who, in face of the evidence which mankind at large furnish, hold that man not only always has been, but always will be, "desperately wicked," can refuse to recognize the conspicuous fact that along with the progress of civilization, there has been growing up not only that kind of altruism which is shown in decreasing aggressiveness on fellow-men, but also that kind of altruism which is shown in actual regard for their welfare. Go back to the times when blood-feuds were not only chronic between adjacent tribes but in the later times in which there were blood-feuds maintained from generation to generation between families of the same tribe, and contrast it with the present time in which, among civilized peoples, such aggressions as exist, relatively few, are far less violent in kind; and it cannot be denied that that negative altruism which is shown in refraining from injuring others, has increased. Contrast the times in which slavery existing everywhere, excited even in moralists no repugnance, with modern times when slavery, by the more sympathetically-minded, is characterized as "the sum of all villainies"; and it is undeniable that the extent to which selfish gratification is pursued at the cost of misery to others, is alike less extreme and less widespread. Observe the contrast between savages who torture their captives till they die, or ancient so-called heroes who dragged the dead bodies of slain foes after their chariots, with our own days in which, among the more advanced nations, wounded enemies are cared for, and by-standing nations send out doctors and nurses; and it cannot be questioned that there exists now [more kind feeling] than existed in the less developed human beings. So in the contrast between gladiatorial shows and days when pugilism is forbidden, or between the societies in which seeing animals slay one another is a chief pleasure and societies in which there exist associations and laws for the prevention of such remaining cruelty to animals as exists.

If, from the increase of sympathy shown by the decrease of cruelty, we pass to that which is shown by the establishment of juster social relations, the same thing is shown to us. From the times when the system of internal protection was so little developed that men had to rectify their own grievances by force as well as they might, to the times when there exist guardians of life and property patrolling the streets at all hours, we are shown a gradual rise of that public sentiment expressing regard for the claims of others. Defective as is the administration of law, yet men’s properties as well as their lives are far safer than they were in early times; by which there is implied an increase of those feelings which embody themselves in equitable laws. If we again look at the growth of governmental forms, which have gone on from period to period decreasing the unchecked powers of ruling classes, and extending to lower and lower grades shares of political power, we see both that the institutions so established are more altruistic in the sense that they recognize better the claims of all, and in the sense that they are advocated and carried on grounds of equity and by appeal to men’s sense of justice–that is, to the most abstract and latest developed of the altruistic sentiments.

Nor is it otherwise if we consider the altruism which expresses itself in active benevolence. Go back to early societies, and we find little or nothing representing those multitudinous agencies which have grown up during civilization for the care of the sick and aged and the unfortunate. In the rudest forms of society, those who were no longer from one or other cause capable of taking care of themselves, were either killed or left to die. But the moral modification which has resulted from the discipline of social life, as it has gradually passed more and more from the militant to the industrial form, has been accompanied by growth of multitudinous forms of philanthropic activity–countless societies voluntarily established and carried on, enormous sums of money subscribed, innumerable people busying themselves with a view to the welfare of those who are not so well off in the world as themselves. That is to say, altruism arising from that same growth of sympathy which checks cruelty and extends justice, has been simultaneously leading to positive exertions for the benefit alike of individuals and of the community at large.

And if we ask what is the attitude of mind in those who are engaged, now in the checking of actions which inflict pain, now in the furtherance of political changes which conduce to more equitable relations, now in the agitations for changing unjust laws, now in the carrying on of organizations for mitigating the pains of less fortunate fellow citizens or increasing their pleasures; we see that if [not] in the whole, still in large measure, the prompting cause is an actual satisfaction in the contemplation of the benefits achieved. Large numbers of persons are there who, often postponing in large measure, and sometimes unduly, their private affairs to public affairs, are as eagerly energetic in achieving what they conceive will redound to human welfare at large, or the welfare of particular classes of people, as though they were pursuing their personal ends; and so show us that the gratification of their altruistic feelings has become to them a stimulus approaching in potency to the gratification of their directly egoistic feelings. So that the pursuit of the altruistic pleasure has become a higher order of egoistic pleasure.

It is a paradox daily illustrated, that the belief in irrationalities habitually goes with skepticism of rationalities. Those who are impressed by some statement of a wonder, and accept it on the strength of some emphatic assertion notwithstanding its utter incongruity with all that is known of the course of things, will listen with utter incredulity to inferences drawn by the most cogent reasoning from premises that they do not deny. Incapable of conceiving with any vividness the necessary dependence of conclusions upon premises, where these are at all remote from the simplest matters, they are not affected in their convictions by demonstration, however clear, as they are affected by the manifestation of strong belief in those who make statements to them. And thus while, for example, they see nothing whatever ridiculous in the tradition which ascribes the universe to a greater artificer who was tired after six days’ labor, it seems to them quite ridiculous to suppose that there are to come in the future, changes in human nature, and corresponding changes in human society, analogous to, and equally great with, those that have taken place since societies were first formed.

One who, looking at the hour hand of a watch, fails to see it move, and is prompted by his inability to see the movement to say that it does not move, is checked from doing so by his experiences of past occasions when, on looking after an interval, he has seen that movement has taken place; but one can readily imagine that in one who had never had any experiences of watches, and who was told that this hour hand was moving though he could not see it, and that unless familiar with the actions of machinery it would be of little avail to point out the arrangements of mainspring, balance wheel, pinions, and the like, in such way as to prove to him that although he could not see it, the hour hand must be moving. And much in the same condition as would be such an one who had never before seen a watch, and who was incredulous as to the movement of the hour hand because it was imperceptible to him, are the great mass of people who habitually look upon human nature and human society as, if not stationary, still, not moving in such way as to be likely to change their places in such great degree as to make them remote from what they now are. They have indeed the opportunity not paralleled in the hypothetical case just put, of contrasting existing civilized societies with existing savage societies; and they have the opportunity of contrasting the present state of any one civilized society with its preceding state. But strong as is the evidence furnished to them that both the individual human being and the masses of human beings, undergo decided changes, they are so dominated by the daily impression of constancy, as to have either unconsciousness, or no adequate consciousness, of the changes that are, from kindred causes, hereafter to take place. Not denying that there will be changes, their imagination of them is so vague, and their belief in them is so feeble, that, practically, the admission that they may take place amounts to nothing in their general conception of things, and plays no part as a factor in their general thinking. And, most remarkably, this proves to be so not [only] with the commonplace uncultured [and] with those of mere literary culture; but it is to a large extent true of those whose scientific culture should give them clear conceptions of causation–clear conceptions that results will not result without causes, and, conversely, that given the causes the results are inevitable. Even a large proportion of the biological world whose discipline, especially in recent years, might be presumed to give them full faith in the potent working hereafter of causes that have worked so potently heretofore, show no sign that their conceptions of human life and human society are much in advance of those held by other people. Strange to say, naturalists who have accepted in full the general hypothesis of organic evolution, and hold that by direct or indirect adaptation, organisms have perpetually been molded to their respective conditions, and that in the future as the past such moldings to conditions must ever go on, show themselves, like the rest, little regardful of the corollaries which must inevitably follow respecting the future of humanity And many of them may be numbered among those who, in various ways, are busy in thwarting this process of adaptation as respects men and society.

Hence, not at all among the uneducated class, very little among the class called educated, and in no adequate degree even in the scientific class, is there a belief in the unquestionable truth that altruism in the future will increase as it has increased in the past; and that as, at the present time, there has grown up in the superior types of men, a capacity for receiving much personal pleasure from furthering the welfare of others, and in contemplating such welfare as is produced by other means, so will there in the future grow up a much greater degree, and a much more widespread amount, of such pleasure–so will there in the future come a further identification of altruism with egoism, in the sense that personal gratification will be derived from achieving the gratification of others. So far is it from being true, as might be supposed from the general incredulity, that though there has arisen a considerable moralization of the human being, as a concomitant of civilization, there will be no comparable increase of such moralization in the future, it is true that the moralization will hereafter go on at a much greater rate, because it will no longer be checked by influences hitherto, and at present, in operation. During all the past, and even still, the egoism of warlike activities has been restraining the altruism which grows up under peaceful activities. The need for maintaining adaptation to the militant life, which implies readiness to sacrifice others, has perpetually held in check the progress of adaptation to the industrial life, which, carried on by exchange of services, does not of necessity entail the sacrifice of others to self. And because of these conflicting influences, the growth of altruism has of necessity been slow. What this moral modification due to the adaptation of human beings to peaceful social life, might have already achieved in civilized societies, had it not been for the moral effects that have accompanied the necessary process of compounding and recompounding by which great nations have been produced, we may judge on observing the moral state existing in the few simple tribes of men who have been so circumstanced as to carry on peaceful lives. (Here insert examples.)

Judge, then, what might by this time have happened under the closer mutual dependence and more complex relations which civilized societies have originated, but for the retarding causes which have kept sympathies seared; and then judge what will happen in the future when, by further progress such as has been going on in the past, we reach eventually a state in which the great civilized societies reach a condition of permanent peace, and there continues no such extreme check as has been operating thus far. Not only must we infer that the future of man and of society will have modifications as great as the past has shown us, but that it will have much greater. That is to say, the transformation of altruistic gratifications into egoistic ones, will be carried very much further; and an average larger share in the happiness of each individual, will depend on consciousness of the well-being of other individuals.

Doubtless the moral modification of human nature which has thus to take place hereafter, analogous to that which has taken place heretofore, will be retarded by other causes than this primary cause. Not only is the growth of sympathy held in check by the performance of unsympathetic actions, such as are necessitated by militant activities, but it is held in check by the constant presence of pains and unhappinesses, and by the consciousness that these exist even when they are not visible. Those in whom the sympathies have become keen, are of necessity proportionately pained on witnessing sufferings borne by others, not [only] in those cases where they are the causes of sufferings, but where the sufferings are caused in any other way. To those whose fellow feelings were too keenly alive to the miseries of the great mass of their kind–alive not only to such miseries as they saw but to such miseries as they heard of or read of, and to such miseries as they knew must be existing all around, far and near, life would be made intolerable: the sympathetic pains would submerge not only the sympathetic pleasures but the egoistic pleasures. And therefore life is made tolerable, even to the higher among us at the present time, by a certain perpetual searing of the sympathies, which keeps them down at such level of sensitiveness as that there remains a balance of pleasure in life. Whence it follows that the sympathies can become more and more acute, only as fast as the amount of human misery to be sympathized with becomes less and less; and while this diminution of human misery to be sympathized with, itself must be due in part to the increase of sympathy which prompts actions to mitigate it, it must be due in the main to the decrease of the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence. While the struggle for existence among men has to be carried on with an intensity like that which now exists, the quantity of suffering to be borne by the majority must remain great. This struggle for existence must continue to be thus intense so long as the rate of multiplication continues greatly in excess of the rate of mortality Only in proportion as the production of new individuals ceases to go on so greatly in excess of the disappearance of individuals by death, can there be a diminution of the pressure upon the means of subsistence, and a diminution of the strain and the accompanying pains that arise more or less to all, and in a greater degree to the inferior. On referring back to the Principles of Biology, Part VI, the reader will find grounds for the inference that along with social progress, there must inevitably go a decrease in human fertility, ending in a comparative balance of fertility and mortality, as there comes the time when human evolution approaches its limit of complete adaptation to the social state. And as is here implied, the highest evolution of the sympathies, and consequent reaching of the ultimate altruism, though the progress will go on with comparative rapidity when a peaceful state is once arrived at, will yet only approach its highest degree as this ultimate state is approached.

But one of the chief causes of perplexity in this question, arising from the conflict of egoistic and altruistic requirements, and which is natural to the present condition, is due to the fact that altruism is habitually associated with self-sacrifice. So long as egoism is in excess, and so long as, in consequence of its excess, the counteraction of altruism is shown mainly in checking undue personal gratification, or in assuaging the pains that have been produced by selfishness somewhere or other, it happens, as a matter of course, that the conception of altruism is identified with the conception of abandonment of individual gratification, and self-infliction of more or less pain. This, however, as I have implied, is an erroneous and purely transitional view of the effect of altruism in its ultimate workings out.

Sympathy is the root of every other kind of altruism than that which, from the beginning, originates the parental activities. It is the root of that higher altruism which, apart from the philoprogenitive instinct, produces desire for the happiness of others and reluctance to inflict pain upon them. These two traits are inevitably associated. The same mental faculty which reproduces in the individual consciousness, the feelings that are being displayed by other beings, acts equally to reproduce those states when they are pleasurable or when they are painful. Sympathy, therefore, is a state of the individual, of pleasure or pain, according to the states of the surrounding beings. Consequently it happens, as indicated above, that when there exists around a large proportion of pain, sympathy may entail on its possessor more pain than pleasure, and so is continually kept in check. Contrariwise as, in course of the general evolution of humanity and society, the general increase of sympathy everywhere, and improvement in the social relations consequent upon greater sympathy, it more and more happens that the states of consciousness existing in those around are pleasurable; and in proportion as this happens, the effect of sympathy is to increase the pleasure of the possessor.

Evidently the general corollary from this is that with the increase of sympathy, there arises the double result, that by its increase it tends to decrease the causes of human misery, and in proportion as it decreases the causes of human misery and increases the causes of happiness, it becomes itself the cause of further reflected happiness received by each from others. And the limit towards which this evolution approaches, is one under which, as the amount of pain suffered by those around from individual imperfections and from imperfections of social arrangement and conduct, become relatively small, and simultaneously the growth of sympathy goes on with little check, the sympathy becomes at the same time almost exclusively a source of pleasure received from the happiness of others, and not of pains received from their pains. And as this condition is approached, the function of sympathy is not that of stimulating to self-sacrifice and of entailing upon its possessor positive or negative pain, but its function becomes that of making him a recipient of positive pleasure. The altruism which has to arise, therefore, in future, is not an altruism which is in conflict with egoism, but is an altruism which comes eventually to coincide with egoism in respect of a large range of life; and it becomes instrumental in exalting satisfactions that are egoistic in so far as they are pleasures enjoyed by the individual, though they are altruistic in respect of the origin of these pleasures.

So far then from its being, as is commonly assumed, true that there must go on throughout all the future, a condition in which self-regard is to be continually subjected by the regard for others, it will, contrariwise, be the case, that a regard for others will eventually become so large a source of pleasure, as to compete with in its amount, and indeed overgrow the pleasure which is derivable from direct egoistic gratification; and the pursuit of this indirect egoistic gratification may so become itself the predominant part of egoism.

Eventually, then, along with the approximately complete adaptation of man to the social state, along with the evolution of a society complete in its adjustments, and along with the ultimate diminution of pressure of population, which must come with the highest type of human life, there will come also a state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges in the other.

To those who look at the creation at large, and the organic creation in particular, from the old point of view of special creation, and who think of the structures and functions of all species as supernaturally given, and therefore fixed by God, there will not only be a repudiation of a conception like this as chimerical, but there will also be an utter imperviousness to all arguments derived from those adaptations of constitution to conditions which the organic creation at large presents, and especially those which present adaptations of the kind here prophesied. But all who take the evolution view, cannot in consistency deny that if we have in lower orders of creatures cases in which the nature is constitutionally so modified that altruistic activities have become one with egoistic activities, there is an irresistible implication that a parallel identification will, under parallel conditions, take place among human beings.

Social insects furnish us with instances completely to the point; and instances showing us, indeed, to what a marvellous degree the life of the individual may be absorbed in subserving the lives of other individuals. Strangely enough, it happens that the typical illustrations taken from the animal creation to enforce on human beings the virtue of activity, are taken from those creatures whose activities are devoted, not to their own special welfare, but to the welfare of the communities they form part of. The ant, which in the Bible is referred to as showing an industry which should shame the sluggard among men, and the busy bee which, in the child’s hymn, is named as an example to be followed in making the best of time, are creatures whose activities are not like those commended to the child and the sluggard–activities mainly to be expended in subserving personal well-being; but they are activities which postpone individual well-being so completely to the well-being of the community, that individual life appears to be attended to only just as far as necessary to make possible due attention to the social life. These instances which are given as spurs to egoistic activity, are actually supplied by creatures whose activity is almost wholly altruistic. Throughout the animal kingdom there are found no better examples of energetic industry, than these in which the ends which the activities subserve are altruistic rather than egoistic. And hence we are shown, undeniably, that it is a perfectly possible thing for organisms to become so adjusted to the requirements of their lives, that energy expended for the general welfare may not only be adequate to check energy expended for the individual welfare, but may come to subordinate it so far as to leave individual welfare no greater than is requisite for maintenance of individual life.

And now observe, further, that we are thus shown not only the existence of an almost complete identification of egoism and altruism; but we are also shown that this identification takes place in consequence of the gratification accompanying the altruistic activities having become a gratification that is substantially egoistic. Neither the ant nor the bee can be supposed to have a sense of duty, in the acceptation we give to that word; nor can it be supposed that it is continually undergoing self-sacrifice in the ordinary acceptation of that word. At the very outset of its mature life, the working bee begins that life which, with untiring energy, it pursues to the end–collecting food to feed the growing members of the community gathering pollen with which to build new cells, and taking only just such food and such rest as are needful to maintain its vigor; and in the absence of those moral instigations existing only in the higher vertebrates, the instigations are in this case simply those resulting from an organization which has become adjusted in the course of evolution to the carrying on a social life. They show us that it is within the possibilities of organization to produce a nature which shall be just as energetic, and even more energetic, in the pursuit of altruistic ends, as is, in other cases, shown in the pursuit of egoistic ends; and they show that in such cases these altruistic ends are pursued in pursuing ends which on their other face are egoistic. For the satisfaction of the needs of the organization, these actions conducive to the welfare of others must be carried on. The seeking for the satisfaction which the organization requires, itself entails the performance of those activities which the welfare of the community requires.

And here we are brought to a special application of that general law, the relativity of pleasure, set forth and illustrated in a preceding chapter. We have but duly to see the far-reaching sequences of this law, to understand, even without such an illustration as that just furnished, that such a relation between the individual and the community is not only possible, but is certain to establish itself if the conditions to its establishment are maintained.

One who once fully grasps the truth that pleasure of every kind is the concomitant of the actiyity of some nervous structure, inherited from the race or developed by modification in the individual, will see it to be an inevitable corollary that there can be a gratification in altruistic activities just as great as in egoistic activities, if there exists the structure which answers to those activities; and that the evolution of such a structure will inevitably take place, partly by direct and partly by indirect equilibration, where it is to the advantage of the species that it should exist. In proportion as, with the advance of society to a peaceful state, there increases the form of social life which consists in mutual exchange of services–in proportion as it becomes to the advantage of the individual, and to the prosperity of the society, to regard others’ claims and fulfill contracts–in proportion as the individual comes to be aided in leading a more complete life, by possessing a nature which begets friendship and kindly offices from all around; in such proportion does there continuously tend to take place both a strengthening of the altruistic emotions directly in the individual, and the increase of those individuals who inherit most largely the altruistic nature. And in proportion as there goes on this individual modification, conducing ever to the prosperity of the society after the peaceful [stage] has been reached, in that same proportion does it also happen that among societies those among whom that modification has gone on most effectually will be those to [survive and grow, so as gradually to replace those societies] in which the individual nature is not so adapted to social requirements. Inevitably, therefore, by this process, the tendency of peaceful conditions is to the continual increase of those faculties, that is, those nervous structures, which have for their spheres of activity, pleasure taken in the welfare of others; and in proportion as this takes place, there is evolved more and more a nature in which the egoistic pursuit of these pleasures, arising from the activity of the altruistic feelings, becomes a source of such altruistic activities as are needful for the general welfare. As certainly as those organized and inherited structures which prompt the activities of the chase, in animals and in men who live by the chase, and which, surviving in civilized men, give them what seems so natural, the pleasure in achieving the success of the chase, are structures which prompt to actions in pursuit of gratification apart from future egoistic ends (for the sportsman may be indifferent to the game he kills); so are there growing up, and will still further grow up with the progress towards a peaceful state, structures which will prompt to altruistic activities, and which will find their gratification in those altruistic activities quite apart from any egoistic motives.

Anyone who looks around and observes the higher types of men and women already existing, will see that even now the evolution of such structures has made considerable progress; and that there is no limit to the progress, save reaching the height at which it completely fulfills requirements.

[I-307]

CHAPTER I.

THE CONFUSION OF ETHICAL THOUGHT.↩

§ 111. If, in common with other things, human feelings and ideas conform to the general law of evolution, the implication is that the set of conceptions constituting ethics, together with the associated sentiments, arise out of a relatively incoherent and indefinite consciousness; and slowly acquire coherence and definiteness at the same time that the aggregate of them differentiates from the larger aggregate with which it is originally mingled. Long remaining undistinguished, and then but vaguely discernible as something independent, ethics must be expected to acquire a distinct embodiment only when mental evolution has reached a high stage.

Hence the present confusion of ethical thought. Total at the outset, it has necessarily continued great during social progress at large, and, though diminished, must be supposed to be still great in our present semicivilized state. Notions of right and wrong, variously derived and changing with every change in social arrangements and activities, form an assemblage which we may conclude is even now in large measure chaotic.

Let us contemplate some of the chief factors of the ethical consciousness, and observe the sets of conflicting beliefs and opinions severally resulting from them.

§ 112. Originally, ethics has no existence apart from religion, which holds it in solution. Religion itself, in its earliest form, is undistinguished from ancestor worship. And the propitiations of ancestral ghosts, made for the purpose of avoiding the evils they may inflict and gaining the benefits they may confer, are prompted by prudential considerations like those which guide the ordinary actions of life.

"Come and partake of this! Give us maintenance as you did when living!" calls out the innocent Wood-Veddah to the spirit of his relative, when leaving an offering for him; and then, at another time, he expects this spirit to give him success in the chase. A Zulu dreams that his brother’s ghost, scolding him and beating him for not sacrificing, says, "I wish for meat"; and then to the reply "No, my brother, I have no bullock; do you see any in the cattle pen?" the rejoinder is, "Though there be but one, I demand it." The Australian medicine man, eulogizing the dead hunter and listening to replies from the corpse, announces that should he be sufficiently avenged he has promised that "his spirit would not haunt the tribe, nor cause them fear, nor mislead them into wrong tracks, nor bring sickness amongst them, nor make loud noises in the night." Thus is it generally. Savages ascribe their good or ill fortunes to the doubles of the dead whom they have pleased or angered; and, while offering to them food and drink and clothing, promise conformity to their wishes and beg for their help.[1]

When from the first stage, in which only the ghosts of fathers and other relatives are propitiated by the members of each family, we pass to the second stage, in which, along with the rise of an established chieftainship, there arises a special fear of the chief’s ghost, there results propitiation of this also–offerings, eulogies, prayers, promises. If, as warrior or ruler, a powerful man has excited admiration and dread, the anxiety to be on good terms with his still more powerful double is great, and prompts observance of his commands and interdicts. Of course, after many conquests have made him a king, the expressions of subordination to his deified spirit, regarded as omnipotent and terrible, are more pronounced, and submission to his will becomes imperative: the concomitant idea being that right and wrong consist simply in obedience and disobedience to him.

All religions exemplify these relations of phenomena. Concerning the Tongans, Mariner says that "Several acts acknowledged by all civilized nations as crimes, are under many circumstances considered by them as matters of indifference," unless they involve disrespect to "the gods, nobles, and aged persons." In his description of certain peoples of the Gold Coast, Major Ellis shows that with them the idea of sin is limited to insults offered to the gods, and to the neglect of the gods.

The most atrocious crimes, committed as between man and man, the gods can view with equanimity These are man’s concerns, and must be rectified or punished by man. But, like the gods of people much farther advanced in civilization, there is nothing that offends them so deeply as to ignore them, or question their power, or laugh at them.

When from these cases, in which the required subordination is shown exclusively in observances expressive of reverence, we pass to cases in which there are commands of the kind called ethical, we find that the propriety of not offending God is the primary reason for fulfilling them. Describing the admonitions given by parents to children among the ancient Mexicans, Zurita instances these:

Do not poison any one, since you would sin against God in his creature; your crime would be discovered and punished, and . . . you would suffer the same death. [P 138] Do not injure any one, shun adultery and luxury; that is a mean vice which causes the ruin of him who yields to it, and which offends God. [P 139] Be modest; humility procures us the favor of God and of the powerful. [P 141]

Much more pronounced, however, among the Hebrews was the belief that right and wrong are made such simply by the will of God. As Schenkel remarks, "Inasmuch as man owes obedience to God’s laws, sin is regarded as rebellion (Isaiah i. 2, lix. 13; Hosea vii. 13; Amos iv 4)." Conformity to divine injunctions is insisted upon solely because they are divine injunctions, as is shown in Leviticus xviii. 4, 5: "Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the Lord your God. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments." Such was the view which the Hebrews themselves avowedly entertained. This is proved by their later writings. Bruch remarks that according to the author of the Book of Wisdom, "virtue is obedience to the will of God, and where this is expressed in the Law fulfillment of it is required (vi. 5, 19)." And in like manner, Fritzsche says–In Ecclesiasticus "the command of God appears as the proper motive of morality"

How little good and bad conduct were associated in thought with the intrinsic natures of right and wrong, and how completely they were associated in thought with obedience and disobedience to Jahveh, we see in the facts that prosperity and increase of population were promised as rewards of allegiance; while there was punishment for such nonethical disobediences as omitting circumcision or numbering the people.

That conformity to injunctions, as well as making sacrifices and singing praises, had in view benefits to be received in return for subordination, other ancient peoples show us. Here are illustrative passages from the Rig-Veda.

A like expected exchange of obligations was shown among the Egyptians when Rameses, invoking The unsacrificing Sanakas perished. Contending with the sacrificers the non-sacrificers fled, O Indra, with averted faces. [i. 33, 4—5]
Men fight the fiend, trying to overcome by their deeds him who performs no sacrifices. [vi. 14, 3]
May all other people around us vanish into nothing, but our own offspring remain blessed in this world. [x. 81, 7]
We who are wishing for horses, for booty, for women . . . Indra, the strong one who gives us women. [iv 17, 16]

Ammon for aid, reminded him of the hecatombs of bulls he had sacrificed to him. And, similarly, it was shown among the early Greeks when Chrises, praying for vengeance, emphasized the claim he had established on Apollo by decorating his temple. Evidently the good and evil which come from enjoined and forbidden actions, are considered as directly caused by God, and not as indirectly due to the constitution of things.

That like conceptions prevailed throughout medieval Europe everyone knows. With the appeals to saints for aid in battle, with the vows to build chapels to the Virgin by way of compounding for crimes, and with the crusading expeditions and pilgrimages undertaken as means to salvation, there went the idea that divine injunctions are to be obeyed simply because they are divine injunctions; and the accompanying idea was that good and evil are consequences of God’s will and not consequences naturally caused. The current idea was well shown in the forms of manumission–"For fear of Almighty God, and for the cure of my soul, I liberate thee" &c. or "For lessening my sins" &c. Even now a kindred conception survives in most men. Not only is it still the popular belief that right and wrong become such by divine fiat, but it is the belief of many theologians and moralists. The speeches of bishops concerning the Deceased Wife’s Sisters Bill, sufficiently indicate the attitude of the one; and various books, among others that of the Quaker moralist Jonathan Dymond, show the other. Though there has long been growing a vague recognition of natural sanctions which some actions have and others have not, yet there continues a general belief that moral obligation is supernaturally derived.

§ 113. Various mythologies of ancient peoples, in common with those of some existing savages, describe the battles of the gods: now with one another and now with alien foes. If the deities of the Scandinavians, the Mongolians, the Indians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, are not all of them successful warriors, yet the supremacy of the gods over other beings, or of one over the rest, is habitually represented as established by conquest. Even the Hebrew deity, characterized as a "man of war," is constantly spoken of as a subduer of enemies, if not personally yet by proxy.

The apotheosized chiefs who become the personages of mythologies (frequently invaders, like the Egyptian gods who came into Egypt from the land of Punt) usually leave behind them wars in progress or unsettled feuds; and fulfillment of their commands, or known wishes, by overcoming enemies, then becomes a duty. Even where there are no bequeathed antagonisms with peoples around, example and precept given by the warrior-king unite in giving divine sanction to the ethics of enmity.

Hence such a fact as that told of the Fijian chief, who was in a state of mental agony because he had displeased his god by not killing enough of the enemy. Hence such representations as are made by Assyrian kings: Shalmaneser II asserting that Asshur "had strongly urged me to conquer and subjugate"; Tiglath Pileser naming Asshur and the great gods as having "ordered an enlarged frontier to" his dominions; Sennacherib describing himself as the instrument of Asshur, and aided by him in battle; Assurbanipal, as fighting in the service of the gods who, he says, are his leaders in war. Of like meaning is the account which the Egyptian king, Rameses II, gives of his transcendent achievements in the field while inspired by the ghost of his deified father. Nor is it otherwise with the carrying on of wars among the Hebrews in pursuance of divine behests; as when it is said–"Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess" (Judges xi. 24). And among other peoples, in later times, we see the same connection of ideas in the name assumed by Attila–"the scourge of God."

Sanctions for deeds entailed by the conflicts between societies, when not thus arising, inevitably arise from social necessities. Congruity must be established between the conduct found needful for self-preservation and the conduct held to be right. When, throughout a whole community, daily acts are at variance with feelings, these feelings, continually repressed, diminish, and antagonist feelings, continually encouraged, grow; until the average sentiments are adjusted to the average requirements. Whatever injures foes is then thought not only justifiable but praiseworthy, and a part of duty. Success in killing brings admiration above every other achievement; burning of habitations and laying waste of territory become things to be boasted of; while in trophies, going even to the extent of a pyramid of heads of the slain, the conqueror and his followers show that pride which implies the consciousness of great deeds.

These conceptions and feelings, conspicuous in ancient epics and histories, have continued conspicuous during the course of social evolution, and are conspicuous still. If, instead of asking for men’s nominal code of right and wrong, we seek for their real code, we find that in most minds the virtues of the warrior take the first place. Concerning an officer killed in a nefarious war, you may hear the remark–"He died the death of a gentleman." And among civilians, as among soldiers, there is tacit approval of the political brigandage going on in various quarters of the globe; while there are no protests against the massacres euphemistically called "punishments."

§ 114. But though for the defense against, and conquest of, societies, one by another, injurious actions of all kinds have been needful, and have acquired in men’s minds that sanction implied by calling them right, such injurious actions have not been needful within each society; but, contrariwise, actions of an opposite kind have been needful. violent as may frequently be the conduct of tribesmen to one another, combined action of them against other tribes must be impossible in the absence of some mutual trust, consequent on experience of friendliness and fairness. And since a behavior which favors harmonious cooperation within the tribe conduces to its prosperity and growth, and therefore to the conquest of other tribes, survival of the fittest among tribes causes the establishment of such behavior as a general trait.

The authority of ruling men gives the ethics of amity collateral support. Dissension being recognized by chiefs as a source of tribal weakness, acts leading to it are reprobated by them; and where the injunctions of deified chiefs are remembered after their deaths, there results a supernatural sanction for actions conducive to harmony, and a supernatural condemnation for actions at variance with it. Hence the origin of what we distinguish as moral codes. Hence the fact that in numerous societies, formed by various races of men, such moral codes agree in forbidding actions which are antisocial in conspicuous degrees.

We find evidence that moral codes thus arising are transmitted from generation to generation, now informally and now formally Thus "the Karens ascribe all their laws, and instructions, to the elders of preceding generations." According to Schoolcraft, the Dakotas "repeat traditions to the family with maxims, and tell their children they must live up to them." And then Morgan tells us that among the Iroquois, when mourning for their sachems, "a prominent part of the ceremonial consisted in the repetition of their ancient laws and usages." Whence it is manifest that, sachems being the ruling men, this repetition of their injunctions during their obsequies, amounted to a tacit expression of obedience, and the injunctions became an ethical creed having a quasi-supernatural sanction.

The gravest transgressions, first recognized as such, as their flagitiousness taken for granted, are, in the absence of a systematized code of conduct, not conspicuously denounced by early teachers; any more than by our own priests, the wrongfulness of murder and robbery is much insisted on. Interdicts referring to the less marked deviations from ordinary conduct, and injunctions to behave worthily, are most common. The works of the ancient Indians furnish illustrations; at the same time showing how reaction against extreme egoism leads to enunciation of extreme altruism. Thus, in the later part of that heterogeneous compound, the Mahabharata, we read:

Enjoy thou the prosperity of others,
Although thyself unprosperous; noble men
Take pleasure in their neighbor’s happiness.

And again in Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya it is said:

The noble-minded dedicate themselves
To the promotion of the happiness
Of other–e’en of those who injure them.

So too a passage in the Cural runs:

To exercise benevolence is the whole design of acquiring property.
He truly lives who knows and discharges the duties of benevolence.
He who knows them not may be reckoned among the dead.

In the Chinese books we have, besides the injunctions of the Taoists, the moral maxims of Confucius, exemplifying his development of the ethics of amity. Enumerating the five cardinal virtues Confucius says:

First among these stands humanity, that is to say, that universal sympathy which should exist between man and man without distinction of class or race. Justice, which gives to each member of the community his due, without favor or affection.

And then in another place he expresses, in a different form, the Christian maxim:

Do not let a man practice to those beneath him, that which he dislikes in those above him; to those before him, what he dislikes in those behind him; to those on the right hand, that which he dislikes on the left.

Social life in ancient Egypt has produced clear recognition of the essential principles of harmonious cooperation. M. Chabas, as quoted by Renouf and verified by him, says:

None of the Christian virtues is forgotten in it; piety, charity, gentleness, self-command in word and action, chastity, the protection of the weak, benevolence towards the humble, deference to superiors, respect for property in its minutest details, . . . all is expressed there, and in extremely good language.

And then, according to Kuenen, who gives evidence of the correspondence, we have the same principles adopted by the Hebrews, and formulated by Moses into the familiar decalogue; the essentials of which, summed up in the Christian maxim, serve along with that maxim as standards of conduct down to our own day

The broad fact which here chiefly concerns us is that, in one or other way, communities have habitually established for themselves, now tacitly and now avowedly here in rudimentary forms and there in elaborated forms, sets of commands and restraints conducive to internal amity. And the genesis of such codes, and partial conformity to them, have been necessary; since, if not in any degree recognized and observed, there must result social dissolution.

§ 115. As the ethics of enmity and the ethics of amity, thus arising in each society in response to external and internal conditions respectively, have to be simultaneously entertained, there is formed an assemblage of utterly inconsistent sentiments and ideas. Its components can by no possibility be harmonized, and yet they have to be all accepted and acted upon. Every day exemplifies the resulting contradictions, and also exemplifies men’s contentment under them.

When, after prayers asking for divine guidance, nearly all the bishops approve an unwarranted invasion, like that of Afghanistan, the incident passes without any expression of surprise; while, conversely, when the Bishop of Durham takes the chair at a peace meeting, his act is commented upon as remarkable. When, at a Diocesan Conference, a peer (Lord Cranbook), opposing international arbitration, says he is "not quite sure that a state of peace might not be a more dangerous thing for a nation than war," the assembled priests of the religion of love make no protest; nor does any general reprobation, clerical or lay, arise when a ruler in the Church, Dr. Moorhouse, advocating a physical and moral discipline fitting the English for war, expresses the wish "to make them so that they would, in fact, like the fox when fastened by the dogs, die biting," and says that "these were moral qualities to be encouraged and increased among our people, and he believed that nothing could suffice for this but the grace of God operating in their hearts." How completely in harmony with the popular feeling in a land covered with Christian churches and chapels, is this exhortation of the Bishop of Manchester, we see in such facts as that people eagerly read accounts of football matches in which there is an average of a death per week; that they rush in crowds to buy newspapers which give detailed reports of a brutal prizefight, but which pass over in a few lines the proceedings of a peace congress; and that they are lavish patrons of illustrated papers, half the woodcuts in which have for their subjects the destruction of life or the agencies for its destruction.

Still more conspicuous do we find the incongruity between the nominally accepted ethics of amity and the actually accepted ethics of enmity when we pass to the Continent. In France, as elsewhere, the multitudinous appointed agents for diffusing the injunction to do good to enemies, are practically dumb in respect of this injunction; and, instead of seeking to make their people put up the sword, are themselves, under the direction of these people they have been teaching, obliged, during their student days, to serve in the army Not to achieve any humane end or to enhance the happiness of mankind, either at home or abroad, do the French submit to the crushing weight of their military budget; but to wrest back territories taken from them in punishment for their aggressiveness. And, as we have lately seen, a wave of enthusiasm very nearly raised to supreme power a soldier who was expected to lead them to a war of revenge.

So is it, too, in Protestant Germany–the land of Luther and the favorite home of Christian theology. Significant of the national feeling was that general order to his soldiers issued by the Emperor on ascending the throne, in which, saying that "God’s decree places me at the head of the army" and otherwise expressing his submission to "God’s will," he ends by swearing "ever to remember that the eyes of my ancestors look down upon me from the other world, and that I shall one day have to render account to them of the glory and honor of the Army." To which add that, in harmony with this oath, pagan alike in sentiment and idea, we have his more recent laudation of dueling clubs: a laudation soon afterwards followed by personal performance of divine service on board his yacht.

How absolute throughout Europe is the contradiction between the codes of conduct adjusted respectively to the needs of internal amity and external enmity, we see in the broad fact that along with several hundred thousand priests who are supposed to preach forgiveness of injuries, there exist immensely larger armies than any on record!

§ 116. But side by side with the ethical conceptions above described, originating in one or other way and having one or other sanction, there has been slowly evolving a different conception–a conception derived wholly from recognition of naturally produced consequences. This gradual rise of a utilitarian ethics has, indeed, been inevitable; since the reasons which led to commands and interdicts by a ruler, living or apotheosized, have habitually been reasons of expediency more or less visible to all. Though, when once established, such commands and interdicts have been conformed to mainly because obedience to the authority imposing them was a duty, yet there has been very generally some accompanying perception of their fitness.

Even among the uncivilized, or but slightly civilized, we find a nascent utilitarianism. The Malagasy, for example, have

laws against Adultery, Theft and Murder; . . . there is also a Fine inflicted on a Man, who shall curse another Man’s Parents. They never swear profanely, but these things they do, because, said they, "it is convenient and proper; and we could not live by one another, if there were not such laws."

In the later Hebrew writings the beginnings of a utilitarian ethics are visible; for though, as Bruch remarks of the author of Ecclesiasticus, "all his ethical rules and precepts in a truly Hebrew way run together in the notion of the fear of God," yet many of his maxims do not originate from divine injunctions. When he advises not to become too dependent, to value a good name, to be cautious in talk, and to be judicious in eating and drinking, he manifestly derives guidance from the results of experience. A fully differentiated system of expediency morals had been reached by some of the Egyptians. Mr. Poole writes:

Ptah-hotep is wearied with religious services already outwom, and instead of the endless prescriptions of the current religion, he attempts a simple doctrine of morals, founded on the observation of a long life. . . . His proverbs enforce the advantage of virtuous life in the present. The future has no place in the scheme. . . . This moral philosophy of the sages is far above that of the Book of the Dead, inasmuch as it throws aside all that is trivial and teaches alone the necessary duties. But it rests on a basis of . . . expediency The love of God, and the love of man, are unnoticed as the causes of virtue.

Similarly was it with the later Greeks. In the Platonic Dialogues, and in the Ethics of Aristotle, we see morality in large measure separated from theology and placed upon a utilitarian basis.

Coming down to modern days, the divergence of expediency ethics from theological ethics, is well illustrated in Paley, who, in his official character, derived right and wrong from divine commands, and in his unofficial character derived them from observation of consequences. Since his day the last of these views has spread at the expense of the first, and by Bentham and Mill we have utility established as the sole standard of conduct. How completely in this last, conduciveness to human welfare had become the supreme sanction, replacing alleged divine commands, we see in his refusal to call "good" a supreme being whose acts are not sanctioned by "the highest human morality"; and by his statement that "if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go."

§ 117. Yet a further origin of moral dictates is to be recognized as having arisen simultaneously. Habits of conformity to rules of conduct have generated sentiments adjusted to such rules. The discipline of social life has produced in men conceptions and emotions which, irrespective of supposed divine commands, and irrespective of observed consequences, issue in certain degrees of liking for conduct favoring social welfare and aversion to conduct at variance with it. Manifestly such a molding of human nature has been furthered by survival of the fittest; since groups of men having feelings least adapted to social requirements must, other things equal, have tended to disappear before groups of men having feelings most adapted to them.

The effects of moral sentiments thus arising are shown among races partially civilized. Cook says: The Otaheitans "have a knowledge of right and wrong from the mere dictates of natural conscience; and involuntarily condemn themselves when they do that to others, which they would condemn others for doing to them." So, too, that moral sentiments were influential during early stages of some civilized races, proof is yielded by ancient Indian books. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi complains of the hard lot of her righteous husband, and charges the Deity with injustice; but is answered by Yudhishthira:

Thou utterest infidel sentiments. I do not act from a desire to gain the recompense of my works. I give what I ought to give . . . Whether reward accrues to me or not, I do to the best of my power what a man should do. . . . It is on duty alone that my thoughts are fixed, and this, too, naturally. The man who seeks to make of righteousness a gainful merchandise, is low. The man who seeks to milk righteousness does not obtain its reward. . . . Do not doubt about righteousness: he who does so is on the way to be born a brute.

And similarly, in another of these ancient books, the Ramayana, we read:

Virtue is a service man owes himself, and though there were no Heaven, nor any God to rule the world, it were not less the binding law of life. It is man’s privilege to know the Right and follow it.

In like manner, according to Edkins, conscience is regarded among the Chinese as the supreme authority. He says:

When the evidence of a new religion is presented to them they at once refer it to a moral standard, and give their approval with the utmost readiness, if it passes the test. They do not ask whether it is Divine, but whether it is good.

And elsewhere he remarks that sin, according to the Confucian moral standard, "becomes an act which robs a man of his self-respect, and offends his sense of right," and is not "regarded as a transgression of God’s law."

Of modern writers who, asserting the existence of a moral sense, consider the intuitions it yields as guides to conduct, we may distinguish two classes. There are those who, taking a view like that of Confucius just indicated, hold that the dicta of conscience are authoritative, irrespective of alleged divine commands; and, indeed, furnish a test by which commands may be known as not divine if they do not withstand it. On the other hand there are those who regard the authority of conscience as second to that of commands which they accept as divine, and as having for its function to prompt obedience to such commands. But the two are at one insofar as they place the dicta of conscience above considerations of expediency; and also insofar as they tacitly regard conscience as having a supernatural origin. To which add that while alike in recognizing the moral sentiment as innate, and in accepting the ordinary dogma that human nature is everywhere the same, they are, by implication, alike in supposing that the moral sentiment is identical in all men.

But, as the beginning of this section shows, it is possible to agree with moralists of the intuitive school respecting the existence of a moral sense, while differing from them respecting its origin. I have contended in the foregoing division of this work, and elsewhere, that though there exist feelings of the kind alleged, they are not of supernatural origin but of natural origin; that, being generated by the discipline of the social activities, internal and external, they are not alike in all men, but differ more or less everywhere in proportion as the social activities differ; and that, in virtue of their mode of genesis, they have a coordinate authority with the inductions of utility.

§ 118. Before going further it will be well to sum up these various detailed statements, changing somewhat the order and point of view.

Survival of the fittest insures that the faculties of every species of creature tend to adapt themselves to its mode of life. It must be so with man. From the earliest times groups of men whose feelings and conceptions were congruous with the conditions they lived under, must, other things equal, have spread and replaced those whose feelings and conceptions were incongruous with their conditions.

Recognizing a few exceptions, which special circumstances have made possible, it holds, both of rude tribes and of civilized societies, that they have had continually to carry on external self-defense and internal cooperation–external antagonism and internal friendship. Hence their members have required two different sets of sentiments and ideas, adjusted to these two kinds of activity.

In societies having indigenous religions, the resulting conflict of codes is not overt. As the commands to destroy external enemies and to desist from acts which produce internal dissensions, come either from the living ruler or from the apotheosized ruler; and as, in both cases, the obligation arises not from the natures of the prescribed acts, but from the necessity of obedience; the two, having the same sanction, are not perceived to stand in opposition. But where, as throughout Christendom, the indigenous religion in which the ethics of enmity and the ethics of amity coexisted with like authorities, has been suppressed by an invading religion, which, insisting on the ethics of amity only, reprobates the ethics of enmity, incongruity has resulted. International antagonisms having continued, there has of necessity survived the appropriate ethics of emnity, which, not being included in the nominally accepted creed, has not had the religious sanction. Hence the fact that we have a thin layer of Christianity overlying a thick layer of paganism. The Christianity insists on duties which the paganism does not recognize as such; and the paganism insists on duties which the Christianity forbids. The new and superposed religion, with its system of ethics, has the nominal honor and the professed obedience; while the old and suppressed religion has its system of ethics nominally discredited but practically obeyed. Both are believed in, the last more strongly than the first; and men, now acting on the principles of the one and now on those of the other, according to circumstances, sit down under their contradictory beliefs as well as they may; or, rather, refrain from recognizing the contradictions.

Hence the first of these various confusions of ethical thought. Since, in the general mind, moral injunctions are identified with divine commands, those injunctions only are regarded as moral which harmonize with the nominally accepted religion, Christianity; while those injunctions which belong to the primitive and suppressed religion, authoritative as they may be considered, and eagerly as they are obeyed, are not regarded as moral. There have come to be two classes of duties and virtues, condemned and approved in similar ways, but one of which is associated with ethical conceptions and the other not: the result being that men cannot bring their real and nominal beliefs into harmony.

And then we have the further confusions which arise, not from the conflict of codes, but from the conflict of sanctions. Divine commands are not the authorities whence rules of conduct are derived, say the utilitarians, but their authorities are given by conduciveness to human welfare as ascertained by induction. And then, either with or without recognition of divine commands, we have writers of the moral-sense school making conscience the arbiter; and holding its dicta to be authoritative irrespective of calculated consequences. Obviously the essential difference between these two classes of moralists is that the one regards as of no value for guidance the feelings with which acts are regarded, while the other regards these feelings as of supreme value.

Such being the conflict of codes and conflict of sanctions, what must be our first step? We must look at the actual ideas and feelings concerning conduct which men entertain, apart from established nomenclatures and current professions. How needful is such an analysis we shall be further shown while making it; for it will become manifest that the confusion of ethical thought is even greater than we have already seen it to be.

[I-325]

CHAPTER II

WHAT IDEAS AND SENTIMENTS ARE ETHICAL?↩

§ 119. A silent protest has been made by many readers, and probably by most, while reading that section of the foregoing chapter which describes the ethics of enmity. Governed by feelings and ideas which date from their earliest lessons, and have been constantly impressed on them at home and in church, they have formed an almost indissoluble association between a doctrine of right and wrong in general, and those particular commands and interdicts included in the decalogue, which, contemplating the actions of men to one another in the same society, takes no note of their combined actions against men of alien societies. The conception of ethics has, in this way, come to be limited to that which I have distinguished as the ethics of amity; and to speak of the ethics of enmity seems absurd.

Yet, beyond question, men associate ideas of right and wrong with the carrying on of intertribal and international conflicts; and this or that conduct in battle is applauded or condemned no less strongly than this or that conduct in ordinary social life. Are we then to say that there is one kind of right and wrong recognized by ethics and another kind of right and wrong not recognized by ethics? If so, under what title is this second kind of right and wrong to be dealt with? Evidently men’s ideas about conduct are in so unorganized a state, that while one large class of actions has an overtly recognized sanction, another large class of actions has a sanction, equally strong or stronger, which is not overtly recognized.

The existence of these distinct sanctions, of which one is classed as moral and the other not, is still more clearly seen when we contrast the maxims of Christianity with the dogmas of duellists. During centuries throughout Europe, and even still throughout the greater part of it, there has existed, and exists, an imperative "obligation," under certain conditions, to challenge another to fight, and an imperative obligation to accept the challenge–an obligation much more imperative than the obligation to discharge a debt. To either combatant the word "must" is used with as much emphasis as it would be used were he enjoined to tell the truth. The "duty" of the insulted man is to defend his honor; and so wrong is his conduct considered if he does not do this, that he is shunned by his friends as a disgraced man, just as he would be had he committed a theft. Beyond question, then, we see here ideas of right and wrong quite as pronounced, with corresponding sentiments of approbation and reprobation quite as strong, as those which refer to fulfillments and breaches of what are classed as moral injunctions. How, then, can we include the last under ethical science and exclude the first from it?

The need for greatly widening the current conception of ethics is, however, still greater than is thus shown. There are other large classes of actions which excite ideas and feelings undistinguishable in their essential natures from those to which the term ethical is conventionally limited.

§ 120. Among uncivilized and semicivilized peoples, the obligations imposed by custom are peremptory. The universal belief that such things ought to be done, is not usually made manifest by the visiting of punishment or reprobation on those who do not conform, because nonconformity is scarcely heard of. How intolerable to the general mind is breach of usages, is shown occasionally when a ruler is deposed and even killed for disregard of them: a sufficient proof that his act is held wrong. And we sometimes find distinct expressions of moral sentiment on behalf of customs having nothing which we should call moral authority, and even on behalf of customs which we should call profoundly immoral.

I may begin with an instance I have named elsewhere in another connection–the instance furnished by some Mahomedan tribes who consider that one of the worst offenses is smoking: "drinking the shameful," as they term it. Palgrave narrates that while "giving divine honors to a creature," is regarded by the Wahhabees as "the first of the great sins," the second great sin is smoking–a sin in comparison with which murder, adultery, and false witness, are trivial sins. Similarly, by certain Russian sects close to Siberia, smoking is an offense distinguished from all others as being never forgiven: "every crime can be expiated by repentance except this one." In these cases the repugnance felt for an act held by us to be quite harmless, is of the same nature as the repugnance felt for the blackest crimes: the only difference being that it is more intense.

Lichtenstein tells us that when Mulihawang, king of the Matelhapees (a division of the Bechuanas), was told that Europeans are not permitted to have more than one wife, "he said it was perfectly incomprehensible to him how a whole nation could submit voluntarily to such extraordinary laws." Similar was the opinion of the Arab sheikh who, along with his people, received the account of monogamy in England with indignation, and said "the fact is simply impossible! How can a man be contented with one wife?" Nor is it only men who think thus. Livingstone says of the Makololo women on the shores of the Zambesi, that they were quite shocked to hear that in England a man had only one wife: to have only one was not "respectable." So, too, in Equatorial Africa, according to Reade, "If a man marries, and his wife thinks that he can afford another spouse, she pesters him to marry again; and calls him a ‘stingy fellow’ if he declines to do so." Similar is the feeling shown by the Araucanian women. "Far from being dissatisfied, or entertaining any jealousy toward the newcomer, she [one of two wives] said that she wished her husband would marry again; for she considered it a great relief to have some one to assist her in her household duties, and in the maintenance of her husband." No notion of immorality, much less criminality, such as we associate with bigamy and polygamy, is here entertained; but, contrariwise, when a woman calls her husband a "stingy fellow" if he does not take a second wife, we have proof that monogamy is reprobated.

Ideas relevant to the relations of the sexes, still more profoundly at variance with our own, are displayed in many places. Books of travel have made readers familiar with the fact that among various races, a traveller entertained by a chief is offered a wife or a daughter as a temporary bedfellow; and the duty of hospitality is held to require this offer. In other cases the loan takes a somewhat different shape. Of the Chinooks we read:

Among all the tribes, a man will lend his wife or daughter for a fish-hook or a strand of beads. To decline an offer of this sort is, indeed, to disparage the charms of the lady, and therefore give such offense, that although we had occasionally to treat the Indians with rigor, nothing seemed to irritate both sexes more than our refusal to accept the favors of the females.

Still more pronounced is the feeling shown by the members of an Asiatic tribe which Erman visited: "The Chuckchi offer to travelers who chance to visit them, their wives, and also what we should call their daughters’ honor, and resent as a deadly affront any refusal of such offers." Here we see that deeds which among ourselves would be classed among the profoundest disgraces, are not only regarded without shame, but declining to participate in them causes indignation: implying a sense of wrong.

As it concerns in another way the relations of the sexes, I may instance next a further contrast between the sentiments entertained by many partially civilized peoples, and those which have arisen along with the advance of civilization. Interdicts on marriages between persons of different ranks, breaches of which have in some cases brought the severest punishment, date back to very early times. Thus, in the Mahabharata we read that Draupadi refused the "ambitious Karna, saying, "I wed not with the baseborn." And then, coming down to comparatively modern times, we have the penalties entailed on those who broke the laws against mésalliances; as in France during the feudal period, on nobles who married beneath them: they were excluded from tournaments, and their descendants also. But the condemnation thus manifested five centuries ago is not paralleled now. Though a certain amount of reprobation is in some cases shown, in other cases there is approbation; and witness Tennyson’s "Miller’s Daughter" and Mrs. Browning’s "Lady Geraldine’s Courtship." Here the different feelings excited, though like in nature to those we call moral, are not concerned with either supposed divine commands or with acts usually classed as moral or immoral.

Returning to the uncivilized races, I may instance the conceptions associated with the division of labor between the sexes. Concerning various tribes of American Indians, North and South, we read that custom, limiting the actions of the men mainly to war and the chase, devolves on the women all the menial and laborious occupations; and these customs have an imperative sanction. Says Falkner concerning the Patagonians: "So rigidly are" the women "obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the highest ignominy." And these usages are fully approved of by the women themselves; as witness the following extract concerning the Dakotas:

It is the worst insult one virago can cast upon another in a moment of altercation. "Infamous woman!" will she cry, "I have seen your husband carrying wood into his lodge to make the fire. Where was his squaw, that he should be obliged to make a woman of himself?"

Clearly this indignation is the correlative of a strong moral feeling enlisted on behalf of the prescribed conduct. But if, among ourselves, any women were left, as among the Esquimaux, "to carry stones [for building houses], almost heavy enough to break their backs," while "the men look on with the greatest insensibility not stirring a finger to assist them," moral reprobation would be felt. As there are no specific injunctions, divine or human, referring to transactions of these kinds, the strongly contrasted emotions which they excite in ourselves and in these uncivilized peoples, must be ascribed to unlikenesses of customs–unlikenesses, however, which are themselves significant of innate emotional unlikenesses.

As further illustrating in a variety of ways these differences of feelings akin in nature to those we call moral, though not ordinarily classed as such, I may, without commenting upon each, here append a series of them.

The Caffers despise the Hottentots, Bushmen, Malays, and other people of color, on account of their not being circumcised. On this account, they regard them as boys, and will not allow them to sit in their company, or to eat with them.

A Mayorvna, who had been baptized, when at the point of death was very unhappy . . . because, dying as a Christian, instead of furnishing a meal to his relations, he would be eaten up by worms.

The Bambara washerwomen . . . were stark naked, yet they manifested no shame at being seen in this state by the men composing our caravan.

And a kindred statement is made concerning the Wakavirondo by Thomson, who describes their women as nevertheless altogether modest, and, remarking that "morality has nothing to do with clothes," says of these people that "they are the most moral of all the tribes of this region, and they are simply angels of purity beside the decently dressed Masai." "I found that the married men," among the Hassanyeh Arabs, says Petherick,

felt themselves highly flattered by any attentions paid to their better halves during their free-and-easy days. [Their marriages are for three or four days in the week only.] They seem to take such attentions as evidence that their wives are attractive.

Among the Khonds, so far as constancy to a husband from being required in a wife, that her pretensions do not, in the least, suffer diminution in the eyes of either sex when fines are levied on her convicted lovers; while on the other hand, infidelity on the part of a married man is held to be highly dishonorable, and is often punished by deprivation of many social privileges.

I have reserved for the last, two remarkable cases in which feelings like those which we class as moral, are definitely expressed in ways to us very surprising. The first concerns the Tahitians, who were described by Cook as without shame in respect of actions which among ourselves especially excite it, and as feeling shame in respect of actions which among ourselves excite none. These people were extremely averse to our custom of eating in society. "They eat alone, they said, because it was right." The other instance, equally anomalous, is even more startling. In Vate "it is considered a disgrace to the family of an aged chief if he is not buried alive." A like usage and accompanying feeling existed in Fiji.

A son said, when about to bury his mother alive, that it was from love to his mother that he had done so; that, in consequence of the same love, they were now going to bury her, and that none but themselves could or ought to do so sacred an office! . . . she was their mother, and they were her children, and they ought to put her to death.

The belief being that people commence life in the next world at the stage they have reached when they leave this world; and that hence postponement of death till old age entails a subsequent miserable existence.

Thus we have abundant proof that with acts which do violence to our moral sentiments, there are associated, in the minds of other races, feelings and ideas not only warranting them but enforcing them. They are fulfilled with a sense of obligation; and nonfulfillment of them, regarded as breach of duty, brings condemnation and resulting self-reproach.

§ 121. Everywhere during social progress custom passes into law. Practically speaking, custom is law in undeveloped societies. "The old Innuits did so, and therefore we must," say the existing Innuits (Esquimaux); and other uncivilized peoples similarly express the constraint they are under. In subsequent stages, customs become the acknowledged bases of laws. It is true that afterwards the body of laws is made up in part of alleged divine commands–the themistes of the Greeks, for example; but in reality these, supposed to come from one who was originally an apotheosized ruler, usually enforce existing customs. Leviticus shows us a whole body of practices, many of them of kinds which would be now regarded as neither religious nor moral, thus acquiring authority. Whether inherited from the undistinguished forefathers of the tribes, or ascribed to the will of a deceased king, customs embody the rule of the dead over the living; as do also the laws into which they harden.

Of course, therefore, if ideas of duty and feelings of obligation cluster round customs, they cluster round the derived laws. The sentiment of "ought" comes to be associated with a legal injunction, as with an injunction traced to the general authority of ancestors or the special authority of a deified ancestor. And not only does there hence arise a consciousness that obedience to each particular law is right and disobedience to it wrong, but eventually there arises a consciousness that obedience to law in general is right and disobedience to it wrong. Especially is this the case where the living ruler has a divine or semidivine character; as witness the following statement concerning the ancient Peruvians: "The most common punishment was death, for they said that a culprit was not punished for the delinquencies he had committed, but for having broken the commandment of the Ynea, who was respected as God." And this conception, reminding us of religious conceptions anciently current and still current, is practically paralleled by the conceptions still expressed by jurists and accepted by most citizens. For though a distinction is commonly made between legal obligation and moral obligation, in those cases where the law is of a kind in respect of which ethics gives no direct verdict; yet the obligation to obey has come to be, if not nominally yet practically, a moral obligation. The words habitually used imply this. It is held "right" to obey the law and "wrong" to disobey it. Conformity and nonconformity bring approbation and reprobation, just as though the legal injunction were a moral injunction. A man who has broken the law, even though it be in a matter of no ethical significance–say a householder who has refused to fill up the census paper or a peddler who has not taken out a license–feels, when he is brought before the magistrates, that he is regarded not only by them but by spectators as morally blameworthy. The feeling shown is quite as strong as it would be were he convicted of aggressing on his neighbors by nuisances–perpetual noises or pestilent odors–which are moral offenses properly so called. That is to say, law is upheld by a sentiment indistinguishable from moral sentiment. Moreover, in some cases where the two conflict, the sentiment which upholds the legal dictum overrides the sentiment which upholds the moral dictum; as in the case of the peddler above named. His act in selling without a license is morally justifiable, and forbidding him to sell without a license is morally unjustifiable–is an interference with his due liberty, which is ethically unwarranted. Yet the factitious moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of legal authority, triumphs over the natural moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of rightful freedom.

How strong is the artificial sanction acquired by a constituted authority, is seen very strikingly in the doings of Joint Stock associations. If the directors of a company formed to carry out a specified undertaking, decide to extend their activities so as to include undertakings not originally specified, and even undertakings wholly unallied to those originally specified; and if they bring before the proprietary their proposals for doing this; it is held that if a majority (at one time a simple majority, but now two-thirds) approve the proposal, the proprietary at large is bound by the decision. Should a few protest against being committed to such new undertakings, they are frowned upon and pooh-poohed as unreasonable obstructions: moral reprobation is vented against such resistance to the ruling agent and its supporters. Nevertheless, the moral reprobation should be inverted. As a question of pure equity, the incorporated body cannot enter on any businesses not specified or implied in the deed of incorporation. Those who break the original contract by entering on unspecified businesses, are unjustified; while those who stand by the original contract, however few in number, are justified. Yet so strong is the quasi-moral sanction associated with the acts of a constituted authority, that its ethically wrong course is thought right, and insistence on regard for the ethically right course is thought wrong!

§ 122. How then are ethical ideas and sentiments to be defined? How, indeed, are they to be conceived in any consistent way? Let us recapitulate.

Throughout the past, and down to present days in most minds, conceptions of right and wrong have been directly associated with supposed divine injunctions. Acts have been classed as good or bad, not because of their intrinsic natures but because of their extrinsic derivations; and virtue has consisted in obedience. Under certain circumstances, we find conduct regarded as praiseworthy or blameworthy according as it does or does not inflict suffering or death upon fellow beings; while, under other circumstances, we find the praise or blame given according as it does or does not conduce to the welfare of fellow beings. Then there is the opposition between hedonism and asceticism: by some approbation is felt for deeds which apparently conduce to the happiness of self or others or both; while, contrariwise, others look with reprobation upon a way of living which makes happiness an end. By this class the perceptions of good and evil conduct, along with love of the one and hatred of the other, are traced to a moral sense; and ethics becomes the interrogation of, and obedience to, conscience. Contrariwise, by that class such guidance is ridiculed; and calculations of consequences, irrespective of sentiment of right or theory of right, occupy the ethical sphere. Universally in early stages, and to a considerable degree in late stages, the idea of ought is associated with conformity to established customs, irrespective of their natures; and when established customs grow into laws, the idea of ought comes to be associated with obedience to laws: no matter whether considered intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.

Clearly, therefore, the conceptions of right, obligation, duty, and the sentiments associated with those conceptions, have a far wider range than the conduct ordinarily conceived as the subject matter of moral science. In different places and under different circumstances, substantially the same ideas and feelings are joined with classes of actions of totally opposite kinds, and also with classes of actions of which moral science, as ordinarily conceived, takes no cognizance. Hence, if we are to treat the subject scientifically, we must disregard the limits of conventional ethics, and consider what are the intrinsic natures of ethical ideas and sentiments.

§ 123. A trait common to all forms of sentiments and ideas to be classed as ethical, is the consciousness of authority. The nature of the authority is inconstant. It may be that of an apotheosized ruler or other deity supposed to give commands. It may be that of ancestors who have bequeathed usages, with or without injunctions to follow them. It may be that of a living ruler who makes laws, or a military commander who issues orders. It may be that of an aggregate public opinion, either expressed through a government or otherwise expressed. It may be that of an imagined utility which every one is bound to further. Or it may be that of an internal monitor distinguished as conscience.

Along with the element of authority at once intellectually recognized and emotionally responded to, there goes the element, more or less definite, of coercion. The consciousness of ought which the recognition of authority implies, is joined with the consciousness of must, which the recognition of force implies. Be it the power of a god, of a king, of a chief soldier, of a popular government, of an inherited custom, of an unorganized social feeling, there is always present the conception of a power. Even when the injunction is that of an internal monitor, the conception of a power is not absent; since the expectation of the penalty of self-reproach, which disobedience may entail, is vaguely recognized as coercive.

A further component of the ethical consciousness, and often the largest component, is the represented opinion of other individuals, who also, in one sense, constitute an authority and exercise a coercion. This, either as actually implied in others’ behavior, or as imagined if they are not present, commonly serves more than anything else to restrain or impel. How large a component this is, we see in a child who blushes when wrongly suspected of a transgression, as much as when rightly suspected; and probably most have had proof that, when guiltless, the feeling produced by the conceived reprobation of others is scarcely distinguishable from the feeling which would be produced by such reprobation if guilty That an imagined public opinion is the chief element of consciousness in cases where the acts ascribed or committed are intrinsically wrong, is shown when this imagined or expressed opinion refers to acts which are not intrinsically wrong. The emotion of shame ordinarily accompanying some gross breach of social convention which is morally indifferent, or even morally praiseworthy (say wheeling home the barrow of a costermonger who has lamed himself), may be quite as strong as the emotion of shame which follows the proved utterance of an unwarranted libel–an act intrinsically wrong. In the majority of people the feeling of ought not will be more peremptory in the first case than in the last.

If, now, we look at the matter apart from conventional classifications, we see that where the consciousnesses of authority, of coercion, and of public opinion, combined in different proportions, result in an idea and a feeling of obligation, we must class these as ethical irrespective of the kind of action to which they refer. If the associated conceptions of right are similar, and the prompting emotions similar, we must consider the mental states as of the same nature, though they are enlisted on behalf of acts radically opposed. Or rather, let us say that, with the exception of an idea and a sentiment incidentally referred to, we must class them as forming a body of thought and feeling which may be called proethical; and which, with the mass of mankind, stands in place of the ethical properly so called.

§ 124. For now let us observe that the ethical sentiment and idea properly so called, are independent of the ideas and sentiments above described as derived from external authorities, and coercions, and approbations–religious, political, or social. The true moral consciousness which we name conscience, does not refer to those extrinsic results of conduct which take the shape of praise or blame, reward or punishment, externally awarded; but it refers to the intrinsic results of conduct which, in part and by some intellectually perceived, are mainly and by most, intuitively felt. The moral consciousness proper does not contemplate obligations as artificially imposed by an external power; nor is it chiefly occupied with estimates of the amounts of pleasure and pain which given actions may produce, though these may be clearly or dimly perceived; but it is chiefly occupied with recognition of, and regard for, those conditions by fulfillment of which happiness is achieved or misery avoided. The sentiment enlisted on behalf of these conditions is often in harmony with the proethical sentiment compounded as above described, though from time to time in conflict with it; but whether in harmony or in conflict, it is vaguely or distinctly recognized as the rightful ruler: responding, as it does, to consequences which are not artificial and variable, but to consequences which are natural and permanent.

It should be remarked that along with established supremacy of this ethical sentiment proper, the feeling of obligation, though continuing to exist in the background of consciousness, ceases to occupy its foreground; since the right actions are habitually performed spontaneously or from liking. Though, while the moral nature is imperfectly developed, there may often arise conformity to the ethical sentiment under a sense of compulsion by it; and though, in other cases, nonconformity to it may cause subsequent self-reproach (as instance a remembered lack of gratitude, which may be a source of pain without there being any thought of extrinsic penalty); yet with a moral nature completely balanced, neither of these feelings will arise, because that which is done is done in satisfaction of the appropriate desire.

And now having, mainly for the purpose of making the statement complete, contemplated the ethical sentiment proper, as distinguished from the proethical sentiment, we may for the present practically dismiss it from our thoughts, and consider only the phenomena presented by the proethical sentiment under its various forms. For throughout the remaining chapters of this division, treating inductively of ideas and feelings about conduct displayed by mankind at large we shall be concerned almost exclusively with the proethical sentiment: the ethical sentiment proper being, in the great mass of cases, scarcely discernible.

Before entering on the task indicated, let me add that a good deal which approaches to repetition will be found in the immediately succeeding pages–not repetition in so far as the evidence given is concerned, but in so far as the cardinal ideas are concerned. In the preliminary discussion to which this chapter and the preceding one have been devoted, it has been necessary to state in brief some of the leading conceptions which a general inspection of the phenomena suggests. These conceptions have now to be set forth in full, along with the masses of facts which give birth to them. But while it seems well to apologize beforehand for the recurrence, in elaborated forms, of ideas already expressed in small space, I do not altogether regret having to elaborate the ideas; since there will be afforded occasion for further emphasizing conclusions which can scarcely be too much dwelt upon.

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CHAPTER III.

AGGEESSION.↩

§ 125. Under this title, accepted in its full meaning, may be ranged many kinds of acts–acts so many and various that they cannot be dealt with in one chapter. Here I propose to restrict the application of the title to acts inflicting bodily injury on others to the extent of killing or wounding them–acts of kinds which we class as destructive.

Even of these acts, which we may consider as completely or partially homicidal, there are sundry kinds not comprehended under aggression as ordinarily understood. I refer to those which do not imply antagonism or conflict.

The first of them to be named is infanticide. Far from being regarded as a crime, child-murder has been, throughout the world in early times, and in various parts of the world still is, regarded as not even an offense: occasionally, indeed, as a duty. We have that infanticide which is dictated by desire to preserve the lives of adults; for in a tribe which is ever on the border of starvation, addition of some to its number may prove fatal to others. Female infanticide, too, is often dictated by thought of tribal welfare: the established policy is to kill girls, who, while not useful for purposes of war and the chase, will, if in excess, injuriously tax the food supplies. Then, again, we have the child-murder committed in a fit of passion. Among savages, and even among the semicivilized, this is considered an indifferent matter: the power of life and death over children being, in early stages, taken for granted. Once more we have the sacrifice of children to propitiate cannibal chiefs, living or dead. Regarded as an obligation, this may be classed as prompted by a proethical sentiment.

Turning to the socially sanctioned homicides of which the victims are adults, we may set down first those which in many places occur at funerals; as instance Indian suttees until recent times. On much larger scales are the immolations during the obsequies of chiefs and kings. The killing of wives to accompany their dead husbands to the other world, and the killing of male attendants to serve them in the other world (sometimes also of friends) are forms of wholesale slaughter which have occurred in many countries, and still occur in parts of Africa. And with these may be joined such slaughters as those which are common in Dahomey, where a man is killed that his double may carry a message from the king to a deceased ancestor. Homicides of this class have also a kind of proethical warrant; since they are instigated by reverence for custom and by the obligation of loyalty.

Lastly we have the homicides prompted by beliefs classed as religious. With or without the ascription of divine cannibalism, the sacrifices of victims to deities have prevailed widely among various races in early times–Phoenicians, Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Hebrews &c.–carried, in some places, to great extremes; as in Ancient Mexico, where thousands of human victims annually were slain on altars, and where wars were made on the plea that the gods were hungry. And to these religious homicides which, in early stages, ministered to the supposed appetites of the gods, must be added the religious homicides which, in comparatively modern times, have been committed, alike by Catholics and Protestants, to appease the supposed wrath of their God against misbelievers.

Under that theory which regards the rightness of acts as constituted by fulfillment of divine injunctions, these religious homicides, in common with sundry of those above described, were prompted by one of the motives we class as proethical.

§ 126. From these aggressions, taking the form of homicides, which are not consequent on personal or tribal antagonisms, let us pass to those of which bloodthirstiness is the cause, with or without enmity, personal or tribal.

I will begin with an instance which I have named elsewhere–that of the Fijians, among whom murder was thought honorable. Credence to this statement, which otherwise one would be inclined to withhold, is justified by knowledge of kindred statements respecting other peoples. Livingstone tells us that a Bushman

sat by the fire relating his early adventures: among these was killing five other Bushmen. "Two," said he, counting on his fingers, "were females, one a male, and the other two calves." "What a villain you are to boast of killing women and children of your own nation! What will God say when you appear before him?" "He will say," replied he, "that I was a very clever fellow." . . . I discovered that, though he was employing the word which is used among the Bakwains when speaking of the Deity, he had only the idea of a chief, and was all the time referring to Sekomi.

Still more astounding is the state of things, and the kind of sentiment, described by Wilson and Felkin in their account of Uganda. Here is an illustrative incident.

A young page of Mtesa’s [king of Uganda], son of a subordinate chief, was frequently employed to bring me messages from the palace, and one morning came down to my house, and informed me with great glee that he had just killed his father. I inquired why he had done this, and he said that he was tired of being merely a servant, and wished to become a chief, and said so to Mtesa, who replied, "Oh, kill your father, and you will become a chief"; and the boy did so.

That, among peoples who lead lives of aggression, it is a virtue to be a destroyer and a vice to be peaceful, sundry cases prove.

The name of "harami"–brigand–is still honorable among the Hejazi Bedouins. . . . He, on the other hand, who is lucky enough, as we should express it, to die in his bed, is called "fatis" (carrion, the corps crévé of the Klephts); his weeping mother will exclaim, "O that my son had perished of a cut-throat!" and her attendant crones will suggest, with deference, that such evil came of the will of Allah.

How profound may become the belief in the virtue of manslaughter, is made clear by the Kukis, whose paradise is "the heritage of the man who has killed the largest number of his enemies in life, the people killed by him attending on him as his slaves."

With this supposed divine approval of manslaying, we may join the social approval manifested in other cases. Among the Pathans, one of the tribes on the northwest frontier of the Punjab, "there is hardly a man whose hands are unstained," and "each person counts up his murders." That, under wild social conditions, a sentiment of this kind readily arises, was shown in California during the gold period. Murderers "continued to notch the number of their victims on neatly kept hilts of pistols or knives."

§ 127. If from the implied or expressed belief in the honroableness of private homicide, illustrated by some still-extant savages, we turn to the belief in the honorableness of that public and wholesale homicide for which the occasions are given by real or pretended intertribal or international injuries, ancient records of barbarous and semicivilized peoples furnish illustrations in abundance.

Among the gods of the primitive Indians, Indra is lauded in the Rig-Veda as the devastating warrior, and Agni, too, "was born, the slayer of the enemy" and the "destroyer of cities." Emulating their gods, the warriors of the Rig-Veda and the Mahabharata glory in conquests. Propitiating Indra with deep libations, the hero prays: "Let us share the wealth of him whom thou hast slain; bring us to the household of him who is hard to vanquish." And then with such prayers, common to militant peoples, may be joined passages from the Mahabharata recommending atrocities.

Let a man inspire his enemy with confidence for some real reason, and then smite him at the proper time, when his foot has slipped a little.

Without cutting into an enemy’s marrow, without doing something dreadful, without smiting like a killer of fish, a man does not attain great prosperity.

A son, a brother, a father, or a friend, who present any obstacle to one’s interests are to be slain.

After these early Aryans, look now at some of the early Semites. Still more extreme in the implied praiseworthiness of sanguinary deeds, are they shown to have been by their records. Assyrian kings glorify themselves in inscriptions describing wholesale slaughters and the most savage cruelties. Sennacherib, driving his chariot through "deep pools of blood," boasts–"with blood and flesh its wheels were clogged"; Assurbanipal says of the conquered–"their tongues I pulled out," "the limbs cut off I caused to be eaten by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven"; Tiglath-Pileser’s account of the slain Muskayans is that "their carcases covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains"; in an inscription of Assur-natsir-pal come the words–"I am a weapon that spares not," the revolted nobles "I flayed, with their skins I covered the pyramid," "their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust"; and of his enemies Shalmaneser II says–"with their blood I dyed the mountains like wool." Evidently the expectation was that men of after times would admire these merciless destructions, and this implies belief in their righteousness; for we cannot assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves eternally infamous.

Omitting evidence furnished in plenty by the histories of the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, we find kindred thoughts and feelings betrayed by the peoples of northern Europe. The Gauls of early days, galloping home with the heads of their enemies slung to their saddles, displayed them on stakes or preserved them in chests. According to Cæsar, the Suevi and Germans generally "esteem it their greatest praise . . . that the lands about their territories lie unoccupied to a very great extent." And the fact that the Norse paradise was conceived as a place for daily combats, sufficiently shows how dominant was the belief in the virtue of successful aggression. That throughout the Middle Ages successful aggression was thought the one thing worth living for, needs no proof. History which is little more than the Newgate Calendar of nations, describing political burglaries and their results, yields illustrations on every page: "arms and the man" supply the universal theme. No better way of showing the dominant sentiment down to comparatively recent times, can be found than that of quoting the mottoes of nobles, of which here are some English ones. Earl of Rosslyn–"Fight"; Baron Hawke–"Strike"; Earl of Sefton–"To conquer is to live"; the Marquis of Downshire–"By God and my sword I will obtain"; the Earl of Carysfort–"This hand is hostile"; Count Magawley–"The red hand to victory"; the Duke of Athole–"Forth, fortune, and fill the fetters." And the general spirit is well shown by lines illustrating the motto of the Middleton family:

My sword, my spear my shaggy shield,
These make me lord of all below,
And he who fears the lance to wield
Beneath my shaggy shield must bow,
His lands, his vineyards must resign,
For all that cowards have is mine.

Mottoes being the expressions of feelings held above all others worthy, and tacitly assuming the existence of like feelings in others, those quoted imply the social sanction given to aggressiveness; and we need but recall the religious ceremonies on the initiation of a knight, to see that his militant course of life was supposed to have a divine sanction also. War, even unprovoked war, was supported by a proethical sentiment.

Nor is it essentially otherwise even now. Thinly veiled by conventional respect for the professed religious creed, the old spirit continually discloses itself. Much more feeling than is excited by a hymn, is excited by the song–"The Hardy Norseman"; and pride in the doing of the "seawolves" who "conquered Normandy" shown by the line–"Oh, ne’er should we forget our sires," is habitually sympathized in. No reading is more popular than narratives of battles; and the epithet "great," as applied to Alexander, Karl, Peter, Frederick, Napoleon, is applied notwithstanding all the atrocities they committed. Occasionally, indeed, we meet with overt expression of this sentiment. Lord Wolseley says of the soldier: "He must believe that his duties are the noblest that fall to man’s lot. He must be taught to despise all those of civil life": a sentiment which is not limited to the "duties" of the soldier as a defender of his country, which in our day he never performs, but is extended to his "duties" as an invader of other countries, and especially those of weak peoples: the appetite for aggression transforms baseness into nobility. When, in the Hindoo epic, the god Indra is described as conquering a woman, we are astonished to find a victory which we should consider so cowardly lauded by the poet; and when, on the walls of Karnak, we see Rameses represented as a giant holding by the hair half-a-dozen dwarfs, and cutting off all their heads with one sweep of his sword, we think it strange that he should have thought to glorify himself by depicting an easy triumph of strong over weak. But when with arms of precision, with shells, with rockets, with far-reaching cannon, peoples possessed only of feeble weapons are conquered with as great facility as a man conquers a child, there comes applause in our journals, with titles and rewards to the leaders! The "duties" of the soldier so performed are called "noble"; while, held up in contrast with them, those of the peaceful citizen are called despicable!

Beyond question, then, the sentiment which rejoices in personal superiority and, not asking for equitable cause, is ready under an authority it willingly accepts, to slaughter so-called enemies, is still dominant. The social sanction, and the reflected inner sanction due to it, constitute a proethical sentiment which, in international relations, remains supreme.

§ 128. The ethics of enmity thus illustrated, very little qualified in some tribes of savages, especially cannibals, qualified in but a moderate degree in ancient semicivilized societies, and continuing predominant during the development of civilized societies, has been qualified more and more by the ethics of amity as the internal social life has disciplined men in cooperation: the relative prosperities of nations, while in part determined by their powers of conquest, having been all along in part determined by the extents to which, in daily intercourse, the aggressiveness of their members has been restrained.

Such peoples as have produced literatures show us, in relatively early days, the rise of an ethics of amity set in opposition to the ethics of enmity. Proceeding, as the expressions of it do, from the mouths of poets and sages, we may not measure by them the beliefs which then prevailed; any more than we may now measure the prevailing beliefs by the injunctions to forgive enemies, perpetually uttered by our priests. But even the occasional enunciation of altruistic sentiments, occurring in ancient societies after there had been long-established states of relatively peaceful life, is significant. And it is interesting to observe, too, how after the absolute selfishness of the antagonistic activities, a violent reaction led to the preaching of absolute unselfishness. Thus while of that vast compilation which constitutes the Mahabharata, the older parts are saguinary in sentiment, the latter parts contain condemnations of needless warfare. It is said that fighting is the worst means of gaining victory, and that a king should extend his conquests without fighting. And there are much more pronounced reprobations of aggressive action, as this:

Treat others as thou would’st thyself be treated.
Do nothing to thy neighbor, which hereafter
Thou would’st not have thy neighbor do to thee.
A man obtains a rule of action by looking on his neighbor as himself.

And then in the writings of an Indian moralist, said by Sir William Jones to date three centuries B.C., we read the extreme statement: "A good man who thinks only of benefiting his enemy has no feelings of hostility towards him even at the moment of being destroyed by him." Similarly among the Persians, we find Sadi writing–"Show kindness even to thy foes"; and again–"The men of God’s true faith, I’ve heard, grieve not the hearts e’en of their foes." In like manner among the Chinese, the teaching of Lao-Tsze was that

Peace is his highest aim. . . . he who rejoices at the destruction of human life is not fit to be entrusted with power in the world. He who has been instrumental in killing many people should move on over them with bitter tears.

Confucius said: "In carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good." Mencius held that "he who has no pleasure in killing men can" unite the empire; and of the warlike he said that:

When contentions about territory are the ground on which they fight, they slaughter men, till the fields are filled with them. When some struggle for a city is the ground on which they fight, they slaughter men till the city is filled with them. . . . Death is not enough for such a crime.

Early as was his time, Mencius evidently entertained higher sentiments than do "the western barbarians" at the present time. The characterization which has been given to slavery–"the sum of all villainies"–would probably have been given by him to aggressive war.

In section 573 of The Principles of Sociology, as also in section 437, instances are given of various tribes which, nonaggressive externally are also nonaggressive internally–tribes in which crimes of violence are so rare that scarcely any control is needed. There may be added a few other examples. There are the aborigines of Sumatra, a simple people who, thrust into the interior by the Malays, are described by Marsden as "mild, peaceable, and forbearing"–that is nonaggressive. There are the Thârus, inhabiting a retired strip of forest at the foot of the Himalayas, which affords them a refuge from invaders, and who are described as "a peaceful and good-natured race." Further, we have a specially relevant testimony given by different authorities respecting the Iroquois. In his work, The League of the Iroquois, Morgan says: "It was the boast of the Iroquois that the great object of their confederacy was peace–to break up the spirit of perpetual warfare, which had wasted the red race from age to age." And then clear indication of the results is contained in the following statement made by the same writer: "Crimes and offenses were so unfrequent under their social system, that the Iroquois can scarcely be said to have had a criminal code."

Here, however, the truth which it specially concerns us to note is that during states of hostility which make aggression habitual, it acquires a social sanction, and in some cases a divine sanction: there is a proethical sentiment enlisted on its behalf. Contrariwise, in the cases just referred to, aggressiveness meets with reprobation. An ethical sentiment, rightly so-called, produces repugnance to it.

Nor was it otherwise with the Hebrews. After the chronic antagonisms of nomadic life had been brought to an end by their captivity, and after their subsequent wars of conquest had ended in a comparatively peaceful state, the expression of altruistic sentiments became marked; until, in Leviticus, we see emerging the principle, often regarded as exclusively Christian–"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"–a principle, however, which appears to have been limited to "the congregation of the children of Israel." And then in later days by the Essenes, as well as by Christ and his apostles, the ethics of amity, extended so as to include enemies, was carried even to the extreme of turning the cheek to the smiter.

§ 129. Into what general induction may these facts be grouped? Taken in the mass, the evidence shows, as we might expect, that in proportion as intertribal and international antagonisms are great and constant, the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of enmity predominate; and, conflicting as they do with the ideas and feelings belonging to the ethics of amity, proper to the internal life of a society they in greater or less degrees suppress these, and fill with aggressions the conduct of man to man.

Miscellaneous kinds of homicide, such as were noted at the outset–infanticide, killing for cannibalism, immolations at funerals, sacrifices to the gods–are characteristic of societies in which warfare is habitual. Those most atrocious of man-eaters, the Fijians, among whom every one carried his life in his hand, implied their ingrained militancy by their conception of the other world, where their gods "make war, and kill and eat each another," and bear such names as "the murderer," "fresh from the cutting up or slaughter," &c.; where a chief arriving after death, boasts that he has "destroyed many towns, and slain many in war"; and where "men who have not slain an enemy" suffer "the most degrading of all punishments." The Bushmen, exhibiting pride in private murder, pass their lives in ceaseless antagonism with men and beasts around–aggressing and aggressed upon. So, too, the Bedouin tribes instanced as thinking any death save one suffered in combat disgraceful, commit never-ending aggressions. And the Waganda, the king of whom suggested to his page the parricide gladly carried out by him, are soldiers noted for "their warlike character, which tinges the whole of their life and government."

If, from the relations as illustrated in these extreme cases, we pass to the relations as illustrated in developing societies, we see that with decrease of external aggressiveness there goes decrease of internal aggressiveness. During the Merovingian period, along with chronic militant activities on large and small scales, occurring even to the extent of wars between towns, perpetual violence characterized the relations of individuals: kings murdered their queens, royal fathers were murdered by their sons, princely brothers murdered brothers, while bloodshed and cruelty prevailed everywhere. In the next period the conquests of Charlemagne were accompanied by atrocities large and small. He beheaded 4,000 Saxons in one day and inflicted death on those who refused baptism or ate flesh during Lent. Similarly throughout the feudal ages, recurring international fights were accompanied by perpetual fights among nobles; the chroniclers describe little else than crimes; and the slaughtering of serfs by knights was passed over as a thing not calling for reproach. But as the course of ages and the consolidation of kingdoms brought diminution of a diffused warfare, and as, by consequence, industrial activities, with resulting internal cooperation, filled larger spaces in men’s lives, the more unscrupulous forms of aggressiveness came to be reprobated, while approbation was given to conduct characterized by regard for others. And though modern times have seen great wars, yet, since the militant activities have not been all-pervading as in earlier times, the sentiments appropriate to peaceful activities have not been so universally repressed. Moreover, as we elsewhere saw (Principles of Sociology, sec. 573), the brutality of citizens to one another has from time to time increased along with renewed militancy and decreased along with cessation of it; while there have been concomitant modifications in the ethical standard.

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CHAPTER IV.

ROBBERY.↩

§ 130. Between physically injuring another, partially or to the death, and injuring him either by taking possession of his body and labor, or of his property, the kinship in nature is obvious. Both direct and indirect injuries are comprehended under the title "Aggression"; and the second, like the first, might, without undue straining of words, have been brought within the limits of the last chapter. But, as before implied, it has seemed more convenient to separate the aggression which nearly always has bloodshed for its concomitant, from the aggression which is commonly bloodless. Here we have to deal with this last.

The extreme form of this last aggression is that which ends in capturing a man and enslaving him. Though to class this under the head of robbery is to do some violence to the name, yet we may reasonably say that to take a man from himself, and use his powers for other purposes than his own, is robbery in the highest degree. Instead of depriving him of some product of past labor voluntarily undertaken, it deprives him of the products of future labors which he is compelled to undertake. At any rate, whether rightly to be called robbery or not, it is to be classed as an aggression, if not so grave as that of inflicting death, yet next to it in gravity

It is needless here to furnish proofs that this kind of aggression has been, from very early stages of human progress, a concomitant of militancy. Eating the vanquished or turning them into bondsmen, commonly became alternatives where intertribal conflicts were perpetual. From the incidental making of captives there has frequently grown up the intentional making of captives. An established policy has dictated invasions to procure workers or victims. But whether with or without intention, this robbery in the highest degree has been, throughout, a concomitant of habitual war; could not, indeed, have arisen to any extent without war.

A closely allied form of robbery–somewhat earlier, since we find it in rude tribes which do not make slaves–is the stealing of women. Of course, along with victory over combatants there has gone appropriation of the noncombatants belonging to them; and women have consequently been in all early stages among the prizes of conquerors. In books treating of primitive marriage, like that of Mr. McLennan, there will be found evidence that the stealing of women not unfrequently becomes the normal process by which the numbers of a tribe are maintained. It is found best to avoid the cost of rearing them, and to obtain by fighting or theft the requisite number from other tribes. Becoming a traditional policy this custom often acquires a strong sanction; and is supposed by some to have originated the interdict against marriage with those of the same clan. But, however this may be, we habitually find women regarded as the most valued spoils of victory; and often, where the men are killed, the women are preserved to become mothers. It was so with the Caribs in their cannibal days; and it was so with the Hebrews, as shown in Numbers xxxi. 17—18, where we read that, after a successful war, all the wives and the males among the children were ordered by Moses to be killed, while the virgins were reserved for the use of the captors. (See also Deuteronomy xxi.)

Now the truth here to be observed is that in societies which have not risen to high stages, the ethical sentiment, or rather the proethical sentiment, makes no protest against robberies of these kind; but, contrariwise, gives countenance to them. The cruel treatment of prisoners delineated in Egyptian and Assyrian wall paintings and wall-sculptures, implies, what the records tell, that there was a social sanction for their subsequent bondage. Similarly, we do not see in the literature of the Greeks, any more than in the literature of the Hebrews, that the holding of men in slavery called forth moral reprobation. It was the same with the capture of women and the making wives of them, or more frequently concubines: this was creditable rather than discreditable. With the social sanction for the stealing of women by the early Aryans, as narrated in the Mahabharata, there was also a divine sanction; and it is manifest that among the Hebrews there was social if not divine sanction for the taking of the virgins of Jabesh Gilead for wives, and also for the stealing of the "daughters of Shiloh" Judges xxi).

Under this head it needs only to add that modern progress with its prolonged discipline of internal amity as opposed to that of external enmity, has been accompanied by disappearance of these grossest forms of robbery. The ethical sentiment, rightly so-called, has been developed to the extent needful for suppressing them.

§ 131. Success in war being honorable, all accompaniments and signs of such success become honorable. Hence, along with the enslaving of captives if they are not eaten, and along with the appropriation of their women as concubines or wives, there goes the seizing of their property. A natural sequence is that not only during war but at other times, robbery of enemies, and by implication of strangers, who are ordinarily classed as enemies, is distinguished from robbery of fellow tribesmen: the first being called good even when the last is called bad.

Among the Comanches "a young man is not thought worthy to be counted in the list of warriors, till he has returned from some successful plundering expedition, . . . the greatest thieves are . . . the most respectable members of society." A Patagonian is considered "as indifferently capable of supporting a wife unless he is an adept in the art of stealing from a stranger." Livingstone says of the East Africans:

In tribes which have been accustomed to cattle-stealing, the act is not considered immoral, in the way that theft is. Before I knew the language well, I said to a chief, "You stole the cattle of so and so." "No, I did not steal them," was the reply "I only lifted them." The word "gapa" is identical with the Highland term for the same deed.

Concerning the Kalmucks the account of Pallas is that they are addicted to theft and robbery on a large scale, but not of people of their own tribe. And Atkinson asserts the like of the Kirghiz: "Thieving of this kind [stealing horses or camels from one of the same tribe] is instantly punished among the Kirghiz; but a baranta, like the sacking of a town, is honorable plunder." Hence doubtless arises that contrast, seeming to us so strange, between the treatment which robber-tribes, such as Bedouins, show to strangers under their roofs and the opposite treatment they show to them after they have departed. Says Atkinson: "My host [a Kirghiz chief] said Koubaldos [another Kirghiz chief to whom I was going] would not molest us at his aoul, but that some of his bands would be set on our track and try to plunder us on our march." Perhaps it is among the Turkomans that we find the most marked illustrations of the way in which predatory tribes come to regard theft as honorable. By the people of Merv, raids "even among members of the same tribe are not, or were not until lately, looked upon in the light of robberies"; but the raids must be on a respectable scale. "It is curious that, while red-handed murder and robbery were a recognized means of existence among the Tekkés, thievery, in the sense of stealing from the person, or filching an article from a stall of the bazaar, was despised." And Mr. O’Donovan subsequently relates that when urging on the Merv Council the cessation of marauding expeditions, a member "with angry astonishment" asked "how in the name of Allah they were going to live if raids were not to be made"! To all which evidence we may add the facts that "the Pathan mother often prays that her son may be a successful robber," that according to Rowney the like is done by the Afridi mother, and the further fact that among the Turkomans a celebrated robber becomes a saint, and pilgrimages are made to his tomb to sacrifice and pray.

While, in most of these cases, a marked distinction is recognized between robbery outside the tribe and robbery within the tribe, in other cases the last as well as the first is deemed not only legitimate but praiseworthy. Dalton says of the Kukis: "The accomplishment most esteemed amongst them was dexterity in thieving." Similarly, according to Gilmour, "In Mongolia known thieves are treated as respectable members of society. As long as they manage well and are successful, little or no odium seems to attach to them." Of another Asiatic tribe we read: "They [Angamis] are expert thieves and glory in the art, for among them, as with the Spartans of old, theft is only dishonorable and obnoxious to punishment when discovered in the act of being committed." From America may be instanced the case of the Chinooks, by whom "cunning theft is regarded as honorable; but they despise and often punish the inexpert thief." A case in Africa is furnished by the Waganda, warlike and bloodthirsty among whom "the distinctions between meum and tuum are very ill-defined; and indeed all sin is only relative, the crime consisting in being detected." And then, passing to Polynesia, we find that among the Fijians "success, without discovery is deemed quite enough to make thieving virtuous, and a participation in the ill-gotten gain honorable." So that in these instances skill or courage sanctifies any invasion of property rights.

§ 132. Evidence yielded by the historic races proves that along with a less active life of external enmity and a more active life of internal amity, there goes a change of ethical ideas and sentiments, allied to that noted in the last chapter.

The Rig-Veda describes the thievish acts of the gods. Vishnu "stole the cooked mess" at the libations of Indra. When Tvashtri began to perform a soma-sacrifice in honor of his son who had been slain by Indra, and refused, on the ground of his homicide, to allow the latter to assist at the ceremony then "Indra interrupted the celebration, and drank off the soma by force."

The moral principle thus exemplified by the gods is paralleled by the moral principle recommended for men: "Even if he were to covet the property of other people, he is bound as a Kshatriya to take it by force of arms, and never to beg for it." But the Indian literature of later ages, displaying the results of settled life, inculcates opposite principles.

Passing over illustrative facts furnished by other ancient historic peoples, it will suffice if we glance at the facts which medieval and modern histories furnish. Dasent tells us of the Norsemen that "Robbery and piracy in a good straightforward wholesale way were honored and respected." Similarly with the primitive Germans. Describing them, Caesar says:

Robberies which are committed beyond the boundaries of each state bear no infamy. . . . And when any of their chiefs has said in an assembly "that he will be their leader, let those who are willing to follow, give in their names"; they who approve of both the enterprise and the man arise and promise their assistance, and are applauded by the people; such of them as have not followed him are considered deserters and traitors, and confidence in all matters is afterward refused them.

Not to attempt the impossible task of tracing through some ten centuries the relation between the perpetual wars, large and small, public and private, and the plundering of men by one another, wholesale and retail, it will suffice to single out special periods. Of France in the early feudal period, Ste. Palaye says: Our old writers denounce the avarice, greed, deceit, perjury, pillage, theft, and brigandage, and other excesses of an unbridled soldiery equally devoid of principles, morals, and sentiments." During the Hundred Years War a regime of robbery became universal. Among the nobles the desire for plunder was the motive for fighting. Everywhere there was brigandage on a large scale, as well as on a small scale. In addition to multitudinous scattered highwaymen there were organized companies of robbers who had their fortresses, lived luxuriously on the spoils of the surrounding country, kidnapped children for pages and women for concubines, and sold at high prices safe-conducts to travelers. And then, along with all these plunderings on land, there was habitual piracy at sea. Not only states, but towns and individuals equipped vessels for buccaneering; and there were established refuges for marine freebooters. Take, again, the evidence furnished by the Thirty Years War in Germany. Universal marauding became the established system. Soldiers were brigands. Not only did they plunder the people everywhere, but they used "thousandfold torments" to make them disclose the places where they had hidden their goods; and the peasants had to "till their fields armed to the teeth" against their fellow countrymen. Meanwhile the soldiers were themselves cheated by their officers, small and great, who some of them made large fortunes by their accumulated embezzlements, at the same time that the princes robbed the nation by debasing the coinage.

Involved and obscure as the evidence is, no one can fail to recognize the broad fact that with progress towards a state in which war is less frequent, and does not, as of old, implicate almost everyone, there has been a decrease of dishonesty and a higher appreciation of honesty; to the extent that now robbery of a stranger has come to be as much a crime as robbery of a fellow citizen. It is true that there are still thefts. It is true that there are still multitudinous frauds. But the thefts are not so numerous, and the frauds are not of such gross kinds as they were. From the days when kings frequently tricked their creditors and shopkeepers boasted of their ability to pass bad money as Defoe tells us, we have somewhat advanced in the respect for meum and tuum. Nay, as shown by Pike’s History of Crime, the contrast is marked even between the amount of transgression against property during the war period ending in 1815 and the recent amount of such transgression.

§ 133. But of the relationship alleged, the clearest proofs are furnished by contrasts between the warlike uncivilized tribes instanced above, and the peaceful uncivilized tribes. Here are traits presented by some of these last.

Not only, according to Hartshorne, is the harmless Wood-Veddah perfectly honest, but he cannot conceive it possible that a man should "take that which does not belong to him." Of the Esquimaux, among whom war is unknown, we read that "they are uniformly described as most scrupulously honest"; and any such qualification of this statement as is made by Bancroft, refers to Esquimaux demoralized by contact with white traders. Of the Fuegians we learn from Darwin that "if any present was designed for one canoe, and it fell near another, it was invariably given to the right owner." And Snow says they were very honorable in their commercial dealings with him. Concerning certain of the Papuans on the southern coast of New Guinea, who are described as too independent for combined action in war, we read that "in their bargaining the natives have generally been very honest, far more so than our own people." And concerning others of this race, Kops tells us that the natives of Dory give evidence "of an inclination to right and justice, and strong moral principles. Theft is considered by them as a very grave offense, and is of very rare occurrence." A like character is ascribed by Kolff to the aborigines of Lette. In The Principles of Sociology, sections 437 and 574, I have given testimonies respecting the honesty of the peaceful Todas, Santáls, Lepchas, Bodo and Dhimáls, Hos, Chakmás, Jakuns. Here I add some further testimonies. Consul Baker tells us of the aborigines of Vera Cruz, now a subject race averse to military service, that "the Indian is honest, and seldom yields to even the greatest temptation to steal." In his description of a race inhabiting a "long strip of swamp and forest" at "the foot of the Himalayas," Mr. Nesfield says that "their honesty is vouched for by a hundred stories; such at least is the character of the Tharu, so long as he remains in the safe seclusion of his solitary wilds," where he is free from hostilities. And then, with the fact stated by Morgan concerning the Iroquois, that "theft, the most despicable of human crimes, was scarcely known among them," we have to join the fact that their league had been formed for the preservation of peace among its component peoples and had succeeded in its purpose for many generations.

[I-361]

CHAPTER V.

REVENGE.↩

§ 134. Among intelligent creatures the struggle for existence entails aggressions. Where these are not the destructive aggressions of carnivorous creatures on their prey, they are the aggressions, not necessarily destructive but commonly violent, of creatures competing with one another for food. Animals severally impelled by hunger are inevitably led into antagonisms by endeavors severally to seize what ever food they can; and injuries, more or less decided, are usual concomitants.

Aggression leads to counteraggression. Where both creatures have powers of offense, they are likely both to use them; especially where their powers of offense are approximately equal, that is, where they are creatures of the same species: such creatures being also those commonly brought into competition. That results of this kind are inevitable, will be manifest on remembering that among members of the same species, those individuals which have not, in any considerable degree, resented aggressions, must have ever tended to disappear, and to have left behind those which have with some effect made counteraggressions. Fights, therefore, not only of predatory animals with prey but of animals of the same kind with one another, have been unavoidable from the first and have continued to the last.

Every fight is a succession of retaliations–bite being given for bite, and blow for blow. Usually these follow one another in quick succession, but not always. There is a postponed retaliation; and a postponed retaliation is what we call revenge. It may be postponed for so short a time as to be merely a recommencement of the fight, or it may be postponed for days, or it may be postponed for years. And hence the retaliation which constitutes what we call revenge, diverges insensibly from the retaliations which characterize a conflict.

But the practice, alike of immediate revenge and of postponed revenge, establishes itself as in some measure a check upon aggression; since the motive to aggress is checked by the consciousness that a counteraggression will come: if not at once then after a time.

§ 135. Among human beings in early stages, there hence arises not only the practice of revenge but a belief that revenge is imperative–that revenge is a duty. Here, from Sir George Grey’s account of the Australians, we have a graphic picture of the sentiment and its results:

The holiest duty a native is called on to perform is that of avenging the death of his nearest relation, for it is his peculiar duty to do so: until he has fulfilled this task, he is constantly taunted by the old women; his wives, if he be married, would soon quit him; if he is unmarried, not a single young woman would speak to him; his mother would constantly cry, and lament she should ever have given birth to so degenerate a son; his father would treat him with contempt, and reproaches would constantly be sounded in his ear.

Of illustrations from North America that furnished by the Sioux may be named. Burton says: "The obstinate revengefulness of their vendetta is proverbial; they hate with the ‘hate of Hell’; and, like the Highlanders of old, if the author of an injury escape them, they vent their rage upon the innocent, because he is of the same clan or color." From South America a case given by Schomburgk may be quoted: "My revenge is not yet satisfied, there still lives a member of the hated family," said a Guiana native, whose relative he suspected to have been poisoned. Here, again, is an instance from Williams’ account of the Fijians.

At that hour of death, he never forgets an enemy, and at that time he never forgives one. The dying man mentions his foe, that his children may perpetuate his hatred–it may be against his own son–and kill him at the first opportunity.

And then Thomson tells us of the New Zealanders that "not to avenge the dead, according to native law indicates the most craven spirit." Passing to Asia I may quote Macrae’s account of the Kukis.

Like all savage people, the Kukis are of a most vindictive disposition; blood must always be shed for blood. . . . If a man should happen to be killed by an accidental fall from a tree, all his relations assemble . . . and reduce it to chips.

In Petherick, we read that the shedding of blood is "an offense with Arabs that neither time nor contrition can obliterate, thirst for revenge descending from father to son, and even through successive generations." So too of the East Africans Burton writes:

Revenge is a ruling passion, as the many rancorous fratricidal wars that have prevailed between kindred clans, even for a generation, prove. Retaliation and vengeance are, in fact, their great agents of moral control.

In all these cases we see that either avowedly or tacitly revenge is considered a moral obligation.

The early stages of various existing people yield equally clear evidence. In his Japan in Days of Yore, Mr. Dening translates the life of Musashi, published by the Momtusho (Education Department), narrating a prolonged vendetta full of combats and murders; and, in partial sympathy with the Japanese educationists, remarks that his hero’s acts of undying revenge, displayed "so many of the nobler aspects of human nature" and are "calculated to inspire confidence in humanity." A kindred spirit is shown in the early Indian literature. The gods are revengeful. As described in the Rig-Veda, "Agni swallows his enemies, tears their skin, minces their members, and throws them before the wolves to be eaten by them, or by the shrieking vultures." And the ascribed character of the gods is participated in by their devotees, as instance the invocation:

Indra and Soma, burn the Rakshas, destroy them, throw them down, ye two Bulls, the people that grow in darkness. Hew down the madmen, suffocate them, kill them, hurl them away and slay the voracious. Indra and Soma, up together against the cursing demon! May he bum and hiss like an oblation in the fire! Put your everlasting hatred on the villain.

The narrative of the "ferocious and deadly struggle" carried on "with all the frenzied wrath of demons," as Wheeler says, is full of vows of revenge–a revenge extending to horrible treatment of enemies’ remains. Nor do we find a different sentiment displayed among the Hebrews, whether in the ascribed actions of Jahveh or the actions of his worshippers. The command to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven" (Deuteronomy xxv 19), and the fulfillment of this command by Saul and Samuel, to the extent of destroying not only the Amalekites but all their cattle, is a typical example of the implied divine revenge–a sample variously paralleled in other cases. And with this sanctification of revenge we see that the acts and feelings of the Hebrews themselves harmonized. The wreaking of vengeance was bequeathed as a duty; as when David, after enjoining Solomon to walk in the ways of the Lord, told him not to spare the son of a man who had cursed him (and who had been forgiven on oath), saying "but his hoar head bring thou down to the grave with blood" (1 Kings ii. 9).

It is superfluous to illustrate in detail the kindred sentiments and ideas of European peoples throughout medaeval times. Most of the political and private incidents narrated exhibit them. To inflict vengeance was among them, as now among savages, considered an obligation; and when, occasionally the spirit flagged in men it was kept alive by women, as in the Merovingian period by Fredegonde and Brunehaut. Then in later centuries there were chronic family feuds between nobles everywhere, transmitted from generation to generation. And the spirit was still active down to the time of the Abbé Brantôme, who, in his will, enjoins a nephew to execute vengeance on his behalf should he be injured when too old to avenge himself. Nay the vendetta, once so general, is even now not extinct in the East of Europe.

Though, throughout the modern civilized world, not perturbed everywhere and always by conflicts, life does not furnish such multitudinous examples of like meaning, yet survival of the ethics of enmity in so far as it enjoins revenge, is sufficiently manifest. Duels almost daily occurring somewhere or other on the Continent, exhibit the conceived obligation under its private form; and under its public form we have before us a striking example in the persistent desire which the French cherish to punish the Germans for defeating them–a desire of which the strength has lately (August 1891) been shown by the remarkable fact that while professedly enthusiastic advocates of liberty and upholders of free institutions, they have been lauding "the noble Russian people" and the despotic Czar who holds them in bondage; and all because they hope thus to be aided in their wished-for fight with Germany. Clearly the appropriate expression of their feeling is–Not that we love freedom less but that we love revenge more.

§ 136. But, while societies have been in course of growth and consolidation, there have been occasional expressions of ideas and sentiments opposite to these–occasional expressions which, as they are associated with the arrival at more settled social states, may be fairly regarded as consequent upon a diminution of warlike activities.

Various illustrations are furnished by the literature of Hindostan. In the code of Manu we read:

Wound not another, though by him provoked,
Do no one injury by thought or deed,
Utter no word to pain thy fellow creatures.

And again, in another place, there is the exhortation–

Treat no one with disdain, with patience bear
Reviling language; with an angry man
Be never angry; blessings give for curses.

Of like spirit is the following from the Cural: "The do no evil even to enemies will be called the chief of virtues." So, too, among some of the Persians. In their literature of the seventh century we find the passage–"Think not that the valor of a man consists only in courage and force; if you can rise above wrath and forgive, you are of a value inestimable." At a later date, namely in a story of Sadi, there occurs the injunction:

Hast thou been injured? suffer it and clear
Thyself from guilt in pardoning others’ sin.

And still more extreme is the doctrine we find in Hafiz, as translated by Sir William Jones:

Learn from yon orient shell to love thy foe,
And store with pearls the hand, that brings thee woe,
Free, like you rock, from base vindictive pride,
Imblaze with gems the wrist, that rends thy side.

Nor are the writings of the Chinese sages without kindred utterances of sentiment. Lao-Tsze says, "Recompense injury with kindness." So also according to Mencius, "A benevolent man does not lay up anger, nor cherish resentment against his brother, but only regards him with affection and love." While Confucius, in conformity with his doctrine of the mean, expresses a less extreme view:

"What do you say concerning the principle that injury should be recompensed with kindness?" The Master said, "With what then will you recompense kindness? Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness."

In the later stages of Hebrew civilization, we similarly find the social and divine sanctions for revenge occasionally qualified–a mingling of opposed ideas and sentiments. While, in Ecclesiasticus xxx. 6, a father is regarded as happy who leaves "an avenger against his enemies," yet in chapter x. 6 there is an injunction to "bear not hatred" for wrong received–an injunction containing in germ the ethical principle which, centuries later, took shape in Christianity.

§ 137. Proofs that decline of vindictiveness and growth of forgiveness are associated with decrease of militancy and increase of peaceful cooperation, cannot be clearly disentangled from the facts; since the two kinds of life have nearly everywhere, and at all times, been associated in one or other proportion. But to such general evidence as the foregoing quotations furnish, may be added some evidence furnished by existing societies.

There is the fact that throughout the chief nations of Europe, the family vendetta has disappeared during a period in which the conflicts of nations have become less constant, and the peaceful exchange of services within each nation more active: a contrast between ancient and modern which asserted itself soonest where the industrial type was earliest developed, namely among ourselves.

Again, there is the fact that in our own society with its comparatively small number of soldiers and a militancy less predominant than that of continental societies with their vast armies and warlike attitudes, there has been a suppression of the revenge for private insults, while this with them continues; and so far has the vindictive spirit declined that an injured man who shows persistent animosity towards one who has injured him, is reprobated rather than applauded: forgiveness is, at any rate by many tacitly approved.

But if we seek a case in which the virtue supposed to be especially Christian is practiced, we must seek it among the non-Christians. Certain peaceful tribes of the Indian hills are characterized by it, as witness this account of the Lepchas:

They are wonderfully honest, theft being scarcely known among them; they rarely quarrel among themselves. . . . They are singularly forgiving of injuries, when time is given them, after hasty loss of temper. Although they were ready enough to lodge complaints before the magistrate against one another in cases of assault and other offenses, they rarely prosecuted to a decision, generally preferring to submit to arbitration, or making mutual amends and concessions. They are averse to soldiering, and cannot be induced to enlist in our army even for local service in the Hills.

Thus we get both positive and negative evidence that the revengefulness within each society is proportionate to the habitual conflict with other societies; and that while, at the one extreme, there is a moral sanction for revenge, at the other extreme there is a moral sanction for forgiveness.

[I-369]

CHAPTER VI.

JUSTICE.↩

§ 138. Perhaps the soul of goodness in things evil is by nothing better exemplified than by the good thing, justice, which, in a rudimentary form, exists within the evil thing revenge. Meeting aggression by counteraggression is, in the first place, an endeavor to avoid being suppressed by the aggressor, and to maintain that ability to carry on life which justice implies; and it is, in the second place, an endeavor to enforce justice by establishing an equality with the aggressor: inflicting injuries as great as have been received.

This rude process of balancing claims usually fails to establish equilibrium. Revenge, habitually carried not as far only as suffices to compensate for injuries received but, if possible, farther, evokes re-revenge, which also, if possible, is carried to excess; and so there results chronic wars between tribes and chronic antagonisms between families and between individuals. These commonly continue from generation to generation.

But occasionally there is shown a tendency towards establishment of an equilibrium, by bringing aggression and counteraggression to a definite balance, achieved by measure. Let us look at the evidence.

§ 139. Men of various rude types, as the Australians, constantly show the idea, tacitly asserted and acted upon, that the loss of a life in one tribe must be compensated by the infliction of a death in another tribe; some member of which is known, or supposed, to have caused the said loss of life. And since deaths from disease and old age are, among others, ascribed to the machinations of foes–since equivalent deaths must be inflicted for these also, there have to be frequent balancing of losses. (It seems clear, however, that these revenges and re-revenges cannot be always carried out as alleged. For if not only deaths by violence but deaths by disease entail them the two tribes must soon disappear by mutual extirpation.) Races much more advanced in some cases carry out, not this secret balancing of mortality accounts between tribes, but an overt balancing. This is the case with the Sumatrans, among whom the differences are squared by money payments.

This maintenance of intertribal justice, prompted in part by consciousness of that corporate injury which loss of a member of the tribe entails, and requiring the infliction of an equivalent corporate injury on the offending tribe, has the trait that it is indifferent what member of the offending tribe is killed in compensation: whether it be the guilty man or some innocent man matters not. This conception of intertribal justice is repeated in the conception of inter-family justice. Those early types of social organization in which the family is the unit of composition, show us that in each family there arises an idea allied to the idea of nationality; and there results an allied system of reprisals for the balancing of injuries. The Philippine Islands supply evidence. "In the province of La Isabela, the Negrito and Igorrote tribes keep a regular Dr. and Cr. account of heads." A further interesting illustration is yielded by the Quianganes of Luzon. From an account of them given by Prof. F. Blumentritt, here is a translated passage:

Blood vengeance is a saaed law with the Quianganes. If one plebeian is killed by another, the matter is settled in a sintple manner by killing the murderer or some one of his family who is likewise a plebeian. But if a prominent man or noble is killed by a plebeian, vengeance on the murderer, a mere plebeian, is not enough; the victim of the sin-offering must be an equivalent in rank. Another nobleman must fall for the murdered noble, for their doctrine is–What kind of an equivalent is it to kill some one who is no better than a dog? Hence the family of the slain noble looks around to see if it cannot find a relative of the murderer to wreak vengeance upon, who is also a noble; while the murderer himself is ignored. If no noble can be found among his relatives, the family of the murdered man wait patiently till some one of them is received into the noble’s caste; then the vendetta is prosecuted, although many years may have elapsed. when the blood-feud is satisfied a reconciliation of the contending factions takes place. In all the feuds the heads of the murdered champions are cut off and taken home, and the head-hunters celebrate the affair festally. The skulls are fixed to the front of the house.

Here the need for inflicting an injury of like amount, and so equalizing the losses, is evidently the dominant need. The Semitic peoples in general furnish kindred facts. Burckhardt writes:

It is a received law among all the Arabs, that whoever sheds the blood of a man, owes blood on that account to the family of the slain person. . . . The lineal descendants of all those who were entitled to revenge at the moment of the man-slaughter, inherit this right from their parents.

And respecting this system of administering rude justice by the balancing of deaths between families, Burckhardt remarks: "I am inclined to believe that this salutary institution has contributed, in a greater degree than any other circumstance, to prevent the warlike tribes of Arabia from exterminating one another . . . the terrible ‘blood-revenge’ renders the most inveterate war nearly bloodless." The evident implication being that dread of this persistent revenge, makes members of different families and tribes fearful of killing one another. That with the feelings and practices of existing Semites, those of ancient Semites agreed, there is good reason to believe. The authorization of blood-revenge between families, is implied in 1 Kings ii. 31, 33, as well as elsewhere. How among European peoples in early times, kindred conceptions led to kindred usages, need not be shown in detail. The fact that when the system of taking life for life was replaced by the system of compensations, these were adjusted to ranks, so that the murder of a person more valuable to the group he belonged to was compounded for by a larger fine payable to it, shows how dominant was the idea of group injury and how dominant was the idea of equivalence.

§ 140. But these ideas of family injury and family guilt have all along been accompanied by ideas of individual injury and individual guilt: here very distinct and there less distinct.

They are very distinct among some peoples in early social stages, as is shown by the account which Im Thurn gives of the Guiana tribes.

In the absence of anything corresponding to police regulations, their mutual relations in everyday life are very well-ordered by the traditional respect which each individual feels for the rights of the others, and by their dread of adverse public opinion should they act contrary to such traditions. . . . The smallest injury done by one Indian to another, even if unintentional, must be atoned by suffering a similar injury.

And that among the Hebrews there was a balancing of individual injuries is a fact more frequently referred to than is the fact that there was a balancing of family injuries; as witness the familiar "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" prescribed in Deuteronomy xix.

The decline of family responsibility and growth of individual responsibility seem to be concomitants of the change in social organization from the type in which the family is the unit of composition to the type in which the individual is the unit of composition. For, evidently as fast as the family organization dissolves, there cease to be any groups which can be held responsible to one another for injuries inflicted by their members; and as fast as this happens the responsibility must fall on the members themselves. Thus it naturally happens that along with social evolution, there emerges from that unjust form of retaliation, in which the groups more than their component men are answerable, that just form in which the men themselves are answerable: the guilty person takes the consequences of his acts, and does not leave them to be borne by other persons.

An instructive contrast in the literature of the Hebrews supports this conclusion. In the earlier writings, God is represented as punishing not only those who have sinned against him, but their posterity for generations. In the later writings, however, there occurs the prophecy of a time when this shall no longer be. Here is a passage from Jeremiah xxxi. 29, 30: "In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge."

That in European peoples growth of this factor in the conception of justice has gone along with the lapsing of group organization and the rise of individual citizenship, is clear. And it is interesting to observe how strange now seem to us the old idea and sentiment, when we come in contact with them, as in China, where the group organization lingers, and it is thought sufficient if, in compensation for one of our people who has been murdered, a victim is delivered up: no matter whether the victim be the guilty man or not.

§ 141. But while, in the more advanced social stages, maintenance of the relation between conduct and consequence comes to be recognized as required by justice; in early social stages the idea of equality is that which chiefly obtains recognition, under the form of an infliction of equivalent injuries. It could scarcely be otherwise. During times of unceasing strife, with entailed wounds and deaths, this is the only equality admitting of distinct maintenance. Evidently, however, from this practice of balancing deaths and mutilations, there tends to arise one component in the conception of equity.

We may see, too, that the activities of militant life themselves afford scope for some further development of the idea; and occasionally there grow up usages requiring some maintenance of equality, even in the midst of conflict. Speaking of certain early wars recorded in the Indian books, Wheeler remarks that

The sentiment of honor which undoubtedly prevailed amongst the ancient Kshatriyas made them regard an attack upon a sleeping enemy as a heinous crime. . . . Aswatthama even whilst bent upon being revenged on the murderer of his father, awoke his sleeping enemy before slaying him.

And various histories yield occasional signs of the belief that under certain circumstances–especially in personal combats–foes should be placed under something like equal conditions before they are attacked; though, very generally the aim has been the reverse–to attack them under every disadvantage.

That all along the idea of likeness of treatment has entered into human relations at large, but chiefly among members of the same society is manifest. But any considerable development of it has been inconsistent with militant life and militant organization. While war, even when retaliatory has necessarily been a discipline in injustice, by inflicting wounds and death upon individuals who have mostly been guiltless of aggression, it has, at the same time, necessitated within each society a type of organization which has disregarded the requirements of justice; alike by the coercive arrangements within its fighting part, by the tyranny over slaves and serfs forming its industrial part, and by the subjection of women. Hence the broad fact that throughout civilization the relations of citizens have become relatively equitable only as fast as militancy has become less predominant; and that only along with this change has the sentiment of justice become more pronounced.

As yielding converse evidence I must again refer to the habits and sentiments which accompany entire peacefulness. Already in the last chapter but one I have named some peoples whose unaggressiveness towards other peoples is accompanied by unaggressiveness among themselves; and of course this trait is in part ascribable to that regard for others’ claims which justice implies. Already, too, in the last chapter, I have quoted various travelers in proof of the great honesty characterizing tribes of this same class: and of course their honesty may be taken as, in a considerable degree, proof of the prevailing sentiment of justice. Here, to this indirect evidence, I may add evidence of a more direct kind, furnished by the treatment of women and children among them. In The Principles of Sociology, sections 324, 327, I have drawn a contrast between the low status of women among militant savages, as well as the militant semicivilized, and the high status of women among these uncultured but unmilitant peoples; showing that by the Todas, low as they are in sundry respects, the women are relieved from all hard work, and "do not even step out of doors to fetch water or wood"; that the wives of the Bodo and Dhimáls "are free from all outdoor work whatever"; that among the Hos a wife "receives the fullest consideration due to her sex"; and that among the "industrious, honest, and peace-loving Pueblos," no girl is forced to marry against her will, and "the usual order of courtship is reversed"–facts all of them showing a recognition of that equality of claims which is an essential element in the idea of justice. And here I may add an instance not before mentioned, furnished by the Manansas, who occupy a hill country in which they have taken refuge from the invading Bamangwatos and Makololo. Said one of them to Holub, "We want not the blood of the beasts, much less do we thirst for the blood of men"; and hence they are regarded with great contempt by the more powerful tribes. Holub, however, testifying to their honesty and fidelity, says that "nothing worse seems to be alleged against them than their habitual courtesy and good-nature"; and he adds, "They treat their women in a way that offers a very favorable contrast to either the Bechuanas or the Matabele": that is, they are relatively just to them. Similarly, in The Principles of Sociology, sections 330—32, I have shown how much the way in which children are treated by warlike peoples who exercise over them the powers of life and death, and behave to boys far better than to girls, differs from the way in which they are treated by these unwarlike peoples, whose conduct to them is both kind and equal; girls are dealt with as fairly as boys.

To these indications that the sentiment of justice is marked where the habits are peaceful, something should be added respecting the overt expression of it. Little that is definite can be expected from the uncultured, since both the sentiment and the idea are complex. We may, however, infer that in a Wood-Veddah who cannot conceive that a man should take that which is not his own, there exists a sufficiently clear, if not a formulated, idea of justice; and we may fairly say that this idea is implied in the peaceful Thârus who, when they fly to the hills for refuge, "always leave any arrears of rent that may be due tied up in a rag to the lintel of their deserted house." Nor can we doubt that both the sentiment and idea, from which result regard for other men’s claims, must be dominant in the Hos, of whom we read that one suspected of theft is not unlikely to commit suicide, as also in the Let-htas, an aboriginal hill tribe in Burma, described as ideally good, among whom one accused by several of an evil act "retires to some secluded spot, there digs his grave and strangles himself." But it is only when we pass to peoples who have risen to a state of culture high enough to evolve literatures, that we get definite evidence concerning the conception of justice which has arisen, and among these we meet with a very significant fact.

For throughout ancient societies at large, militant in their activities, in their types of structure, and in the universally established system of status of compulsory cooperation, justice is not differentiated in thought from altruism in general. In the literatures of the Chinese, the Persians, the Ancient Indians, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, justice is in the main confounded with generosity and humanity. The maxim commonly supposed to be especially Christian, but which, as we have seen, was in kindred forms enunciated among various peoples in pre-Christian days, shows us this. "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," is an injunction

Missing text ...

... which merges generosity and justice in one. In the first place, it makes no distinction between that which you are called upon to do to another on grounds of equity, and that which you are called upon to do to him on grounds of kindness ; and, in the second place, it includes no recognition, overt or tacit, of those claims of the doer which we call " rights." In the consciousness of justice properly so-called, there is included an egoistic as well as an altruistic element — a consciousness of the claim of self and a sympathetic consciousness of the claims of others. Perception and assertion of this claim of self, cannot develop in a society organized for warfare, and carried on by compulsory cooperation. Universal paralysis would ensue if each man were free, within the limits prescribed by equity, to do as he liked. Under a despotic rule there is scope for any amount of generosity but for only a limited amount of justice. The sentiment and the idea can grow only as fast as the external antagonisms of societies decrease and the internal harmonious co-operations of their members increase.

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CHAPTER VII.

GENEROSITY.↩

§ 142. To bring into intelligible order the kinds of conduct ordinarily grouped under the name generosity is difficult; partly because much which passes under the name is not really prompted by generous feeling, and partly because generosity rightly so-called is complex in nature and its composition variable.

Generosity is a double-rooted sentiment: one of its roots being very ancient and the other very modern. Its ancient root is the philoprogenitive instinct, which, as manifested throughout a large part of the animal kingdom, leads to the sacrifice of self for the benefit of offspring. This form of generosity coexists in many creatures with absolute disregard of the welfare of all save offspring: conspicuously so in the Carnivora and less conspicuously so in the Herbivora. The relatively modern root of generosity is sympathy which is shown by some of the higher gregarious creatures, as the dog, in considerable degrees. This trait is more variously and largely displayed by human beings, and especially by certain higher types of them. The earlier factor in the sentiment is personal and narrow, while the later is impersonal and broad.

In mankind, generosity ordinarily combines the two. The love of the helpless, which constitutes the essential part of the philoprogenitive instinct, is, nearly always, associated with fellow feeling: the parent sympathizes with the pleasures and pains of the child. Conversely the feeling which prompts a generous act of one adult to another, commonly includes an element derived from the early instinct. The individual aided is conceived in a distinct or vague way as an object of pity; and pity is a sentiment closely allied to the parental, since it is drawn out towards some being relatively helpless or unfortunate or suffering.

To this mixed nature of the sentiment as commonly displayed, is due the confusion in its manifestations among races in different stages; and to it must consequently be ascribed the perplexities which stand in the way of satisfactory inductions.

§ 143. As a preliminary it should be further remarked that the sentiment of generosity, even in its developed form, is simpler than the sentiment of justice; and hence is earlier manifested. The one results from mental representations of the pleasures or pains of another or others–is shown in acts instigated by the feelings which these mental representations arouse. But the other implies representations, not simply of pains or pleasures, but also, and chiefly representations of the conditions which are required for, or are conducive to, the avoidance of pains or procuring of pleasures. Hence it includes a set of mental actions superposed on the mental actions constituting generosity.

Recognition of this truth makes comprehensible the order of their succession in the course of civilization. And this order will be rendered still more comprehensible if we remember that generosity among people of low intelligence, often results from inability to represent to themselves distinctly the consequences of the sacrifices they make–they are improvident.

§ 144. First to be dealt with is that pseudo-generosity mainly composed of other feelings than benevolent ones. The wish for the welfare of another is, indeed, rarely without alloy: there are mostly present other motives–chiefly the desire for applause. But to the lowest of the actions apparently caused by generosity these other motives form the predominant or sole prompters instead of the subordinate prompters.

The display of hospitality among uncivilized and barbarous peoples furnishes striking examples. Of the Bedouin "at once rapacious and profuse," and who is scrupulously hospitable, Palgrave says: "He has in general but little to offer, and for that very little he not unfrequently promises himself an ample retribution, by plundering his last night’s guest when a few hours distant on his morning journey." Similarly of the Kirghiz, we are told by Atkinson that a chief who does not molest travelers while with him, sends his followers to rob them on their march. In East Africa, too, a chief of Urori "will entertain his guests hospitably as long as they remain in his village, but he will plunder them the moment they leave it." Still more startling are the apparent incongruities of conduct among the Fijians. "The same native who within a few yards of his house would murder a coming or departing guest for sake of a knife or a hatchet, will defend him at the risk of his own life as soon as he has passed his threshold." And then how little relation there is between generosity rightly so-called and hospitality in such cases, is further shown by the statement of Jackson that the Europeans who have lived long among Fijians have become hospitable: "a practice which they have adopted through the example of these savages."

Among the uncivilized at large, of whatever type, hospitality of a less treacherous kind, prompted apparently by usage the origin of which is difficult to understand, is constantly displayed. "‘Custom’ enjoins the exercise of hospitality on every Aino. They receive all strangers as they received me, giving them of their best, placing them in the most honorable place, bestowing gifts upon them, and, when they depart, furnishing them with cakes of boiled millet." We read that among the Australians, the laws of hospitality require that strangers should be perfectly unmolested during their sojourn. Jackson says that according to the rules of Samoan hospitality, strangers are well treated, receiving the best of everything. According to Lichtenstein "the Caffres are hospitable"; and that "the hospitality of the Africans has been noticed by almost every traveler who has been much among them" is remarked by Winterbottom. Of the tribes inhabiting North America Morgan says: "One of the most attractive features of Indian society was the spirit of hospitality by which it was pervaded. Perhaps no people ever carried this principle to the same degree of universality as did the Iroquois." So, too, Angas tells us of the New Zealanders that they are very hospitable to strangers.

By this last people we are shown in how large a measure the love of applause is a factor in apparent generosity. The New Zealanders, writes Thomson, have a great admiration of profuseness, and desire to be considered liberal at their feasts; and elsewhere he says that by them "heaping up riches, unless to squander, was disgraceful." To an allied feeling may be ascribed the trait presented by the people of St. Augustine Island, among whom the dead were judged and sent to happiness or misery according to their "goodness" or "badness"; and "goodness meant one whose friends had given a grand funeral feast, and badness a person whose stingy friends provided nothing at all." To this peremptory desire for approval is in some cases due an expenditure, on the occasion of a death or a marriage, so great that the family is impoverished by it for years; and in one case, if not in more cases, female infanticide is committed with the view of avoiding the ruinous expense which a daughter’s marriage entails.

To the prompters of pseudo-generosity thus disclosed, may be added another disclosed by the habits of civilized settlers in remote regions. Leading solitary lives as such men do, the arrival of a stranger brings an immense relief from monotony and gratifies the craving for social intercourse. Hence it happens that travelers and sportsmen are not only welcomed but even pressed to stay.

Manifestly, then, the sentiment which in many cases instigates hospitality to visitors and feasts to friends, is a proethical sentiment. There goes with it little, or none, of the ethical sentiment proper.

§ 145. We find, however, among some of the most uncivilized peoples, displays of a generosity which is manifestly genuine–sometimes, indeed, find displays of it greater than among the civilized.

Burchell tells us even of the Bushmen that towards one another they "exercise the virtues of hospitality and generosity; often in an extraordinary degree." So, too, he says that the Hottentots are very hospitable among themselves, and often to people of other tribes; and Kolben expresses the belief that "In Munificence and Hospitality the Hottentots, perhaps, go beyond all the other Nations upon Earth." Of the East Africans, again, Livingstone says: "The real politeness with which food is given by nearly all the interior tribes, who have not had much intercourse with Europeans, makes it a pleasure to accept." Though, in the following extract concerning the people of Loango, there is proof that love of approbation is a strong prompter to generous actions, yet there seems evidence that there is mingled with it a true sentiment of generosity.

They are always ready to share the little they have with those whom they know to be in need. lf they have been fortunate in hunting and fishing, or have procured something rare, they immediately run and tell their friends and neighbors, taking to each his share. They would choose to stint themselves rather than not give them this proof of their friendship. . . . They call the Europeans close fists, because they give nothing for nothing.

Other races, some lower and some higher, yield like facts. We read that the Australian natives who have been successful in hunting always, and without any remark, supply those of their number who have been unsuccessful with a share of their meal. The account given by Vancouver of the Sandwich Islanders, shows that, in their generosity towards strangers, they were like most uncivilized peoples before bad treatment by Europeans had demoralized them. He says: "Our reception and entertainment here [at Hawaii] by these unlettered people, who in general have been distinguished by the appellation of savages, was such as, I believe, is seldom equalled by the most civilized nations of Europe." Brett describes the Guiana tribes as "passionately fond of their children; hospitable to every one; and, among themselves, generous to a fault." These instances I may reinforce by one from a remote region. Bogle stayed while in Tibet with the Lama’s family–that is, with his relations, at whose hands he received much kindness. When he offered them presents they refused to accept them, saying, "You. . . are come from a far country; it is our business to render your stay agreeable; why should you make us presents?"

§ 146. Various of the uncivilized display generosity in other ways than by hospitality and in ways which exhibit the sentiment more clearly detached from other sentiments. Illustrations are furnished by that very inferior race, the Australians. They were always willing to show Mr. Eyre where water was to be had, and, even unsolicited, would help his men to dig for it. Their kindness in this respect seems the more remarkable on remembering how difficult it was for them to find a proper supply for themselves. Sturt tells us that a friendly native has been known to interpose, at great personal risk, on behalf of travelers whom a hostile tribe was about to attack. With an adjacent race it was the same. During troubled times in Tasmania, the lives of white people were in several instances "saved by the native women, who would often steal away from the tribe, and give notice of an intended attack." Under another form, much generosity of feeling is shown by the Tongans. Mariner writes of them that

They never exult in any feats of bravery they may have performed, but, on the contrary, take every opportunity of praising their adversaries; and this a man will do, although his adversary may be plainly a coward, and will make an excuse for him, such as the unfavorableness of the opportunity or great fatigue, or ill state of health, or badness of his ground, &c.

These, and many kindred facts, make it clear that the name savages," as applied to the uncivilized, misleads us; and they suggest that the name might with greater propriety be applied to many among ourselves and our European neighbors.

§ 147. If, as we see, under the form of hospitality enforced by custom, in which it is largely simulated, or under forms in which it is more manifestly genuine, generosity is widely prevalent among peoples who have not emerged from low stages of culture; we need not be surprised to find expressions of generous sentiments, and injunctions to perform generous actions, in the early literatures of races which have risen to higher stages. The ancient Indian books furnish examples. Here, from the Rig-Veda, is an extract exhibiting the interested or nonsympathetic prompting of generosity: "The givers of largesses abide high in the sky; the givers of horses live with the sun; the givers of gold enjoy immortality; the givers of raiment prolong their lives." Similarly Rig-Veda X. 107, eulogizes liberality to priests.

I regard as the king of men him who first presented a gift. . . . The wise man makes largesse, giving his breastplate. Bountiful men neither die nor fall into calamity; they suffer neither wrong nor pain. Their Iiberality confers on them this whole world as well as heaven.

In the Code of Manu, too, we read that strangers are to be allowed to sojourn and be well entertained. He must eat before the householder (iii. 105). "The honoring of a guest confers wealth, reputation, life, and heaven" (iii. 106; iv 29) and delivers from guilt (iii. 98). And kindred reasons for hospitality are given by Apastamba: The reception of guests is rewarded by ``immunity from misfortunes, and heavenly bliss" (ii. 3, 6, 6). "He who entertains guests for one night obtains earthly happiness, a second night gains the middle air, a third heavenly bliss, a fourth the world of unsurpassable bliss; many nights procure endless worlds" (ii. 3, 7, 16). The literature of the Persians contains kindred thoughts. In the Shâyast, the clothing of the soul in the next world is said to be formed "out of almsgivings." Passages in the Gulistan enjoin liberality while reprobating asceticism: "The liberal man who eats and bestows, is better than the religious man who fasts and hoards. Whosoever hath forsaken luxury to gain the approbation of mankind, hath fallen from lawful into unlawful voluptuousness." And in the same work we have a more positive injunction to be generous, but still associated with self-interest as a motive: "Do good, and do not speak of it, and assuredly thy kindness will be recompensed to thee."

Passing to China we find in Confucius various kindred injunctions; dissociated, too, from promptings of lower motives. Here are examples:

Now the man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others; wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others.

The Master said, "Though a man have abilities as admirable as those of the duke of Chow, yet if he be proud and, niggardly those other things are really not worth being looked at.

When any of his [Confucius’s] friends died, if he had no relations who could be depended on for the necessary offices, he would say "I will bury him.

That in the sacred books of the Hebrews are to be found kindred admonitions, here joined with promises of supernatural rewards and there without such promises, needs no saying. It should be added, however, that we are not enabled by these quoted passages to compare the characters displayed by Indians, Persians, Chinese, or Hebrews, with the characters described in the foregoing accounts travelers give us of the uncivilized; for these passages come from the writings of exceptional men–poets and sages. But though violent reaction against an all-pervading selfishness may mostly be the cause of exaggerated expressions of generosity, we must admit that the possibility of such exaggerated expressions goes for something.

§ 148. Concerning generosity among European peoples, as exhibited in history at successive stages of their progress, no very definite statements can be made. We have evidence that in early days there existed much the same feelings and practices as those now existing among savages–practices simulating generosity. Tacitus says of the primitive Germans: "No nation indulges more profusely in entertainments and hospitality. To exclude any human being from their roof is thought impious." And these usages and ideas went, as we know along with utter lack of sympathy: they implied the generosity of display sanctified by tradition.

Throughout the Middle Ages and down to comparatively recent times, we see, along with a decreasing generosity of display little more than the generosity prompted by hope of buying divine favor. The motive has been all along expressed in the saying, "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth to the Lord" (Proverbs xix. 17); and the Lord is expected to pay good interest. Christianity even in its initial form, represents the giving of alms as a means of salvation; and throughout many centuries of Christian history the giving of alms had little other motive. Just as they built chapels to compound for crimes and manumitted slaves to make peace with God; so, beyond a desire for the applause which followed largesse, the only motive of the rich for performing kind actions was an other-worldly motive–a dread of hell and wish for heaven. As Mr. Lecky remarks, "Men gave money to the poor, simply and exclusively for their own spiritual benefit, and the welfare of the sufferer was altogether foreign to their thoughts." How utterly alien to generosity rightly so-called, was the feeling at work, is shown by the unblushing, and indeed self-satisfied, avowal made by Sir Thomas Browne in the passage which Mr. Lecky quotes from him–"I give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God."

In modern days, however, we may recognize a growing proportion of true generosity–the ethical sentiment as distinguished from the proethical sentiment. Though there is still in predominant amount that transcendental self-seeking which does good here merely to get happiness hereafter–though there are even multitudes who, in the spirit of Sir Thomas Browne, feel no shame in the avowal that their kindnesses to others are prompted by the wish to please God more than by the wish to further human welfare; yet there are many who, in conferring benefits, are prompted mainly and others who are prompted wholly by fellow feeling with those whom they aid. And beyond the manifestations of this sentiment of true generosity in private actions, there are occasionally manifestations of it in public actions; as when the nation made a sacrifice of twenty millions of money that the West Indian slaves might be emancipated.

That this development of true generosity has been consequent on increase of sympathy and that sympathy has gained scope for exercise and growth with the advance to an orderly and amicable social life, scarcely needs saying.

§ 149. For reasons given at the outset, it is difficult to bring the various manifestations of pseudo-generosity and generosity proper, into generalizations of a definite kind. And the impediment due to the complexity and variable composition of the emotion prompting generous acts, is made greater by the inconsistency of the traits which men, and especially the lower types of men, present. Unbalanced as their natures are, they act in quite opposite ways according to the impulse which is for the moment in possession of consciousness. Angas tells us that "infanticide is frequent among the New Zealanders." Yet "both parents are almost idolatrously fond of their children"; and while Cook described them as "implacable towards their enemies," Thomson observed that they were kind to their slaves. Other instances are furnished by the Negro races. Reade says that in parts of equatorial Africa where there is the greatest treachery there are also strong marks of affectionate friendship. Concerning the East Africans Burton writes: "When childhood is passed, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts. Yet they are a sociable race, and the sudden loss of relatives sometimes leads from grief to hypochondria and insanity." Lacking those higher emotions which serve to coordinate the lower, these last severally determine the actions now this way and now that, according to the incidents of the moment. Hence only by comparison of extremes are we likely to discover any significant relations of facts.

In the accounts of those most ferocious savages, the cannibal Fijians, who worship cannibal gods–savages whose titles of honor are "the waster of" such a coast, "the depopulator of" such an island, and who committed atrocities which Williams said "I dare not record here," no mention is made of any generosity save that which results from display. Among the predatory red men of North America, the Dakotas may be singled out as those who, in the greatest degree, show the aggressiveness and revengefulness fostered by a life of chronic war–men by whom prisoners, especially aged ones, are handed over to the squaws to torture for their amusement. Here generosity is referred to only to note its absence: the Dakota is ungenerous, says Burton–never gives except to get more in return. Similarly of the Nagas, ever fighting, village with village as well as with neighboring races, carrying blood feuds to extremes, dreaded as robbers and murderers, and always mutilating their dead enemies, we read that "they are totally devoid of a spark of generosity and will not give the most triffing articles without receiving remuneration."

Of the converse connection of traits the evidence is usually not clear, for the reason that the generosity ascribed to tribes which do not carry on perpetual hostilities is mostly of the kind shown in hospitality which is always open to the interpretation of being due in part, if not wholly to usage or love of display Thus Colquhoun, who talks of the "hospitable aborigines" and says "it is quite refreshing to turn from the Christian Anamites to the less repulsive, if heathen, hill-tribes" (the Steins who inhabit "fever-stricken haunts," where they can lead peaceful lives), says that "amongst them a stranger is certain of a welcome; the fatted pig or fowl is at once killed, the loving cup produced." Similarly in his earlier work, Across Chrysê, Mr. Colquhoun, speaking of indigenous peoples here and there islanded among the conquering Tartars, speaks of them as "very pleasant in their ways, kind and hospitable"; and afterward he quotes the impressions of a resident French missionary who spoke of the peaceful native inhabitants as "simple, hospitable, honest," having "le bon coeur," while of the governing Chinese, and especially the military mandarins, his verdict was–"être mandarin, c’est être voleur, brigand!" Of like meaning is the contrast drawn by the Abbé Favre in his Account of the Wild Tribes of the Malayan Peninsula. On the one hand he describes the conquering race, the Malays, as being full of predatory vices, lying, cheating, plundering–"no man can entrust them with anything"; and, so far from being hospitable, using every means to fleece the traveler. On the other hand of the aboriginal peoples, who "fled to the fastnesses of the interior, where they have since continued in a savage state," he tells us that their disputes are settled "without fighting or malice," that they are "entirely inoffensive," and "generally kind, affable, inclined to gratitude and to beneficence," "liberal and generous." Briefly contrasting the two, he says–"The actions of Malays generally show low sentiments and a sordid feeling; but the Jakuns are naturally proud and generous"; and then he asks, "Whence then comes so remarkable a difference?" As a cause he comments on the "plundering and bloody actions" of the piratical Malays; while the Jakuns have been led into quiet lives in their fastnesses. Let me add, lastly the case of the peaceful and "simple Arafuras," of whom the French resident, M. Bik, says: "They have a very excusable ambition to gain the name of rich men, by paying the debts of their poorer fellow villagers. . . . Thus the only use they make of their riches is to employ it in settling differences."

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CHAPTER VIII.

HUMANITY.↩

§ 150. The division between the subject matter of this chapter and that of the last chapter, is in large measure artificial, and defensible only for convenience’ sake. Kindness, pity, mercy which we here group under the general head of humanity, are closely allied to generosity; though less liable than it to be simulated by lower feelings. They are all altruistic sentiments, and have for their common root, sympathy. Hence we may expect to find, as we shall find, that in respect of their relations to other traits of nature, and to type of social life, much the same may be said of them as may be said of generosity.

It may also be said of them, as of generosity, that while in their developed forms they are mainly prompted by mental representations of the pains or pleasures of other beings, they usually contain to the last, as they contain in chief measure at first, the parental feeling–the feeling which is excited by the consciousness of relative incapacity or helplessness–the pleasure felt in taking care of something which tacitly appeals for aid. And the mixed nature of these sentiments hence resulting, adds, as in the case of generosity to the difficulty of generalizing.

A further difficulty which is indeed a sequence of the last, results from the incongruous emotions which many types of men, and especially inferior types, display. Thus, while Moffat says "the Bushmen will kill their children without remorse," and while Lichtenstein tells us that no other savages betray "so high a degree of brutal ferocity"; Moffat, speaking of their attentions to him when he was ill, says: "I was deeply affected by the sympathy of these poor Bushmen, to whom we were utter strangers." Agreeing with Burchell, Kolben describes the Hottentots as friendly liberal, benevolent; and yet, from Kolben, as from Sparrman, we learn that they frequently bury infants alive, and leave their aged to die in solitary places. It is so, too, with the Australians. While they abandon their aged to perish, and often destroy their infants, they are represented as fond and indulgent parents, and as often showing kind feelings to travelers. More strange still is the contrast exhibited in Borneo, where, according to Boyle, a Dyak has often been seen rushing "through a captured village, clasping in his arms a young child as tenderly as possible, without relaxing his grasp of its father’s gory head."

In face of such facts it seems unlikely that our inductions concerning the relations of humane feeling to type of man, and to social type, can be more than rudely approximate.

§ 151. We may fitly begin with illustrations of entire lack of sympathy, now taking the negative shape of simple indifference to others’ suffering, and now taking the positive shape of delight in their suffering. Of the Karens Mason says: "I have stood over an old woman dying alone in a miserable shed, and tried in vain to induce her children and grandchildren, close by, to come to help her." The lack of feeling shown by the Honduras people in Herrera’s day he illustrates by the refusal of a wife to kill a hen for her sick husband, because, as she said, "her husband would die, and then she should lose him and the hen too." Various Negro races furnish kindred examples. While, concerning the natives of Loando, Monteiro says that "the Negro is not cruelly inclined" [not actively cruel], yet "he has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compassion": "A fellow creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highiy provocative of merriment and enjoyment." Duncan and Burton agree in saying that the Dahomans, who "are void either of sympathy or gratitude, even in their own families," are "in point of parental affection, inferior to brutes." And then the Ashantis show us this indifference formulated as a principle of conduct. Two of their proverbs, as rendered by Burton, run thus: "If another suffers pain, (to you) a piece of wood suffers." "The distress of others is no concern of yours; do not trouble yourself about it."

Passing from negative to positive cruelty, we find in the Damaras illustrations of both. Baines says of them: "Everybody knows that in other tribes the aged and helpless are left to perish, but that a mother should refuse to pull a few bundles of grass to close up a sleeping hut for her sick daughter. . . . is almost beyond belief." And, according to Galton, a sick man "is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all they can to expedite his death." So with the negative inhumanity of the Dahomans above named may be joined their positive inhumanity; shown, for instance, in the "annual customs" at which numbers of victims are slaughtered to supply a dead king "with fresh attendants in the shadowy world," and again shown by decorating their buildings with great numbers of human skulls, which they make war to obtain. Of kindred testimonies Holub yields one concerning the Marutse, asserting that "a brutal cruelty is one of the predominant failings of these people"; and another is yielded by Lord Wolseley, who says that "the love of bloodshed and of watching human bodily suffering in any shape is a real natural pleasure to the Negroes of West Africa."

To these cases of positive inhumanity may be added those displayed by the predatory tribes of North America who, while they discipline their young men by subjecting them to tortures, also torture their enemies. "Wolves of women borne," as the Prairie Indians are called, hand over "an old man or woman" for torture, "to the squaws and papooses, pour les amuser." Burton who tells us this, says of the Yutahs that they are "as cruel as their limited intellects allow them to be." From another authority we learn that the squaws among the Comanches are crueler than the men, and delight in torturing the male prisoners.

§ 152. How often misused words generate misleading thoughts! Savage, originally meaning rude, wild, uncultured, was consequently applied to aboriginal peoples. Behaving treacherously and cruelly to voyagers, as some of them did in retaliation, this trait was regarded as a universal trait; and "savage" came to mean ferocious. Hence the baseless belief that savageness in this sense, characterizes the uncivilized in contrast with the civilized. But the inhumanity which has been shown by the races classed as civilized, is certainly not less, and has often been greater, than that shown by the races classed as uncivilized.

Passing over the multitudinous cruelties which stain the annals of ancient Eastern nations, of whom the Assyrians may be named as a sample; merely naming the doings of the admired Homeric Greeks–liars, thieves, and murderers, as Grote shows–whose heroes revelled in atrocities; and not dwelling on the brutalities of the Spartans or the callousness, if nothing more, of other later Greeks; we may turn to the Romans, whose ruthless civilization, lauded by admirers of conquests, entailed on Europe centuries of misery. Twenty generations of predatory wars, developed a nature of which the savagery has rarely been equalled by that of the worst barbarian races known to us. Though the torture of captives has been practiced by the North American Indians, they have not been in the habit of torturing their slaves. Though there were subject tribes among the Fijians who were liable to be used for cannibal feasts, yet the Fijians did not go to the length of killing hundreds of his fellow slaves along with one who had murdered his master. And if very often the uncivilized reduce to bondage such of the conquered as are not slain, they do not form them into herds, make them work like beasts, and deny them all human privileges; nor do they use any of them to gratify their appetites for bloodshed by combats in arenas–appetites so rampant in Rome that the need for satisfying them was bracketed with the need for satisfying bodily hunger. Using the word "savage" in its modern acceptation, we may fairly say that, leaving the Fijians out of the comparison, the white savages of Rome outdid all which the dark savages elsewhere have done.

Were it not that men are blinded by the theological bias and the bias of patriotism, it would be clear to them that throughout Christian Europe also, during the greater part of its history the inhumanity fostered by the wars between societies, as well as by the feuds within each society, has been carried to extremes beyond those reached by inferior peoples whom we think of as ferocious. Though the atrocities committed by such semicivilized races as the Mexicans and Central Americans, such as skinning victims alive and tearing out their palpitating hearts, may not have been paralleled in Europe; yet Europeans, loudly professing a religion of love, have far exceeded them in the ingenuity of their multitudinous appliances for the infliction of prolonged agonies on heretics, on witches, and on political offenders. And even now though at home the discipline of a peaceful social life has nearly extinguished such inhumanities, yet by our people abroad there are still perpetrated inhuman deeds, if not of these kinds, yet of other kinds. The doings of Australian settlers to the natives, of "beachcombers" and kidnappers in the Pacific, do but exemplify in vivid ways the barbarous conduct of European invaders to native races–races which, when they retaliate, are condemned as "savage."

§ 153. While men of some varieties appear to be devoid of sympathy and the moral traits which it originates, there are men of other varieties who, inferior to ourselves as they may be in respect of culture, are our equals, and some of them our superiors, in respect of humanity. Here, in the briefest way I string together the testimonies of travelers, whose names will be found in the references.

The Veddahs are "in general gentle and affectionate"; widows are always supported by the community." Tannese–"The sick are kindly attended to the last." In New Guinea some tribes of Papuans have shown great humanity to Europeans placed at their mercy. Dyaks–"Humane to a degree which well might shame ourselves." Malagasy–"Treat one another with more humanity than we do." Esquimaux–"As between themselves, there can be no people exceeding them in this virtue–kindness of heart." Iroquois–"Kindness to the orphan, hospitality to all, and a common brotherhood" were enjoined. Chippewas–before the white man came, there was more "charity practiced towards one another; and the widow and orphan were never allowed to live in poverty and want." Araucanians–No indigent person is to be found . . . the "most incapable of subsisting themselves are decently clothed:" "generous and humane towards the vanquished." Mandingos–"It is impossible for me to forget the disinterested charity and tender solicitude, with which many of these poor heathens . . . sympathized with me in my sufferings." And Kolff, speaking of the "continued kindness" of the inhabitants of Luan, says–"I never met with more harmony contentment and toleration, more readiness to afford mutual assistance, more domestic peace and happiness, nor more humanity and hospitality."

Though, as in the case of the Bushmen, characterized by Moffat in the first section of this chapter, humane actions on some occasions are associated with brutal actions on other occasions, yet in some of the peoples here instanced–the Veddahs, the Esquimaux, and the inhabitants of Luan–there is no such alloy.

§ 154. In the literatures of ancient Eastern peoples, there are numerous expressions of humane sentiments and exhortations to humane actions–utterances of poets and sages, which, though they probably indicate in but small measure the prevailing sentiments, may be taken as in some measure significant of advance consequent on settled social life. Among the early Indian books, the Mahabharata contains the following:

To injure none by thought or word or deed,
To give to others, and be kind to all–
This is the constant duty of the good.

And in the same book, the princess Savitri, urging Yama, the god of death, to give back the soul of her husband which he was carrying away tells the god how noble is the quality of mercy. She argues that to give is more divine than to take; to preserve is mightier than to destroy. The sacred book of the Persians, the Zend-Avesta, appears to have its humane precepts in some measure prompted by the doctrine of metempsychosis–kind treatment of animals being insisted upon partly for that reason; but Sadi, in the Gulistan, has definite injunctions of a relevant kind:

Show mercy to the weak peasant . . . it is criminal to crush the poor and defenceless subjects with the arm of power. . . . Thou who art indifferent to the sufferings of others deservest not to be called a man.

Charitable conduct was insisted upon among the Egyptians too. According to Birch and Duncker, it was enjoined "to give bread to the hungry water to the thirsty clothes to the naked, and shelter to the wanderer"; and the memoirs in the tombs "portray just and charitable lives, protection of the widow and the needy care for the people in times of famine." Similarly the books of the Chinese sages agree in emphasizing the virtues which flow from fellow-feeling. According to Legge, Lâo-tsze "seems to condemn the infliction of capital punishment; and he deplores the practice of war." In a like spirit Confucius says that "benevolence is the characteristic element of humanity." And Mencius too, while alleging that the "feeling of commiseration is essential to man," remarks that "so is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die." To all which has of course to be added the evidence furnished by the sacred books of the Hebrews, in the later of which there are injunctions to show kindness and mercy, not to men only but to animals–injunctions which the European peoples who avowedly accepted them, along with the still more humane doctrine of Jesus, did so little throughout many centuries to practice, even in small measure.

§ 155. Amid perturbing causes and conflicting testimonies, no general conclusions seem trustworthy save those reached by putting side by side the extreme cases. Comparisons so made justify anticipation.

Of the Karens, instanced above as absolutely heartless, it is said that "every tribe is antagonistic to each other," and there is almost continual war. So too is it with another Indian race, the Afridis. The intensity of the fighting propensity among them is such that "an Afridi generally has a blood feud with nine out of ten of his own relations"; and their lack of all humane sentiment is implied by the statement that "ruthless, cowardly robbery, cold-blooded, treacherous murder, are to an Afridi the salt of life." Then we have the case of the Dahomans, above shown to be utterly void of sympathy even with their own offspring, and whose absolutely militant social state is so exceptionally indicated by their army of Amazons. The wildest tribes of the North American Indians, too, the Dakotas and the Comanches, whose inhumanity is shown by torturing their prisoners, are tribes of warriors carrying on chronic feuds and perpetual wars.

Of the converse relation, the most marked cases above instanced are those exhibited by certain absolutely peaceful peoples–the Esquimaux, the inhabitants of Luan, the Veddahs. Among such, free as they are from those passions which intertribal enmities exercise and increase, we find an unusual display of that fellow-feeling which results in kindly behavior and benevolent actions.

And here, along with this contrast, may be joined a contrast of kindred nature, between the absence and presence of a trait allied to humane feeling–I mean gratitude; for of gratitude, as of humanity the ultimate root is sympathy. Of the fighting and destructive Fijians Williams says:

Ingratitude deeply and disgracefully stains the character of the Fijian heathen. . . . If one of them, when sick, obtained medicine from me, he thought me bound to give him food; the reception of food he considered as giving him a claim on me for covering; and, that being secured, he deemed himself at liberty to beg anything he wanted, and abuse me if I refused his unreasonable request.

On the other hand, what do we read about the Veddahs, living always in peace? Mr. Atherton describes them as "very grateful for attention or assistance"; and, as quoted by Pridham, Mr. Bennett says that after having given some Veddahs presents and done them a service,

a couple of elephants’ tusks, nearly six feet in length, found their way into his front verandah at night, but the Veddahs who had brought them never gave him an opportunity to reward them. "What a lesson in gratitude and delicacy" he observes, "even a Veddah may teach!"

Truly, indeed, they may teach this, by making in so unobtrusive a way and with great labor, a return greater in value than the obligation; and they may teach more–may teach that where there have not been preached the Christian virtues, these may be shown in a higher degree than where they are ostentatiously professed and perpetually enjoined.

[I-400]

CHAPTER IX.

VERACITY.↩

§ 156. Complete truthfulness is one of the rarest of virtues. Even those who regard themselves as absolutely truthful are daily guilty of overstatements and understatements. Exaggeration is almost universal. The perpetual use of the word "very." where the occasion does not call for it, shows how widely diffused and confirmed is the habit of misrepresentation. And this habit sometimes goes along with the loudest denunciations of falsehood. After much vehement talk about "the veracities," will come utterly unveracious accounts of things and people–accounts made unveracious by the use of emphatic words where ordinary words alone are warranted: pictures of which the outlines are correct but the lights and shades and colors are doubly and trebly as strong as they should be.

Here, among the countless deviations of statement from fact, we are concerned only with those in which form is wrong as well as color–those in which the statement is not merely a perversion of the fact but, practically an inversion of it. Chiefly, too, we have to deal with cases in which personal interests of one or other kind are the prompters to falsehood–now the desire to inflict injury as by false witness; now the desire to gain a material advantage; now the desire to escape a punishment or other threatened evil; now the desire to get favor by saying that which pleases. For in mankind at large, the love of truth for truth’s sake, irrespective of ends, is but little exemplified.

Here let us contemplate some of the illustrations of veracity and unveracity–chiefly unveracity–furnished by various human races.

§ 157. The members of wild tribes in different parts of the world, who, as hunters or as nomads, are more or less hostile to their neighbors, are nearly always reprobated by travelers for their untruthfulness; as are also the members of larger societies consolidated by conquest under despotic rulers.

Says Burton of the Dakotas–"The Indian, like other savages, never tells the truth." Of the Mishmis, Griffith writes–"They have so little regard for truth, that one cannot rely much on what they say." And a general remark, à propos of the Kirghiz, is to the same effect. "Thuth, throughout Central Asia, is subservient to the powerful, and the ruler who governs leniently commands but little respect."

Of the settled societies, the first to be named is the Fijian. Williams tells us that

Among the Fijians the propensity to lie is so strong, that they seem to have no wish to deny its existence. . . . Adroitness in lying is attained by the constant use made of it to conceal the schemes and plots of the Chiefs, to whom a ready and clever liar is a valuable acquisition. . . . "A Fijian truth" has been regarded as a synonym for a lie.

Of kindred nature, under kindred conditions, is the trait displayed by the people of Uganda.

In common with all savage tribes, truth is held in very low estimation, and it is never considered wrong to tell lies; indeed, a successful liar is considered a smart, clever fellow, and rather admired.

So, too, was it among the ancient semicivilized peoples of Central America. De Laet says of certain of them, living under a despotic and bloody regime–"they are liars, like most of the Indians." And concerning the modern Indians, who may be supposed to have preserved more or less the character of their progenitors, Dunlop writes:

I never have found any native of Central America, who would admit that there could be any vice in lying; and when one has succeeded in cheating another, however gross and infamous the fraud may be, the natives will only remark, "Que hombre vivo" (What a clever fellow).

A like fact is given by Mr. Foreman in his work on the Philippine Islands. He says the natives do not "appear to regard lying as a sin, but rather as a legitimate, though cunning, convenience."

§ 158. The literatures of ancient semicivilized peoples yield evidence of stages during which truth was little esteemed, or rather, during which lying was tacitly or openly applauded. As we saw in a recent chapter (section 127) deception, joined with atrocity, was occasionally inculcated in the early Indian literature as a means to personal advancement. We have proof in the Bible that, apart from the lying which constituted false witness, and was to the injury of a neighbor, there was among the Hebrews but little reprobation of lying. Indeed it would be remarkable were it otherwise, considering that Jahveh set the example; as when, to ruin Ahab, he commissioned "a lying spirit" (1 Kings, xxii. 22) to deceive his prophets; or as when, according to Ezekiel, xiv. 9, he threatened to use deceptions as a means of vengeance.

If the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.

Evidently from a race-character which evolved such a conception of a deity’s principles, there naturally came no great regard for veracity This we see in sundry cases; as when Isaac said Rebecca was not his wife but his sister, and nevertheless received the same year a bountiful harvest: "the Lord blessed him" (Gen. xxvi, 12); or as when Rebecca induced Jacob to tell a lie to his father and defraud Esau–a lie not condemned but shortly followed by a divine promise of prosperity; or as when Jeremiah tells a falsehood at the king’s suggestion. Still we must not overlook the fact that in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, as also in parts of the New Testament, lying is strongly reprobated. Averaging the evidence, we may infer that along with the settled life of the Hebrews there had grown up among them an increased truthfulness.

Much regard for veracity was hardly to be expected among the Greeks. In the Iliad the gods are represented not only as deceiving men but as deceiving one another. The chiefs "do not hesitate at all manner of lying." Pallas Athene is described as loving Ulysses because he is so deceitful; and, in the words of Mahaffy the Homeric society is full of "guile and falsehood."[2] Nor was it widely otherwise in later days. The trait alleged of the Cretans–"always liars"–though it may have been more marked in them than in Greeks at large, did not constitute an essential difference. Mahaffy describes Greek conduct in the Attic ages as characterized by "treachery" and "selfish knavery," and says that Darius thought a Greek who kept his word a notable exception.

Evidence of the relation between chronic hostilities and utter disregard of truth, is furnished throughout the history of Europe. In the Merovingian period–"the era of blood"–oaths taken by rulers, even with their hands on the altar, were forthwith broken; and Salvian writes–"If a Frank forswear himself, where’s the wonder, when he thinks perjury but a form of speech, not of crime?" After perpetual wars during the two hundred years of the Carolingian period, with Arabs, Saracens, Aquitanians, Saxons, Lombards, Slavs, Avars, Normans, came the early feudal period, of which H. Martin says:

The tenth [century] may pass for the era of fraud and deceit. At no other epoch of our history does the moral sense appear to have been so completely effaced from the human soul as in that first period of feudalism.

And then, as an accompaniment and consequence of the internal conflicts which ended in the establishment of the French monarchy, there was a still-continued treachery: the aristocracy in their relations with one another "were without truth, loyalty, or disinterestedness . . . Neither life nor character was safe in their hands." Though Mr. Lecky ascribes the medieval "indifference to truth" to other causes than chronic militancy, yet he furnishes a sentence which indirectly yields support to the induction here made, and is the more to be valued because it is not intended to yield such support. He remarks that "where the industrial spirit has not penetrated, truthfulness rarely occupies in the popular mind the same prominent position in the catalogue of virtues" as it does among those "educated in the habits of industrial life."

Nor do we fail to see at the present time, in the contrasts between the Eastern and Western nations of Europe, a like relation of phenomena.

§ 159. Reflection shows, however, that this relation is not a direct one. There is no immediate connection between bloodthirstiness and the telling of lies. Nor because a man is kind-hearted does it follow that he is truthful. If, as above implied, a life of amity is conducive to veracity, while a life of enmity fosters unveracity, the dependencies must be indirect. After glancing at some further facts, we shall understand better in what ways these traits of life and character are usually associated.

In respect of veracity as in respect of other virtues, I have again to instance various aboriginal peoples who have been thrust by invading races into undesirable habitats; and have there been left either in absolute tranquillity or free from chronic hostilities with their neighbors. Saying of the Kois that they all seem to suffer from chronic fever (which sufficiently shows why they are left unmolested in their malarious wilds) Morris tells us that "They are noted for truthfulness, and are quite an example in this respect to the civilized and more cultivated inhabitants of the plains." According to Shortt, in his Hill Ranges of Southern India,

A pleasing feature in their [Sowrahs] character is their complete truthfulness. They do not know how to tell a lie. They are not sufficiently civilized to be able to invent.

I may remark in passing that I have heard other Anglo-Indians assign lack of intelligence as the cause of this good trait–a not very respectable endeavor to save the credit of the higher races. Considering that small children tell lies, and that lies are told, if not in speech yet in acts, by dogs, considerable hardihood is shown in ascribing the truthfulness of these and kindred peoples to stupidity. In his Highlands of Central India, Forsyth writes: "The aborigine is the most truthful of beings, and rarely denies either a money obligation or a crime really chargeable against him." Describing the Râmósîs, Sinclair alleges that

They are as great liars as the most civilized races, differing in this from the Hill tribes proper, and from the Parwâris, of whom I once knew a Brâhman to say: "The Kunabis, if they have made a promise, will keep it, but a Mahâr [Parwari] is such a fool that he will tell the truth without any reason at all."

And this opinion expressed by the Brahman, well illustrates the way in which their more civilized neighbors corrupt these veracious aborigines; for while Sherwill, writing of another tribe, says "The truth is by a Sonthal held sacred, offering in this respect a bright example to their lying neighbors the Bengalis," it is remarked of them by Man that "Evil communications are exercising their baneful influences over them, and soon, I fear, the proverbial veracity of the Sonthal will cease to become a byword."

In The Principles of Sociology, vol. ii, sections 437 and 574, I gave the names of others of these Indian hill-tribes noted for veracity–the Bodo and Dhimals, the Carnatic aborigines, the Todas, the Hos; and here I may add one more, the Puluyans, whose refuge is "hemmed in on all sides by mountains, woods, backwaters, swamps, and the sea," and who "are sometimes distinguished by a rare character for truth and honor, which their superiors in the caste scale might well emulate." So too is it in a neighboring land, Ceylon. Wood-Veddahs are described as "proverbially truthful and honest." From other regions there comes kindred evidence. Of some Northern Asiatic peoples, who are apparently without any organization for offense or defense, we read: "To the credit of the Ostiaks and Samoiedes it must be said, that they are eminently distinguished for integrity and truthfulness."

But now we have to note facts which make us pause. There are instances of truthfulness among peoples who are but partially peaceful, and among others who are anything but peaceful. Though characterized as "mild, quiet, and timid," the Hottentots have not infrequent wars about territories; and yet, in agreement with Barrow, Kolben says the Word of a Hottentot "is sacred: and there is hardly any thing upon earth they look upon as a fouler crime than breach of engagement." Morgan, writing of the Iroquois, states that "the love of truth was another marked trait of the Indian character." And yet, though the Iroquois league was formed avowedly for the preservation of peace, and achieved this end in respect of its component nations, these nations carried on hostilities with their neighbors. The Patagonian tribes have frequent fights with one another, as well as with the aggressive Spaniards; and yet Snow says–"A lie with them is held in detestation." The Khonds, too, who believe that truthfulness is one of the most sacred duties imposed by the gods, have "sanguinary conflicts" between tribes respecting their lands. And of the Kolis, inhabiting the highlands of the Dekhan, we read that though "manly, simple, and truthful," they are "great plunderers" and guilty of "unrelenting cruelty."

What is there in common between these truthful and pacific tribes and these truthful tribes which are more or less warlike? The common trait is that they are not subject to coercive rule. That this is so with tribes which are peaceful, I have shown elsewhere (Principles of Sociology, ii, sections 573—74); and here we come upon the significant fact that it is so, too, with truthful tribes which are not peaceful. The Hottentots are governed by an assembly deciding by a majority and the head men have but little authority. The Iroquois were under the control of a council of fifty elected sachems, who could be deposed by their tribes; and military expeditions, led by chiefs chosen for merit, were left to private enterprise and voluntary service. Among the Patagonians there was but feeble government: followers deserting their chiefs if dissatisfied. Writing of the Khonds’ "system of society" Macpherson says–"The spirit of equality pervades its whole constitution, society is governed by the moral influence of its natural heads alone, to the entire exclusion of the principle of coercive authority."

§ 160. In the remarks of sundry travelers, we find evidence that it is the presence or absence of despotic rule which leads to prevalent falsehood or prevalent truth.

Reference to the Reports on the Discovery of Peru of Xeres and Pizarro (pp. 68—69, 85—86, 114—20), makes it manifest that the general untruthfulness described was due to the intimidation the Indians were subject to. So, too, respecting the Mexicans, the Franciscan testimony was–"They are liars, but to those who treat them well they speak the truth readily." A clear conception of the relation between mendacity and fear was given to Livingstone by his experiences. Speaking of the falsehood of the East Africans he says,

But great as this failing is among the free, it is much more annoying among the slaves. One can scarcely induce a slave to translate anything truly: he is so intent on thinking of what will please.

And he further remarks that "untruthfulness is a sort of refuge for the weak and oppressed."

A glance over civilized communities at once furnishes verification. Of European peoples, those subject to the most absolute rule, running down from their autocrats through all grades, are the Russians; and their extreme untruthfulness is notorious. Among the Egyptians, long subject to a despotism administered by despotic officials, a man prides himself on successful lying, and will even ascribe a defect in his work to failure in deceiving some one. Then we have the case of the Hindus, who, in their early days irresponsibly governed, afterwards subject for a long period to the brutal rule of the Mahometans, and since that time to the scarcely-less brutal rule of the Christians, are so utterly untruthful that oaths in Courts of Justice are of no avail, and lying is confessed to without shame. Histories tell like tales of a mendacity which, beginning with the ruled, infects the rulers. Writing of the later feudal period in France, Michelet says: "It is curious to trace from year to year the lies and tergiversations of the royal false coiner": but nowadays political deceptions in France, though still practiced, are nothing like so gross. Nor has it been otherwise among ourselves. If with the "universal and loathsome treachery of which every statesman of every party was continually guilty," during Elizabeth’s reign, while monarchical power was still but little qualified, we contrast the veracity of statesmen in recent days, we see a kindred instance of the relations between the untruthfulness which accompanies tyranny and the truthfulness which arises along with increase of liberty.

Hence such connections as we trace between mendacity and a life of external enmity, and between veracity and a life of internal amity, are not due to any direct relations between violence and lying and between peacefulness and truth-telling; but are due to the coercive social structure which chronic external enmity develops, and to the noncoercive social structure developed by a life of internal amity. To which it should be added that under the one set of conditions there is little or no ethical, or rather proethical, reprobation of lying; while under the other set of conditions the proethical reprobation of lying, and in considerable measure the ethical reprobation, become strong.

[I-410]

CHAPTER X.

OBEDIENCE.↩

§ 161. Under the one name "obedience" are grouped two kinds of conduct, which have widely different sanctions: the one sanction being permanent and the other temporary. Filial obedience and political obedience being thus bracketed, the idea of virtuousness is associated with both; and almost everyone thinks that a submission which is praiseworthy in the one case, is praiseworthy in the other also.

Here we have to recognize the truth that while due subordination of child to parent originates in a permanent order of Nature, and is unconditionally good, the subordination of citizen to government is appropriate to a process which is transitional, and is but conditionally good.

It is true that in societies which have had a genesis of the kind erroneously supposed by Sir Henry Maine to be universal, the two kinds of obedience have a common root: the patriarchal group grows out of the family and, by insensible steps, the subjection of children to parents passes into the subjection of adult sons to their father, and the subjection of family groups to the father of the father or patriarch. It is true, also, that by union of many patriarchal groups there is produced an organization in which a supreme patriarch is the political head. But in developed societies, such as those of modern days, these primitive relationships have wholly disappeared, and the two kinds of obedience have become quite distinct. Nevertheless, being in large measure prompted by the same sentiment, the two commonly vary together.

In contemplating the facts, we will first take those which concern the subordination of child to father, and then those which concern the subordination of citizen to government.

§ 162. The earliest social stages are characterized not only by absence of chiefs, and therefore absence of the sentiment which causes political submission, but they are often characterized by such small submission of sons as renders the human family group near akin to the brutal family group–a group in which parental responsibility on the one side, and filial subjection on the other, soon cease.

The American races yield instances. The Araucanians "never punish their male children, considering chastisement degrading, and calculated to render the future man pusillanimous and unfit for the duties of a warrior." Among the Arawaks affection seems to prompt this lenient treatment: a father "will bear any insult or inconvenience from his child tamely, rather than administer personal correction." And then of a Dakota boy we read that "at ten or twelve, he openly rebels against all domestic rule, and does not hesitate to strike his father: the parent then goes off rubbing his hurt, and boasting to his neighbors of the brave boy whom he has begotten." Some Old World races supply kindred illustrations. Of the East Africans, Burton says: "When childhood is past, the father and son become natural enemies, after the manner of wild beasts." So, too, when, writing about the Bedouin character, and commenting on "the daily quarrels between parents and children," Burckhardt tells us that "instead of teaching the boy civil manners, the father desires him to beat and pelt the strangers who come to the tent," to cultivate his high spirit: adding elsewhere that "the young man, as soon as it is in his power, emancipates himself from the father’s authority . . . whenever he can become master of a tent himself . . . he listens to no advice, nor obeys any earthly command but that of his own will." Associated with insubordination to parents, we sometimes have cruelty shown to them in age. A Chippewayan old man "is neglected, and treated with great disrespect, even by his own children"; and the Kamtschadales "did not even consider it a violation of filial duty to kill them [their parents] when they became burdensome."

Towards mothers, more especially is disregard shown: their relatively low position as slaves to men, prompting contempt for them. By the Dakotas "the son is taught to make his mother toil for him." In Fiji "one of the first lessons taught the infant is to strike its mother, a neglect of which would beget a fear lest the child should grow up to be a coward." When a young Hottentot has been admitted into the society of men

He may insult his mother when he will with impunity. He may cudgel her, if he pleases, only for his humor without any danger of being called to an account for it. Such actions are esteemed as tokens of a manly temper and bravery.

Concerning the Zulu boys Thompson writes: "It is a melancholy fact, that when they have arrived at a very early age, should their mothers attempt to chastise them, such is the law, that these lads are at the moment allowed to kill their mothers." And Mason says of the Karens:

Occasionally when the mother gives annoyance to her children by reproving them; one will say: "My mother talks excessively. I shall not be happy till she dies. I will sell her, though I do not get more than a gong or five rupees for her." And he sells her.

So far as these instances go, they associate lack of obedience of children to parents with a low type of social organization. This, however, is not a uniform relation, as we see in the case of the Esquimaux, among whom "the affection of the parents for their children is very great, and disobedience on the part of the latter is rare. The parents never inflict physical chastisement upon the children." The fact would appear to be that in the lowest social groups, we may have either filial obedience or filial disobedience; but that if the groups are of kinds which lead lives of antagonism, then, in the absence of filial obedience, there does not arise that cohesion required for social organization.

§ 163. This is implied by the converse connection which we see displayed among various types of men.

If, with the wandering Semites above named, we contrast the Semites who, though at first wandering, became settled and politically organized, we see little filial subordination in the one and much in the other. Among the Hebrews the head of the family exercised capital jurisdiction (Genesis xxxviii. 24). In the decalogue (Exodus xx, 12) honoring parents comes next to obeying God. In Leviticus xx. 9, punishment is threatened for cursing father or mother, just as it is for blasphemy; and in Deuteronomy xxi. 18—21, it is ordered that a rebellious son shall be publicly stoned to death. Of another branch of the race, which assumed the coercive type of social organization–the Assyrians–we read that "a father was supreme in his household . . . If the son or daughter disowned his father he was sold as a slave, and if he disowned his mother he was outlawed."

By the Hindus, filial piety vividly shown by sacrifices of food to deceased father, grandfather, great-grandfather, &c., was in early times vividly shown, too, during life.

The father of Nakiketas had offered what is called an All-sacrifice, which requires a man to give away all that he possesses. His son, hearing of his father’s vow, asks him, whether he does or does not mean to fulfill his vow without reserve. At first the father hesitates; at last, becoming angry he says: "Yes, I shall give thee also unto death." The father, having once said so, was bound to fulfill his vow, and to sacrifice his son to death. The son is quite willing to go, in order to redeem his father’s rash promise.

No less conspicuously has this connection been exhibited in China, where it has continued from the earliest recorded days down to our own. With the established worship of ancestors, by whom are supposed to be consumed the periodical offerings of food, &c., made to them, there has all along gone the absolute subordination of children to living parents. Says Confucius–"Filial piety and fraternal submission!–are they not the root of all benevolent actions?" An old Chinese saying runs–"Among the hundred virtues, filial piety is the chief"; and a sacred edict of 1670 says filial piety is "the first and greatest of the commandments in China." It was the same in another large society of which the continuity goes back beyond our chronology: I mean that of the Egyptians. According to Ptah-hotep, "The secret of moral duty is obedience; filial obedience is its root." Nor was it otherwise with the society which, beginning as a small cluster of clans, spread and spread till it overran all Europe, with parts of Asia and Africa. The subjection of sons to fathers in early Roman days, and long afterwards, was absolute–less qualified indeed, than in China; for though down to the present time Chinese parents have the right of infanticide, and may sell their children as servants or slaves; and though, by implication, adult sons can do nothing without parental approval, or own property not subject to parental confiscation; yet we do not read that the Chinese have exercised the power of life and death over adult children, as did the Romans. Of course with the establishment of this absolute parental power went the assumption that filial submission should be absolute. And if, throughout subsequent European history, a father’s authority and a child’s subjection have been less extreme; yet, up to comparatively modern times, they have been very decided.

By various types of men we are thus shown that filial obedience has constantly accompanied social growth and consolidation: if not throughout, yet during its earlier stages.

§ 164. The height to which political obedience rises is determined, in chief measure, by the existence of favorable conditions. If the physical characters of the habitat are such as to negative large aggregations of men–as they do in wide tracts which are barren, leading to nomadic life, or as they do where mountain chains cut off group from group–the tendency seems rather to be for the filial sentiment to develop no further than the patriarchal; and along with this restricted growth there may go resistance to a wider rule. The Khonds exemplify this:

For the head of a family all the tribes have the greatest respect, it being a proverb with them that "A man’s father is his God on earth." The social organization among them is indeed strictly patriarchal, the father of a family being its absolute ruler in every case. Disobedience to him under any circumstances is regarded as a crime.

This trait is possessed by another mountain people, the Bhils, who, along with a certain amount of submission to general chiefs, show an extreme allegiance to their family chiefs or patriarchs, called Turwees.

So wonderful is the influence of the chief over this infatuated people, that in no situation, however desperate, can they be induced to betray him. . . . To kill another when their Turwee desires, or to suffer death themselves, appears to them equally a matter of indffference.

From filial obedience, thus widening in range, may in time develop a settled political obedience, where physical circumstances favor it; and especially where there arises combined action in war. Pallas tells us that the Kalmucks manifest much "attachment towards their legitimate rulers"; and that they honor and obey their parents. Among the Sgaus, a division of the Karens (apparently unlike the other divisions), "The elders say: ‘O children and grandchildren! respect and reverence your mother and father.’ . . . ‘O, children and grandchildren! obey the orders of kings, for kings in former times obeyed the commands of God.’ "But it is in the larger societies of primitive types that the two kinds of obedience are most closely associated. In China where, as before shown, filial obedience is extreme, we see them jointly insisted upon; as implied by Tsze-hea when he lauded a man "if, in serving his parents, he can exert his utmost strength, if, in serving his prince, he can devote his life"; and as implied in the conduct of Confucius, already quoted as enjoining filial obedience, who when "passing the vacant place of the prince, his countenance appeared to change, and his legs to bend under him, and his words came as if he hardly had breath to utter them." After recognizing in China occasional dissent, as of Mencius, who in one place suggests rebellion, we may pass to Persia. Here, too, there were solitary expressions of independence, as by the Darwesh who said that "kings are for the protection of their subjects, not subjects for the service of kings"; but, in general, political obedience was urged, for reasons of prudence if for no other. One of their vazirs said:

Opinions differing from the king, to have
’Tis your own hands in your own blood to lave.
Should he affirm the day to be the night,
Say you behold the moon and Pleiads’ light.

And Sadi enjoins the attitude of submission as a part of duty: instance the sentence: "Whosoever possesseth the qualities of righteousness placeth his head on the threshold of obedience." Among the Ancient Indians, instanced above as carrying to an extreme the submission of son to father, political submission was strongly insisted on; as in the Code of Manu, where it is held wrong to treat even a child-king "as if he were a mortal; he is a great divinity in human shape." Then in Egypt, along with that exhortation to obey parents quoted from Ptah-hotep, may be named his approval of wider obedience: "If thou abasest thyself in obeying a superior, thy conduct is entirely good before God." Commenting on the groveling prostrations represented in their sculptures and paintings, Duncker remarks that the Egyptians "worshipped their kings as the deities of the land." Indeed, in the inscriptions on the tombs of officials, the deeds implying such worship are specified as proofs of their virtue. Nor was it otherwise with the Hebrews. While, in their decalogue, religious obedience and filial obedience are closely coupled, there was elsewhere joined with these political obedience; as in Proverbs xvi. 10, where it is said: "A divine sentence is in the lips of the king; his mouth transgresseth not."

Throughout European history a like relationship is traceable. Along with the theory and practice of absolute subjection of child to parent, there went the theory and practice of absolute subjection to the chief man of the group–now to the local head, while the groups were small and incoherent, and now to the central head, when they became large and consolidated. Less definite forms of rule having been replaced by feudalism, there first came fealty to the feudal lord, and then, with advancing political integration, there came loyalty to the king. In the old French epic the one inexpiable crime is the treason of a vassal; the noblest virtue is a vassal’s fidelity. In our own country the extreme loyalty of the highlanders to the chiefs of their clans, and subsequently to the Stuarts as their kings, exemplifies the dominance of the sentiment; while the English nobility have, among other ways of showing this feeling, shown it in sundry of their mottoes; as instance–Paulet and others, "Aimez loyaulté"; Earl Grey and others, "De bon vouloir servir le roy"; Earl of Lindsay "Loyalty binds me"; Baron Mowbray, "I will be loyal during my life"; Earl of Rosse, "For God and the King"; Adair, "Loyal to the death."

And here let us note how the frequency with which loyalty is thus expressed as the highest of sentiments, reminds us of the frequency with which aggressiveness has been, by other nobles, chosen as the sentiment most worthy to be professed.

§ 165. The significance of this association lies in the fact that they are both accompaniments of chronic militancy. When we remember that first of all the chief, and in later days the king, and later still the emperor, is primarily the supreme commander; and that his headship in peace is but a sequence of his headship in war; it is clear that at the outset political obedience is identical with military obedience. Further, it needs but to consider that for success in war absolute subordination to the commander-in-chief is essential, and that absolute subordination to him as king is a concomitant, to see that while the militancy remains active, the two remain one.

Additional evidence of this relationship is yielded by a few cases in which political obedience is carried to an extreme exceeding obedience of all other kinds. The first to be named is afforded by a people who have passed away–the warlike and cannibal Mexicans, who invaded their neighbors to get victims to satisfy their hungry gods. Montezuma II, says Herrera, "caused himself to be so highly respected, that it almost came to be adoration. No commoner was to look him in the face, and if one did, he died for it." According to Peter of Ghent, "the worst feature in the character of the Indians is their submissiveness"; and then Herrera, illustrating their loyalty names a man who would not betray his lord, but rather than do so allowed himself to be "torn piecemeal" by dogs. Among existing peoples, a striking example is furnished by the cannibal Fijians. These ferocious savages, revelling in war and destruction, are described by Erskine as intensely loyal. So obedient are they to their chiefs, says Jackson, that they have been known to eat pumice-stone when commanded to do so; and Williams says that a condemned man stands unbound to be killed, himself declaring, "Whatever the king says, must be done." Of the bloody Dahomans, too, with their Amazon army, we are told by one traveler that "before the king all are slaves alike," and by another that "they reverence him with a mixture of love and fear, little short of adoration": "parents are held to have no right or claim to their children, who, like everything else, belong to the king." So that political subordination submerges all other kinds of subordination.

Nor is it only by these extreme cases, and by the extreme converse cases, that this connection is shown. It is shown also by the intermediate cases: instance the various peoples of Europe. In Russia militancy and its appliances subordinate the entire national life; and among Europeans the Russians display the most abject obedience: gaining, thereby the applause of Mr. Carlyle. Loyal to the point of worship, they submit unresistingly to the dictation of all state officials down to the lowest. On the other hand, we are ourselves the people among whom militancy and its appliances occupy the smallest space in the national life, and among whom there is least political subjection. The government has come to be a servant instead of a master. Citizens severely criticize their princes; discuss the propriety of abolishing one division of the legislature; and expel from power ministers who do not please them.

Nor is it otherwise when we compare earlier and later stages of the same nation. By these, too, we are shown that as fast as the life of internal amity outgrows the life of external enmity, the sentiment of obedience declines. Though submissive loyality to the living German Kaiser is great, yet it is not so great as was the submissive loyalty to his conquering ancestor, Frederick II, when Forster wrote: "What chiefly disgusted me was the deification of the king." If, notwithstanding the nominally free form of their government, the mass of the French people let their liberties be trampled upon to an extent which the English delegates to a Trades–Union Congress in Paris said is "a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a Republican nation"; yet their willing subordination is not so great as it was at the time when war had raised the French monarchy to its zenith. In our own case, too, while there is a marked contrast between the amount of war, internal and external, in early days, and the complete internal peace, joined with long external peace, which recent times have known; there is a contrast no less marked between the great loyalty shown in early days and the moderate loyalty largely nominal, shown at present.

It remains only to add that, along with the decline of political subordination there has gone a decline of filial subordination. The harsh rule of parents and humble submission of children in past centuries, have, in our times, been exchanged for a very moderate exercise of parental authority and a filial subjection which, far less conspicuous during youth than it used to be, almost ceases when the age for marriage arrives.

§ 166. Thus, akin though they are in the sentiment prompting them, and in the main varying together, the two kinds of obedience, filial and political, have different sanctions. The one is bound up with the laws of life, while the other is dependent on the needs of the social state, and changes as they change.

For the obedience of child to parent there is the warrant arising from relatively imperfect development, and there is the warrant arising from the obligation to make some return for benefits received. These are obviously permanent; and though, with the advance from lower to higher types of man and society. filial subjection decreases, yet some degree of it must ever remain, and must continue to be prompted by an ethical sentiment properly so-called.

On the other hand, political obedience, nonexistent in groups of primitive men, comes into existence during the political integrations effected by war–during the growth and organization of large societies formed by successive conquests. The development of political obedience in such societies is a necessity; since, without it, there cannot be carried on the combined actions by which subjugations and consolidations are brought about.

The implication is that the sentiment of political obedience, having but a transitional function, must decrease in amount as the function decreases in needfulness. Along with decline of that system of status characterizing the militant type of organization, and rise of that system of contrast characterizing the industrial type, the need for subjection becomes gradually less. The change of sentiment accompanying this change from compulsory cooperation to voluntary cooperation, while it modifies the relations of citizens to one another, modifies also their relations to their government: to this the same degree of obedience is neither required nor felt. Humble submission ceases to be a virtue; and in place of it there comes the virtue of independence.

Decline of political obedience and waning belief in the duty of it, go along with increasing subordination to ethical principles, a clearer recognition of the supremacy of these, and a determination to abide by them rather than by legislative dictates. More and more the proethical sentiments prompting obedience to government, come into conflict with the ethical sentiment prompting obedience to conscience. More and more this last causes unconformity to laws which are at variance with equity. And more and more it comes to be felt that legal coercion is warranted only insofar as law is an enforcer of justice.

That political obedience is thus a purely transitional virtue, cannot be perceived while the need for political subordination remains great; and while it remains great the unlimited authority of the ruling power (if not a man then a majority) will continue to be asserted. But if from past changes we are to infer future changes, we may conclude that in an advanced state, the sphere of political obedience will have comparatively narrow limits; and that beyond those limits the submission of citizen to government will no more be regarded as meritorious than is now the cringing of a slave to a master.

[I-422]

CHAPTER XI.

INDUSTRY.↩

§ 167. If we are to understand the origins and variations of the sentiments, ethical and proethical, which have been entertained in different times and places concerning industry and the absence of industry we must first note certain fundamental distinctions between classes of human activities, and between their relations to the social state.

Industry, as we now understand it, scarcely exists among primitive men–scarcely indeed, can exist before the pastoral and agricultural states have been established. Living on wild products, savages of early types have to expend their energies primarily in gathering and catching these: the obtainment of some, like fruits and roots, being easy and safe, and the obtainment of others, such as beasts of which some are swift and some are large, being difficult and dangerous. After these the remaining activities, more difficult and dangerous than those the chase implies, are implied by warfare with fellow men. Hence the occupations of the utterly uncivilized may be roughly divided into those which demand strength, courage, and skill, in large measure, and those which demand them in but small measure or not at all. And since in most cases the preservation of the tribe is mainly determined by its success in war and the chase, it results that the strength, courage, or skill shown in these, come to be honored both for themselves and for their value to the tribe. Conversely, since the digging up of roots, the gathering of wild fruits, and the collecting of shellfish, do not call for strength, courage, and skill, and do not conspicuously further tribal preservation, these occupations come to be little honored or relatively despised. An implication strengthens the contrast. While the stronger sex is called on to devote itself to the one, the other is left to the weaker sex: sometimes aided by conquered men, or slaves. Hence arises a further reason why in primitive societies, honor is given to the predatory activities while the peaceful activities are held in dishonor. Industry, therefore, or that which at first represents it, is not unnaturally condemned by the proethical sentiment.

The only kinds of activity to be classed as industrial which the warriors of the tribe may enter upon, are those necessitated by the making of weapons and the erection of wigwams or huts: the one, closely associated with war and the chase, demanding also the exercise of skill; and the other demanding both skill and strength–not the moderate strength shown in monotonous labor, but the great strength which has to be suddenly exerted. And these apparent exceptions furnish a verification; for they further show that the occupations held in contempt are those which, demanding relatively little power, physical or intellectual, can be carried on by the inferior.

The contrast thus initiated between the sentiments with which these classes of occupations are regarded, has persisted with but small, though increasing, qualification, throughout the course of human progress; and it has thus persisted because the causes have in the main persisted. While the self-preservation of societies has most conspicuously depended on the activities implied by successful war, such activities have been held in honor; and, by implication, industrial activities have been held contemptible. Only during recent times–only now that national welfare is becoming more and more dependent on superior powers of production, and such superior powers of production are becoming more and more dependent on the higher mental faculties, are other occupations than militant ones rising into respectability; while simultaneously respectability is being acknowledged in the accompanying capacity for persistent and monotonous application.

Carrying this clue with us, we shall be able now to understand better the ethics of labor, as changing from people to people and from age to age.

§ 168. The North American Indians furnish the simplest and clearest illustrations of predatory habits and associated sentiments. Schoolcraft says of the Chippewas:

They have regarded the use of the bow and arrow the war club and spear as the noblest employments of man. . . . To hunt well and to fight well, are the first and the last themes of their hopes and praises of the living and the dead. . . . They have ever looked upon agricultural and mechanical labors as degrading.

Of the Snake Indian, Lewis and Clarke write: "He would consider himself degraded by being compelled to walk any distance." Of kindred nature is Burton’s account of the Dakotas: "The warrior, considering the chase as an ample share of the labor curse, is so lazy that he will not rise to saddle or unsaddle his pony. . . . Like a wild beast he cannot be broken to work: he would rather die than employ himself in honest industry." By the more civilized Iroquois, too, the primitive feeling was displayed–"The warrior despised the toil of husbandry, and held all labor beneath him." Even the unwarlike Esquimaux is said to exhibit a like aversion. "He hunts and fishes, but having brought his booty to land troubles himself no further about it; for it would be a stigma on his character, if he so much as drew a seal out of the water." There being, perhaps, for this usage a plea like that possessed by the usage of the Chippewayans, among whom, "when the men kill any large beast, the women are always sent to bring it to the tent"–the plea, namely, that the chase, whether on sea or on land, is extremely exhausting.

Passing to South America we meet with facts of kindred meaning. Men of the Guiana tribes take no share in industry, save in making clearance for the growing of food: each lies "indolently in his hammock until necessitated to fish, or use the more violent exercise of the chase, to provide for the wants of his family," And then of the Araucanians, warlike but agricultural (apparently because there is but little scope for the chase), we are told that "the ‘lord and master’ does little but eat, sleep, and ride about."

In the wording of this last statement, as by implication in the other statements, we may see that in early stages the egoism of men, unqualified by the altruism which amicable social intercourse generates, leads them to devolve on women all exertions which, unaccompanied by the pleasures of achievement, are monotonous and wearisome. "The lord and master" does what he likes; and he likes to make the woman (or his woman as the case may be) do all the dull and hard work. Proofs of this are multitudinous. America furnishes instances in the accounts of the Chippewayans, Creeks, Tupis, Patagonians; as witness these extracts:

"This laborious task [dragging the sledges] falls most heavily on the women: nothing can more shock the feelings of a person, accustomed to civilized life, than to witness the state of their degradation."

"The women perform all the labor, both in the house and field, and are, in fact, but slaves to the men."

"When they removed, the women were the beasts of burthen, and carried the hammocks, pots, wooden pestles and mortars, and all their other household stock."

The lives of the Patagonian women are "one continued scene of labor. . . . They do everything, except hunting and fighting."

Here, again, are testimonies given by travelers in Africa concerning the Hottentots, Bechuanas, Kaffirs, Ashantis, people of Fernando Po and the Lower Niger:

The wife "is doomed to all the toil of getting and dressing provisions for" her husband, "herself and children. . . . and to all the care and drudgery within doors, with a share of the fatigue in tending the cattle."

"The women build the houses; plant and reap the corn; fetch water and fuel; and cook the food. It is very rarely that the men are seen helping the women, even in the most laborious work."

"Besides her domestic duties, the woman has to perform all the hard work; she is her husband’s ox, as a Kafir once said to me–she has been bought, he argued, and must therefore labor."

"It may be remarked, that the weightiest duties generally devolve upon the wife, who is to be found ‘grinding at the mill,’ transacting business in the market, or cultivating the plantation."

"The females in Fernando Po have a fair portion of work assigned to them, such as planting and collecting the yam . . . but they are certainly treated with greater consideration and kindness than in any part of Africa we visited."

On the lower Niger, "women are commonly employed in the petty retail trade about the country; they also do a great deal of hard work, especially in the cultivation of the land."

Of which extracts it may be remarked that the latter ones, which concern races of more advanced kinds, carrying on more settled industries, show that with them the slavery of women is less pronounced.

Beyond that dishonorableness which, in early stages, attaches to labor because it can be performed by women, who in most cases are incapable, or considered to be incapable, of war and the chase; there is the further dishonorableness which attaches to it because, as above pointed out, it is carried on also by conquered men or slaves–by men, that is, proved in one or other way to be inferior. In very early stages we sometimes find slaves thus used for the nonpredatory occupations which their masters find irksome. Even of the Chinooks we read that "slaves do all the laborious work"; and they are often associated with the women in this function. Says Andersson: "The Damaras are idle creatures. What is not done by the women is left to the slaves, who are either the descendants of impoverished members of their own tribe or . . . captured Bushmen." Describing the people of Embomma on the Congo, Tuckey writes: "The cultivation of the ground is entirely the business of slaves and women, the King’s daughters and princes’ wives being constantly thus employed." Burton tells us that in Dahomey "agriculture is despised, because slaves are employed in it"; but a great deal of it seems to be done by women. And similarly of the Mishmis in Asia, we read that "the women and slaves do all the cultivation."

Naturally then, and, indeed, we may say necessarily there grows up in these early stages a profound prejudice against labor–a proethical sentiment condemnatory of it. How this proethical sentiment, having the sanction of ancestral usages, assumes this or that special character according to the habits which the environment determines, we are variously shown. Thus we read that the Bushmen "are sworn enemies to the pastoral life. Some of their maxims are, to live on hunting and plunder"; "The genuine Arabs disdain husbandry, as an employment by which they would be degraded." In which examples, as in many already given, we may see how a mode of life long pursued, determines a congruous set of feelings and ideas. And the strength of the prejudices which maintain inherited customs of this class, is shown by sundry anomalous cases. Livingstone tells us of the East Africans that where there are cattle, the women till the land, plant the corn, and build the huts. The men stay at home to sew, spin, weave, and talk, and milk the cows."

Still more strange is the settled division of labor between the sexes in Abyssinia. According to Bruce, "It is infamy for a man to go to market to buy anything. He cannot carry water or bake bread; but he must wash the clothes belonging to both sexes, and, in this function, the women cannot help him." In Cieza’s account of certain ancient Peruvians, the Cañaris, we find a kindred system:

[The women] are great laborers, for it is they who dig the land, sow the crops, and reap the harvests, while their husbands remain in the houses sewing and weaving, adorning their clothes, and performing other feminine offices. . . . Some Indians say that this arises from the dearth of men and the great abundance of women.

Possibly such anomalies as these have arisen in cases where surrounding conditions, causing decrease of predatory activities while the labors of women continued to suffice for purposes of production, left the men to lead idle lives or lives filled with easy occupations. We may safely infer that among barbarous peoples, the men did not take to hard and monotonous labor until they were obliged.

§ 169. But where chronic militancy did not effectually keep down population, increase of it made peremptory the devotion of men to food production; and with this change in social life there was initiated a change in the proethical sentiments respecting labor. The Khonds furnish an example. They "consider it beneath their dignity to barter or traffic, and . . . regard as base and plebeian all who are not either warriors or tillers of the soil." So of the Javans we are told that "they have a contempt for trade, and those of higher rank esteem it disgraceful to be engaged in it; but the common people are ever ready to engage in the labors of agriculture, and the chiefs to honor and encourage agricultural industry." From various sources we learn that the Germanic tribes, both in their original habitats and in those which they usurped, became reconciled to husbandry as an alternative to hunting and marauding: doubtless because by no other occupation could adequate sustenance be obtained.

Concerning these and kindred transitional states, two passing remarks may be ventured. One is that since industry chiefly agricultural, is at first carried on by slaves and women, working under authority it results that when freemen are forced by want of food to labor, they have a strong prejudice against laboring for others, that is, laboring for hire; since working under authority by contract, too much resembles working under authority by compulsion. While Schomburgk characterizes the Caribs as the most industrious race in Guiana, he says that only the extremest need can induce a Carib so far to lower his dignity as to work for wages for a European. This feeling is shown with equal or greater strength by some peaceful peoples to whom subordination is unfamiliar or unknown. Speaking of southeast India, Lewin says: "Among the hill tribes labor cannot be hired; the people work each one for himself. In 1865, in this district, a road had to be cut; but although fabulous wages were offered, the hill population steadily refused to work." And still more decided is the aversion to working under orders shown by the otherwise industrious Sonthal:

The Sonthal will take service with no one, he will perform no work except for himself or his family, and should any attempt be made to coerce him, he flies the country or penetrates into the thickest jungle, where unknown and unsought, he commences clearing a patch of ground and erecting his log hut.

The other remark is that the scorn for trade which, as above shown, at first coexists with the honoring of agriculture, is possibly due to the fact that it was originally carried on chiefly by unsettled classes, who were detached, untrustworthy members of a community in which most men had fixed positions. But the growth of trade slowly brought a changed estimate. As, in hunting tribes, agriculture, relatively unessential, was despised, but became respectable when it became an indispensable means to maintenance of life; so trade, at first relatively unessential (since essential things were mostly made at home), similarly lacked the sanction of necessity and of ancestral custom, but in course of time, while growing into importance, gradually ceased to excite that proethical sentiment which vents itself in contempt.

§ 170. With the growth of populous societies and the more and more imperative need for agriculture, the honorableness for labor does not for long periods obtain recognition, for the reasons indicated at the outset: it is carried on by slaves, or by serfs, or in later days by men more or less inferior in body or mind. A strong association in thought is thus established; and the natural repugnance to work is enforced by the belief that engagement in it is a confession of a low nature.

Though, in the literatures of ancient civilized societies, we find the duty of laboring insisted on, it seems mostly to be the duty of subject men. The injunction contained in the Code of Manu–"Daily perform thine own appointed work unweariedly," refers by implication to men under authority: "appointed" work implies a master. So, too, according to the Book of the Dead (cxxv), the Egyptian, when questioned after death, had to declare, "I have not been idle," and, "I have not made delays, or dawdled." From the phrasing of the last sentence we may fairly infer that the work diligently performed was work commanded. Of the Hebrews the same may be concluded. Remembering that, being originally pastoral, they long continued to regard the care of cattle as relatively honorable (like the existing Arabs among whom, when the men are not raiding, their only fit occupation is herding); we may similarly gather that the obligation to work was mostly the obligation imposed on servants or slaves: slaves being usually the proper word. Though the third commandment applies to masters as well as to servants, yet, even supposing the Commandments were indigenous, the fact that the life was still mainly pastoral, implies that the work spoken of was pastoral work, not manual labor. It is true that in the legend of Adam’s condemnation, the curse of labor is imposed on all his descendants; but we have, in the first place, good reason for regarding this legend as of Babylonian origin, and we have, in the second place, the inference suggested by recent researches, that the Adami, a dark race, were slaves, and that the eating of the forbidden fruit reserved for the superior race, was a punishable transgression; just as was, in ancient Peru, the eating of coca, similarly reserved for the Inca class. So that possibly among the Hebrews also, the duty of working was imposed on inferior men rather than on men as such. In Persian literature we do, indeed, meet with more distinct recognition of the virtuousness of labor irrespective of conditions. Thus it is said–"A sower of seeds is as great in the eyes of Ormusd, as if he had given existence to a thousand creatures." And in The Parsees, by Dosabhoy Framjee, we read that "the Zoroastrian is taught by his religion to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow."

§ 171. The peoples of Europe from early days down to our own, illustrate this relation between the kind of social activity and the prevailing sentiment about labor.

We have first the evidence which the Greeks furnish. Plato, showing his feeling towards traders by saying that the legislator passes them over, while for agriculturists he shows such respect as is implied by giving them laws, shows more fully in the Republic how degraded he holds to be all producers and distributors: comparing them to the basest parts of the individual nature. Similar is the belief expressed, and feeling manifested, by Aristotle, who says, "It is impossible for one who lives the life of a mechanic or hired servant to practice a life of virtue."

Nor has it been otherwise further West. In the Roman world, along with persistent and active militancy, there went an increasing degradation of the nonmilitant class–slaves and freedmen. And throughout "the dark ages," which collapse of the brutal civilization of Rome left behind, as well as throughout those ages during which perpetually recurring wars at length established large and stable kingdoms, this contempt for industry, both bodily and mental, continued; so that not only unskilled labor and the skilled labor of the craftsman, but also the intellectual labor of the educated man, were treated with contempt. Only in proportion as fighting ceased to be the exclusive business of life with all but the subject classes, and only as the subject classes, simultaneously growing larger, gained a larger share in the formation of opinion did the honorableness of industry become in some measure recognized: any praise of it previously given by the governing classes, being due to the consciousness that it conduced to their welfare.

In modern days, especially among ourselves and the Americans, the industrial part of society has so greatly outgrown the militant part, and has come to be so much more operative in forming the sentiments and ideas concerning industry, that these are almost reversed. Though unskilled labor is still regarded with something like contempt, as implying inferiority of capacity and of social position; and though the labor of the artisan, more respected because of the higher mental power it implies, is little respected because of its class associations; yet intellectual labor has in recent times acquired an honorable status. But the fact chiefly to be noted is that along with the advance of industrialism towards social supremacy, there has arisen the almost universal feeling that some kind of useful occupation is imperative. Condemnations of the "idle rich" are nowadays uttered by the rich themselves.

It may be noted, however, that even still, among those who represent the ancient regime–the military and naval officers–the old feeling survives; with the result that those among them who possess the highest culture–the medical officers, both military and naval, and the engineer officers–are regarded as standing on a lower level than the rest, and are treated with less consideration by the authorities.

§ 172. Thus as in all the preceding chapters, so in this chapter, we see that the ethical conceptions, or rather the proethical conceptions, are determined by the forms of the social activities. Toward such activities as are most conspicuously conducive to the welfare of the society sentiments of approbation are called forth, and conversely; the result being that the idea of right comes to be associated with the presence of them and wrong with the absence of them.

Hence the general contrast shown from the earliest stages down to the latest, between the disgracefulness of labor in societies exclusively warlike, and the honorableness of labor in peaceful societies, or in societies relatively peaceful. This contrast is significantly indicated by the contrast between the ceremonies at the inauguration of a ruler. Among uncivilized militant peoples, in the formal act of making or crowning a chief or king, weapons always figure: here he is raised on a shield above the shoulders of his followers, and there the sword is girded on or the spear handed to him. And since, in most cases, relatively peaceful societies have preserved in their traditions the ceremonies used in their exclusively militant days, it rarely happens that the inauguration of a ruler is free from symbols of this kind. But one significant case of freedom from them is supplied by that tribe in Africa, the Manansas, already named, who, driven by warlike tribes around into a hill country, have devoted themselves to agriculture, and who say: "We want not the blood of the beasts, much less do we thirst for the blood of men!" for among them, according to Holub, a new sovereign receives as tokens, some sand, stones, and a hammer, "symbolizing industry and labor."

There is one remaining fact to be named and emphasized. Out of the proethical sentiments which yield sanction to industry and make it honorable, there eventually emerges the ethical sentiment proper. This does not enjoin labor for its own sake, but enjoins it as implied by the duty of selfsustentation instead of sustentation by others. The virtue of work consists essentially in the performance of such actions as suffice to meet the cost of maintaining self and dependents and discharging social duties; while the disgracefulness of idleness essentially consists in the taking from the common stock the means of living, while doing nothing either to add to it or otherwise to further men’s happiness.

[I-435]

CHAPTER XII.

TEMPERANCE.↩

§ 173. Such ethical, or rather proethical, sentiments as attach to temperance, have primarily like sundry of the associated proethical sentiments, religious origins. As shown in The Principles of Sociology, section 140, the bearing of hunger becomes in many cases a virtue, because it is a sequence of leaving food for the ancestor, and, at a later stage, sacrificing food to the god. Where food is not abundant, relinquishments of it involve either absolute fastings or stinted meals; and hence there arises an association in thought between moderation in eating and a subordination which is either religious or quasi-religious.

Possibly in some cases a kindred restraint is put on the drinking of liquors which are used as libations, since the quantities required for these also, restrict the quantities remaining for the sacrificers. If, as often happens, there is at every meal a throwing aside of drink, as well as food, for the invisible beings around, it tends to become an implication that one who exceeds so far as to become intoxicated, has disregarded these invisible beings, and is therefore to be blamed. It is true that, as we shall presently see, other ideas sometimes lead to contrary beliefs and sentiments; but it is possible that there may from this cause have originated the divine reprobation which is in some cases alleged.

Since the above paragraphs were written, I have found clear proof that the suspicion they express is well founded. From a people among whom ancestor-worship, and the habitual sacrificing to ancestors, have been through all known ages zealously carried on, we get evidence that moderation in both food and drink, pushed even to asceticism, is a consequence of regard for the dead, to whom oblations are constantly made. Said Confucius: "He who aims to be a man of complete virtue, in his food does not seek to gratify his appetite." Here we have the virtue enunciated apart from its cause. But Confucius also said: "I can find no flaw in the character of Yu. He used himself coarse food and drink, but displayed the utmost filial piety towards the spirits. His ordinary garments were poor, but he displayed the utmost elegance in his sacrificial cap and apron." Here we have the virtue presented in connection with religious duty: the last being the cause, the first the consequence.

Considered apart from supposed religious sanction, the virtue of temperance can of course have no other sanction than utility, as determined by experience. The observed beneficial effects of moderation and the observed detrimental effects of excess, form the bases for judgments, and the accompanying feelings.

Rational ideas concerning temperance–especially temperance in food–cannot be formed until we have glanced at those variations in the physiological requirements, entailed by variations in surrounding circumstances.

§ 174. What would among ourselves be condemned as disgusting gluttony is, under the conditions to which certain races of men are exposed, quite normal and indeed necessary. Where the habitat is such as at one time to supply very little food and at another time food in great abundance, survival depends on the ability to consume immense quantities when the opportunities occur. A good instance is furnished by Sir George Grey’s account of the orgies which follow the stranding of a whale in Australia.

By and by other natives came gaily trooping in from all quarters: by night they dance and sing, and by day they eat and sleep, and for days this revelry continues unchecked, until they at last fairly eat their way into the whale, and you see them climbing in and about the stinking carcase choosing titbits . . . they remain by the carcase for many days, rubbed from head to foot with stinking blubber gorged to repletion with putrid meat. . . . When they at last quit their feast, they carry off as much as they can stagger under.

Living as the Australians do in a barren country, and often half starved, those of their number who could not fully utilize an occasion like this would be the first to die during times of famine. Proof that this is the true interpretation, is furnished by Christison’s account of a tribe of central Queensland. They are great eaters "only at first; but when they have become used to rations and regular meals, including bread or damper, they are very moderate eaters, perhaps more moderate than Europeans."

In other cases what seems to us extreme and almost incredible excess, is due to the physiological necessity for producing heat in climates where the loss of heat is very great. Hence the explanation of the following story.

From Kooilittiuk I learnt a new Eskimaux luxury: he had eaten until he was drunk, and every moment fell asleep, with a flushed and burning face, and his mouth open: by his side sat Arnalooa [his wife], who was attending her cooking pot, and at short intervals awakened her spouse, in order to cram as much as was possible of a large piece of half-boiled flesh into his mouth, with the assistance of her forefinger and having filled it quite full, cut off the morsel close to his lips. This he slowly chewed, and as soon as a small vacancy became perceptible, this was filled again by a lump of raw blubber. During this operation the happy man moved no part of him but his jaws, not even opening his eyes; but his extreme satisfaction was occasionally shown by a most expressive grunt, whenever he enjoyed sufficient room for the passage of sound.

Another case, equally astonishing, comes from northern Asia. Mr. Cochrane says:

The Yakuti and Tongousi are great gluttons. I gave the child [a boy about five years old] a candle made of the most impure tallow, a second, and a third–and all were devoured with avidity. The steersman then gave him several pounds of sour frozen butter; this also he immediately consumed; lastly a large piece of yellow soap; all went the same road. . . In fact, there is nothing in the way of fish or meat, from whatever animal, however putrid or unwholesome, but they will devour with impunity and the quantity only varies from what they have, to what they can get. I have repeatedly seen a Yakut or a Tongouse devour forty pounds of meat in a day.

The following testimony of Capt. Wrangell shows the physiological results of this enormous consumption.

Even in Siberia, the jakuti are called iron-men, and I suppose that there are not any other people in the world who endure cold and hunger as they do. I have seen them frequently in the severe cold of this country and when the fire had long been extinguished, and the light jacket had slipped off their shoulders, sleeping quietly, completely exposed to the heavens, with scarcely any clothing on, and their bodies covered with a thick coat of rime.

And now observe the remarkable and significant fact that where survival primarily depends on this ability to eat and digest enormous quantities of food, this ability acquires an ethical or proethical sanction. According to Erman, a Yakut adage says: "To eat much meat and to grow fat upon it, is the highest destiny of men."

§ 175. Passing from this extreme instance of the way in which the necessities of life generate corresponding ideas of right and wrong, and coming to the ordinary cases meeting us in temperate and tropical climates, where something like an ethical sanction, as we ordinarily understand it, comes into play; we find no connections between temperance in food and other traits, unless it be a general association of gluttony with degradation.

Even this qualified generalization may be held doubtful. Cook described the Tahitians as each consuming a "prodigious" quantity of food. Yet they were physically a fine race, intellectually superior to many and, though licentious, were described by him as having sundry characteristics to be admired. Conversely the Arabs are relatively abstemious in both food and drink. But while in their sexual relations they are about as low as the Tahitians, since they are continually changing wives, and say of themselves, "Dogs are better than we are," they are little to be admired in any respect: being fanatically revengeful and regarding skillful robbery as a qualification for marriage.

At the same time that the uncivilized at large present no definite relations between temperance or intemperance in food and their other traits, they display little or no sentiment in respect of one or the other which can be called ethical. Save in the above remarkable proverb quoted from the Yakuts, opinion on this matter has not taken shape among them.

In some ancient semicivilized societies, however, there had arisen the consciousness that excess in food is wrong. In the Code of Manu it is written:

For gluttony is hateful, injures health,
May lead to death, and surely bars the road
To holy merit and celestial bliss.

The fact that in parts of the Mahabharata "heavenly blessedness" is described as without any kind of "sensual gratification," implies reprobation of excess in eating. This is of course implied also in the ascetic life on which the Indian sages insisted. The Hebrews, too, displayed this consciousness: there was occasional advocacy of abstemiousness, as shown in the proverb: "Be not among winebibbers: among riotous eaters of flesh: for the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags" (Prov. xxiii 20—21). By the Egyptians gluttony was recognized as a vice, but was nevertheless deliberately practiced. On the one hand, excess in food was set down among the forty-two chief sins of the Egyptians, while on the other hand, at their

banquets the Egyptians do not seem to have been very moderate. Herodotus tells us (ii. 78) that a small wooden image of a mummy was carried round at their entertainments with the exhortion, "Look on this, drink and be merry. When dead, thou wilt be as this is!" This admonition was not without its results. ln the pictures on monuments we find not only men, but women, throwing up the surfeit of food and wine.

But the general aspect of the evidence seems to imply that with the rise of settled societies, and with the generalizing of experiences, there arose a utilitarian condemnation of excess in food.

§ 176. Excess in drinking is a phrase which, though applicable to drinking of unfermented liquors in injurious quantities, yet practically applies to liquors which are either fermented, and therefore intoxicating, or are otherwise intoxicating. Opinion concerning the taking of them is determined mainly by recognition of the effects they produce–regarded here with approbation and there with reprobation.

It is a mistake to suppose that the state of intoxication is everywhere condemned. Whether produced by alcohol or by other agent, it has been in early times lauded, and still is so in some places. An interpretation is suggested by the remark of an Arafura, who, when belief in the Christian God was commended to him and he was told that God is everywhere present, said: "Then this God is certainly in your arrack, for I never feel happier than when I have drunk plenty of it." The idea thus implied was distinctly and perpetually expressed by the ancient Indians in their praises of Soma-drinking. The god Soma was supposed to be present in the juice of the plant called soma; intoxication resulted from being possessed by him: and the exalted state desired, produced, and gloried in, was a state of religious blessedness: the gods themselves being supposed to be thus inspired by the god Soma. Says Max Müller:

Madakyut=such a state of intoxication as was not incompatible with the character of the ancient gods. . . . We have no poetical word to express a high state of mental excitement produced by drinking the intoxicating juice of the Soma or other plants, which has not something opprobrious mixed up with it, while in ancient times that state of excitement was celebrated as a blessing of the gods, as not unworthy of the gods themselves, nay as a state in which both the warrior and the poet would perform their highest achievements.

So, too, by the Greeks it was believed that the god Dionysus was present in wine, and that "the Bacchic excitement," with its accompanying prophetic power, was due to possession by him. Hence there arose a religious sanction for drunkenness, as shown in the orgies. Nor are we without cases in our own times. The Dahomans, according to Burton, deem it a "duty to the gods to be drunk"; and the Ainos sanctity their intoxication under "the fiction of `drinking to the gods’": "the more saké the Ainos drink the more devout they are, and the better pleased are the gods." Kindred ideas and sentiments exist in Polynesia, in connection with the taking of the intoxicating ava, kava, or yaqona. In Fiji the preparation and drinking are accompanied by prayers to the gods and chants, and participation in the ceremonies is regarded as honorable.

Evidently then, drunkenness, instead of having in all cases religious condemnation, has in some cases religious sanction; and thus comes to have a proethical sentiment justifying it. This is very well shown by the Ainos, who refuse to associate with those who will not drink.

§ 177. Either with or without this kind of sanction, intemperance, under one or other form, is widely spread among the inferior races.

Of the Kalmucks, Pallas tells us that they are intemperate in eating and drinking when they have the chance. "The festivities of the Khonds," says Campbell, "usually terminate in universal drunkenness." Brett writes that the drunkenness of the natives of Guiana takes the shape of "fearful excess at intervals." And we read of the existing Guatemalans that "the greatest happiness of these people consists in drunkenness, produced by the excessive use of . . . chicha." These last testimonies respecting American peoples at the present day recall kindred testimonies respecting ancient American peoples. Garcilasso says of the Peruvians: "They brought liquor in great quantity, for this was one of the most prevalent vices among the Indians." Of the Yucatanese, Landa says: "The Indians were very debauched, and often got drunk"; "the women got intoxicated at the banquets, but by themselves." And Sahagun writes of the Mexicans that "they said that the bad effects of drunkenness were produced by one of the gods of wine. Hence it appears that they did not consider as a sin what they had done while being drunk."

But intemperance is by no means universal among the uncivilized and semicivilized: sobriety being shown by some of the utterly primitive as well as by some of the considerably advanced. Of the Veddahs we read–"They do not smoke, and are very temperate, drinking water only." Says Campbell: "Fond of fermented and spirituous liquors, the Lepchas are nevertheless not given to drunkenness." Of the Sumatran of the interior, only partially vitiated by contact with the Malays, Marsden tells us: "He is temperate and sober, being equally abstemious in meat and drink." Africa, too, supplies instances: "The Foolas and Mandingos very strictly abstain from fermented liquors, and from spirits, which they hold in such abhorrence, that if a single drop were to fall upon a clean garment, it would be rendered unfit to wear until washed." And Waitz makes the general remark that "except where they have had much intercourse with whites the Negroes cannot be accused of being specially addicted to intoxicating liquors."

This last statement, reminding us of the demoralization which Europeans everywhere produce in the native races whom they pretend to civilize, and reminding us more especially of the disastrous effects which follow the supplying of them with whiskey or rum, shows how cautious we must be in our inferences respecting the relations between drinking habits and social states. It is clear that in some cases, as in that of the Veddahs, sobriety may result from lack of intoxicants, and that in other cases insobriety does not naturally belong to the type or the tribe, but has been imported.

§ 178. Perhaps among European peoples, with their long histories, we may with most chance of success seek for such relation as exists between sobriety and social conditions. This relation seems but indefinite at best.

Brutal as was their social system, the Spartans were ascetic in their regimen; and remembering the lessons which drunken helots were made to inculcate, it is clear that originally the Spartans reprobated drunkenness and were ordinarily sober. Meanwhile the Athenians, much more civilized as they were in their social state, and far superior in culture, were by no means so sober. Some scanty testimonies imply that among the European peoples who at that time were socially organized in but low degrees, excesses in drinking were frequent. Of the early Gauls Diodorus says: "They are so exceedingly given to wine, that they guzzle it down as soon as it is imported by the merchant." And describing the primitive Germans, Tacitus tells us that "to pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no one." Of course not much has come down to us respecting men’s drinking habits during "the dark ages"; but the prevalence of intemperance may be inferred from such indications as we have. One of the excesses occurring in the Merovingian period was that Bishop Eonius fell down drunk at mass; and we are told of Charlemagne that he was temperate: the implication being that temperance was something exceptional. Of France it may be remarked that even when intoxication was not produced, wine was taken in great excess during many later centuries. Montaigne, while saying that drunkenness was less than when he was a boy tells us that: "I have seen a great lord of my time . . . who without setting himself to’t, and after his ordinary rate of drinking at meals, swallowed down not much less than five quarts of wine." Evidently, from the days of Montaigne down to those of the modern French, the majority of whom water their ordinary weak wine, the decrease of intemperance has been marked. And among ourselves there has taken place, though with much irregularity a kindred change. From old English and Danish times, when there was drunkenness among monks as well as others, down through the times of the Normans, who soon became as intemperate as those they had subjugated, and down through subsequent centuries, the excesses in drinks of the less potent kinds were great and general. At the beginning of the last century, when the consumption of spirits increased greatly, rising to nearly a gallon per head of the population annually and producing scenes such as Hogarth depicted in his Gin Lane, there came the remedial Gin Act, which, however, was soon repealed after having done mischief. Then during the rest of the century while "drunkenness was the common vice of the middle and tower orders," wealthier people indulged so largely in wine for their entertainments, as not unfrequently to improverish themselves.

§ 179. Evidently the relations between drinking habits and kinds of social life are obscure. We cannot, as the teetotalers would like, assert a regular proportion between temperance and civilization, or between intemperance and moral degradation at large. Says Surgeon-General Balfour, "Half of the Asiatic races–Arab, Persian, Hindu, Burman, Malay, Siamese . . . are abstinents"; and yet no one will contend that, either in social type or social conduct, these races are superior to the races of Europe, who are anything but abstinents. Within Europe itself differences teach us the same lesson. Sober Turkey is not so high in its social life as whiskey-drinking Scotland. Yet, on comparing Italy and Germany, do we see that along with the contrast between the small potations of the one, and the great potations of the other, there goes contrast between their moral states of the kind that might be looked for. Putting on the one hand the Bedouin, who, habitual robber as he is and displaying numerous vices, nevertheless drinks no fermented liquors, and cries "Fie upon thee, drunkard!" and on the other hand the clever English artisan, who occasionally drinks to excess (and the clever ones are most apt to do this) but who is often a good fellow in other respects, we do not find any clear association between temperance and rectitude.

Some relation may reasonably be supposed to exist between drunkenness and general wretchedness. Where the life is miserable there is a great tendency to drink, partly to get what little momentary pleasure may be had, and partly to shut out unhappy thoughts about the future. But if we recall the drunkenness which prevailed among our upper classes in the last century, we cannot say that wretchedness, or at any rate physical wretchedness, was its excuse. Ennui, too, seems often an assignable cause, and may have produced the prevailing inebriety throughout Europe in early days, when there was difficulty in passing the time not occupied in fighting or hunting. Yet we find various peoples whose lives are monotonous enough, but who do not drink. Manifestly various influences cooperate; and it appears that the results of them are too irregular to be generalized.

§ 180. But we are chiefly concerned with temperance and intemperance as ethically regarded. That intemperance, whether in food or drink, is condemned by the ethical sentiment proper, which refers, not to the extrinsic but to the intrinsic effects, as injurious alike to body and mind, goes without saying. But it is otherwise with the proethical sentiment. We have many cases showing that there comes either approbation or reprobation or intemperance, according to the religious ideas and social habits.

Already we have seen that intoxication may be sanctified by certain theological beliefs; and here we have to note that prevailing excess in drinking, and the current opinion which grows up along with it, may result in a social sanction. One of the uncivilized races shows us that a habit of taking a toxic agent may where it is general, generate for itself not only a justification but something more. Says Yule of the Kasias:

In the people perhaps the first thing that strikes a stranger is their extreme addiction to chewing pawn, and their utter disregard of the traces which its use leaves on their teeth and lips. Indeed they pride themselves on this, saying that "Dogs and Bengalees have white teeth."

In records of ancient civilized races we find evidence of a kindred pride in excesses. Apart from its religious sanction, the drunken elevation which followed Soma-drinking was gloried in by the Indian rishi; and among a neighboring people, alcoholic excess was by some thought the reverse of disgraceful, as witness the epitaph of Darius Hystaspes, saying that he was a great conqueror and a great drinker, and as witness the self-commendation of Cyrus, who "in his epistle to the Spartans says, that in many other things he was more fit than his brother to be a king, and chiefly because he could bear abundance of wine." But modern Europe has yielded the clearest proofs that prevailing inebriety may generate a sentiment which justifies inebriety. The drinking usages in Germany in past times, and down to the present time among students, show that along with an inordinate desire for fermented liquor, and the scarcely credible ability to absorb it, there had grown up a contempt for those who fell much below the average drinking capacity and a glory in being able to drink the largest quantity in the shortest time. Among ourselves, too, in the last century kindred ideas and feelings prevailed. The saying "It is a poor heart that never rejoices" was used as a justification for excess. The taking of salt to produce thirst, the use of wine glasses which would not stand, and the exhortation "No heel-taps," clearly showed the disapproval of moderation which went along with applause for the "three-bottle" man. There are some still living who have taken part in orgies at which after locking the door and placing a number of bottles of wine on the sideboard, the host announced that they had to be emptied before rising: the refusal to take the required share causing reprobation.[3]

But while, in past generations, there was thus a certain pro-ethical sentiment upholding intemperance, in our own generation temperance is upheld both by the ethical sentiment, and by a proethical sentiment. Not only is drinking to excess universally reprobated, and to have been intoxicated even once leaves a stain on a man’s reputation, but we have now a large class by whom even moderate drinking is condemned. While in America water is the universal beverage at meals and the taking of wine is regarded as scarcely respectable.

[I-448]

CHAPTER XIII.

CHASTITY.↩

§ 181. Before we can understand fully the ethical aspects of chastity, we must study its biological and sociological sanctions. Conduciveness to welfare, individual or social or both, being the ultimate criterion of evolutionary ethics, the demand for chastity has to be sought in its effects under given conditions.

Among men, as among inferior creatures, the needs of the species determine the rightness or wrongness of these or those sexual relations; for sexual relations unfavorable to the rearing of offspring, in respect either of number or quality must tend towards degradation and extinction. The fact that some animals are polygamous while others are monogamous is thus to be explained. In Part III of The Principles of Sociology, treating of "Domestic Institutions," it was shown that the relation between the sexes is liable to be determined into this or that form by environing conditions; and that certain inferior forms of the relation appear, under some conditions, to become necessary: nonadoption of them being fatal to the society. A natural connection was found to exist between polygamy and a life of perpetual hostilities, entailing great destruction of men: since of tribes which mutually slaughter their men, the one which, being monogamous, leaves many women unmarried and childless, must fail to maintain its population in face of the one which, being polygamous, utilizes all its women as mothers (sec. 307). We saw, too, that in some cases, especially in Tibet, polyandry appears more conducive to social welfare than any other relation of the sexes. It receives approval from travelers, and even a Moravian missionary defends it: the missionary holding that "superabundant population, in an unfertile country must be a great calamity and produce ‘eternal warfare or eternal want’" (sec. 301).

These inferior forms of marriage are not consistent with that conception of chastity which accompanies the settled monogamy of advanced societies. As we understand it, the word connotes either the absence of any sexual relation, or the permanent sexual relation of one man with one woman. But we must not extend this higher conception of chastity to these lower societies. We must not assume that there exists in them any such ethical reprobation of these less-restricted relations as they excite in us. To see this clearly we must glance at the facts.

§ 182. Already in section 120 I have given sundry illustrations of the truth, startling to those whose education has left them ignorant of multiform humanity, that the institution of polygamy is in various places morally approved, while the opposite institution is condemned. This truth, however, should not cause surprise, considering that from childhood all have been familiar with the tacit approval of the usage in the book they regard as divine. The polygamy of the patriarchs is spoken of as a matter of course, and there is implied approval of it by a wife who prompts her husband to take a concubine. But beyond this we see, in the case of David, both the religious and the social sanction for a harem: the one being implied by the statement that David, to whom God had given his "master’s wives," was a man "after his own heart," and the other by the fact that when Nathan reproached him, the reproach was that he had taken the solitary wife of Uriah, not that he had already many wives (1 Samuel xiii. 14; 2 Samuel xii). His many wives we may reasonably suppose constituted a mark of dignity, as do those of kings among savage and semicivilized peoples now. Clearly, then, under certain social conditions there is a proethical sentiment supporting polygamy and that species of unchastity implied by it.

So, too, is it with polyandry. Various passages in the Mahabharata imply that it was a recognized institution among the early Indians, regarded by them as perfectly proper: practiced, indeed, by those who are upheld as models of virtue. The heroine of the poem, Draupadi, is the wife of five husbands. Each of them had a house and garden of his own, and Draupadi dwelt with them "in turn for two days at a time." Meanwhile, as we have already seen (sec. 117), one of the husbands, Yudhishthira, unfortunate notwithstanding his goodness, enunciates the doctrine that right is to be done regardless of consequences; while elsewhere Draupadi describes the virtues which she holds proper for a wife, and represents herself as acting up to them. Kindred evidence is yielded at the present time by some of the tribes in the valleys of the Himalayas–the Lad~ khis, and the Ch~ mp~ s. Telling us that they practice polyandry. Drew says of the Lad~ khis that they are "cheerful, willing, and good-tempered"; "they are not quarrelsome"; are "much given to truth-telling"; and he adds that the "social liberty of the women . . . I think it may be said, is as great as that of workmen’s wives in England."

Rightly to interpret these facts, however, it should be added that the social state in which polyandry originally existed among the Indian peoples, had emerged from a social state still lower in respect of the sexual relations. Bad as were the gods of the Greeks, the gods of the ancient Indians were worse. In the Puranas as well as in the Mahabharata there are stories about the "adulterous amours" of Indra, Varuna, and other gods; at the same time that the "celestial nymphs are expressly declared to be courtesans," and are "sent by the gods from time to time to seduce austere sages." A society having a theology of such a kind, cannot well have been other than licentious. With the ascription even of incest to some of their gods, there naturally went an utter disregard of restraints among themselves. In the Mahabharata we read: "Women were formerly unconfined, and roved about at their pleasure, independent. Though in their youthful innocence, they abandoned their husbands, they were guilty of no offense; for such was the rule in early times." And according to a tradition embodied in that poem,

This condition of things was abolished by Sv‘ tak‘ hi, son of the rishi Uddalaka, who was incensed at seeing his mother led away by a strange Brahman. His father told him there was no reason to be angry as: "The women of all castes of earth are unconfined: just as cattle are situated, so are human beings, too, within their respective castes."

Hence it may possibly be that polyandry arose as a limitation of promiscuity; and that therefore the ethical sentiment existing in support of it, was really in support of a relative chastity.

§ 183. Returning now from this half-parenthetical discussion of those types of undeveloped chastity which are implied by low types of marriage, and resuming the discussion of chastity and unchastity considered in their simple forms, let us first look at the evidence presented by various uncivilized peoples. And here, in pursuance of the course followed in preceding chapters dealing with other divisions of conduct, I am obliged to name facts which in the absence of a strong reason should be passed over. They are not, however, more objectionable than many which are reported in our daily papers with no better motive than ministering to a prurient curiosity.

The absolute or relative deficiency of chastity may be conveniently exemplified by a string of extracts from books of travel. We may begin with North America. The testimony of Lewis and Clarke respecting the Chinooks, agreeing with that of Ross, is as follows: "Among these people, as indeed among all Indians, the prostitution of unmarried women is so far from being considered criminal or improper, that the females themselves solicit the favors of the other sex, with the entire approbation of their friends and connections." Concerning the Sioux, these same travelers give us a fact equally significant: "The Sioux had offered us squaws, but while we remained there having declined, they followed us with offers of females for two days."

Coming further south the Creeks may be named as, according to Schoolcraft, no better than the Chinooks. Like evidence is furnished by South American races, as the Tupis and Caribs: "Bands [of chastity] were broken without fear, and incontinence was not regarded as an offense"; Caribs "put no value on the chastity of unmarried women." These instances yielded by America, are associated with some in which the unchastity is of a qualified kind. To the fact that "among the Esquimaux it is considered a great mark of friendship for two men to exchange wives for a day or two," may be added a like fact presented by the Chippewayans: "It is a very common custom among the men of this country to exchange a night’s lodging with each other’s wives. But this is so far from being considered as an act which is criminal, that it is esteemed by them as one of the strongest ties of friendship between two families." The Dakotas supply an example, like many found elsewhere, of the coexistence of laxity before marriage with strictness after it: "There are few nations in the world amongst whom this practice, originating in a natural desire not to ‘make a leap in the dark,’ cannot be traced. Yet after marriage they will live like the Spartan matrons a life of austerity in relation to the other sex." In ancient Nicaragua, as in various countries, there was another kind of compromise between chastity and unchastity: "On the occasion of a certain annual festival, it was permitted that all the women, of whatever condition, might abandon themselves to the arms of whomever they pleased. Rigid fidelity however, was exacted at all other times." But there seems to have been no restraint at other times on the unmarried, as witness Herrera’s statement: "Many of the women were beautiful, and their parents used, when the maidens were marriageable, to send them to earn their portions, and accordingly they ranged about the country in a shameful manner, till they had got enough to marry them off."

Asia furnishes illustrations of another usage common among the uncivilized. The Kamtschadales and Aleuts lend their wives to guests; and sundry others of the Northern Asiatic races do the like. Pallas tells us that the Kalmucks are little jealous of their wives, and freely give them up to acquaintances. And then of an adjacent people we read–"The relation between the sexes, among the Kirghizes, is altogether on a very primitive footing; mothers, fathers, and brothers regard any breach of morality with great leniency and husbands even encourage their friends to close intimacy with their wives. . . . Like the Kirghizes, the Buruts are strangers to jealousy." So, too, of the Mongols Prjevalsky tells us that "adultery is not even concealed, and is not regarded as a vice." From peoples further south, two instances may be cited: "Among the Red Karens, chastity both with married and unmarried, is reported as remarkably loose. The commerce of the sexes among young people is defended as nothing wrong, because ‘it is our custom’ "; "Prostitution is exceedingly common, while chastity is a rare virtue among Toda women; and the ties of marriage and consanguinity are merely nominal."

To all these instances from other regions may be added some from Africa. In his Highlands of Ethiopia, Harris writes: "The jewel chastity is here [in Shoa] in no repute: and the utmost extent of reparation to be recovered in a court of justice for the most aggravated case of seduction is but five-pence sterling!" The nature of the sentiment prevailing near the Upper Congo is shown by this extract from Tuckey: "Before marriage, the father or brothers of a girl prostitute her to every man that will pay two fathoms of cloth; nor does this derogate in any way from her character, or prevent her being afterwards married." And so is it with some unlike people further south. Among the Bushmen, "infidelity to the marriage compact is . . . not considered as a crime; it is scarcely regarded by the offended person. . . . They seem to have no idea of the distinction of girl, maiden, and wife; they are all expressed by one word alone."

In Polynesia we have the well-known evidence yielded by the Arreoi society of Tahiti; and from the same region, or rather from Micronesia, comes yet other evidence. In his account of the inhabitants of the Ladrone Islands, Freycinct writes: "Souvent on avoit vu les péres vendre sans rougir les prémices de leurs filles . . . les méres elles–mêmes engager leurs enfants à suivre l’impulsion de leurs sens. . . . On possède encore une des chansons qu’elles chantoient à leurs filles en pareille circonstance." The Pelew Islanders furnish a like case: the universal practice being for the mother to instruct her newly initiated daughter always to exact payment, and the explanation of the usage being "the avarice of parents as recognized by custom."

Of the opposite trait a good many examples are furnished by primitive or uncultured peoples. Two of them come from amid these generally lax tribes of North America. Catlin says of the Mandans: "Their women are beautiful and modest–and amongst the respectable families, virtue is as highly cherished and as inapproachable, as in any society whatever." And of the Chippewas Keating writes: "Chastity is a virtue in high repute among the Chippewas, and without which no woman could expect to be taken as a wife by a warrior." But he goes on to admit that there is a good deal of concealed irregularity. Africa, too, yields some instances. "A Kaffer woman is both chaste and modest": "instances of infidelity are said to be very rare"; and the like is said of the Bachassins. The most numerous examples of chastity come from the island races. Mariner tells us that in Tonga adultery is very rare. "Chastity prevails more perhaps among these (the Sumatrans] than any other people," says Marsden. Similar is the statement of Low about the inland people of Borneo: "adultery is a crime unknown, and no Dyak (Land) ever recollected an instance of its occurrence." So in Dory, New Guinea, according to Kops, "chastity is held in high regard. . . . Adultery is unknown." And Erskine testifies that the women of Uea, Loyalty Islands, are strictly chaste before marriage, and faithful wives afterwards." Some peoples who are in other respects among the lowest are in this respect among the highest. Snow says that the Fuegian women at Picton Island are remarkably modest; and a fact worthy of special note is that among the rudest of the Musheras of India, who have no formal marriage, "unchastity, or a change of lovers on either side, when once mutual appropriation has been made, is a thing of rare occurrence"; and when it does occur causes excommunication. The remaining two most marked instances are found among other peaceful tribes of the Indian hills. Says Hodgson of the Bodo and Dhimal–"Chastity is prized in man and woman, married and unmarried." And according to Dalton, "The Santál women are represented by all who have written about them as exceedingly chaste, yet the young people of the different sexes are greatly devoted to each other’s society and pass much time together."

With these cases of indigenous chastity may be named cases of peoples who are being degraded by foreign influences. In a paper on the Veddahs, whose neighbors the Singhalese are extremely lax, virchow quotes Gillings to the effect that adultery and polygamy are only heard of among them where attempts have been made to civilize them. And then, little as we should expect to meet with such a testimony from a clergyman concerning a race so low as the Australians, yet of one tribe we are told by the Rev R.W. Holden, as quoted by Taplin, that

The advent of the whites has made the aborigines much more degraded, more helpless, more–yea, much more–susceptible to all diseases. Before our coming amongst them their laws were strict, especially those regarding young men and young women. It was almost death to a young lad or man who had sexual intercourse till married.

But the like cannot be said of other Australian tribes.

As thus presented by the uncivilized races, the facts do not fall into clear generalizations: they do not show distinct relations between chastity or unchastity and social forms or types of race. The evidence does, indeed, preponderate in favor of the relatively peaceful or wholly peaceful tribes, but this relation is not without exception; and conversely though the standard of chastity is low in most of the fighting societies it is not low in all. Nor, when we contemplate special antitheses, do we get clear proof. Of the atrocious Fijians, exceeding in their cannibalism all other peoples, and who glory in lying, theft, and murder, we read in Erskine that the women are modest and that "female virtue may be rated at a high standard," while according to Seemann, "adultery is one of the crimes generally punished with death." On the other hand, Cook describes the Tahitians as utterly devoid of the sentiment of chastity. He says they are "people who have not even the idea of indecency and who gratify every appetite and passion before witnesses, with no more sense of impropriety than we feel when we satisfy our hunger at a social board with our family or friends." At the same time he speaks very favorably of their dispositions: "They seemed to be brave, open, and candid, without either suspicion or treachery cruelty or revenge; so that we placed the same confidence in them as in our best friends."

Here are incongruities which appear quite irreconcilable with the ideas current among civilized peoples.

§ 184. Throughout the foregoing sections the aim has been to ascertain by examination of the facts, what relations, if any, exist between chastity and social type, as well as between this virtue and other virtues; but we must now consider specifically the prevailing ethical sentiments which go along with observance and nonobservance of it. Already in many of the quotations above given, these sentiments have been expressed or implied; but to complete the general argument it seems needful to observe definitely, the extreme deviations from what we may consider normal, which they sometimes undergo. I will give three instances–one from the uncivilized, another from a semicivilized people now extinct, and a third from an existing civilized people.

Of the Wotyaks, a Finnish race, the German traveler Buch says:

Indeed it is even disgraceful for a girl if she is little sought after by the young men. . . . It is therefore only a logical result that it is honorable for a girl to have children. She then gets a wealthier husband, and her father is paid a higher kalym for her.

Concerning the ancient Chibchas, of Central America, we read:

Some Indians . . . did not much care that their wives should be virgins. . . . On the contrary some, if they discovered that they had had no intercourse with men, thought them unfortunate and without luck, as they had not inspired affection in men: accordingly they disliked them as miserable women.

The civilized nation referred to as showing, in some cases, a feeling almost the reverse of that so strongly pronounced among Western nations, we find in the Far East. Says Dixon of the Japanese:

It used to be no uncommon thing (and we have no clear evidence that the custom is obsolete) for a dutiful daughter to sell herself for a term of years to the proprietor of a house of ill-fame, in order that she might thus retrieve her father’s fallen fortunes. When she returned to her home, no stigma attached to her; rather was she honored for her filial devotion.

Though, in a work just published, The Real Japan, Mr. Henry Norman denies this alleged return home with credit (in modern times at least) he verifies that earlier part of the statement, that daughters are sold for specific periods by their parents: the fact that such parents are tolerated being sufficiently indicative of the prevailing sentiment.

Here then we get proof that in respect of this division of conduct, as in respect of the divisions of conduct dealt with in preceding chapters, habits generate sentiments harmonizing with them. It is a trite remark that the individual who persists in wrongdoing eventually loses all sense that it is wrongdoing, and at length believes that it is rightdoing: and the like holds socially–must, indeed, hold socially since public opinion is but an aggregate of individual opinions.

§ 185. If, instead of comparing one society with another, we compare early stages of those societies which have developed civilizations with later stages, we find very variable relations between chastity and social development. Only in modern societies can we say that this relation becomes tolerably clear.

Already we have seen how low in their sexual relations were the people of India in early days, and how, promiscuity and polyandry having died out, poets and sages in later times endeavored to explain away the traditional transgressions of their gods, while existing Hindus show shame when reproached with the illicit amours of their ancient heroes and heroines. Here there seems to have been a progress of the kind to be looked for.

That, among adjacent societies, there took place some kindred changes, seems implied in the fact that prostitution in temples, which prevailed among Babylonians, Egyptians, &c., and which, like other usages connected with religion, more persistent than general usages, probably indicated certain customs of earlier times, disappeared partially if not wholly. It is to be observed, too, that along with woman-stealing, common during primitive stages of the civilized, as still among the uncivilized, there naturally went a degraded position of captured women (concubinage being a usual concomitant), and that therefore, with the cessation of it, one cause of low sexual relations came to an end. That in the case of the Hebrews further advances took place seems to be shown by the facts that though Herod the Great had nine wives, and though in the Mishnah polygamy is referred to as existing, yet the references in Ecclesiasticus imply the general establishment of monogamy.

The relevant changes in the course of Greek civilization clearly do not warrant the assertion that better relations of the sexes accompanied higher social arrangements. The amount of concubinage implied by the Iliad, was less than that implied by the use of female slaves and servants in Athenian households; and the established institution of hetairai, with the many distinguished of whom coexisted a multitude of undistinguished, the adding to the public revenue by a tax on houses of ill-fame, and the continuance of authorized prostitution in the temples of Aphrodite Pandemos, further prove that the relations of the sexes had degenerated. On passing to Rome we meet with an undeniable case of retrogression in sexual arrangements and usages, going along with the kind of social progress which is implied by extension of empire and increase of political organization. The contrast between the regular relations of men to women in early Roman times, and the extremely irregular relations which prevailed in the times of the emperors, when the being modest was taken to imply being ugly, and when patrician ladies had to be stopped by law from becoming prostitutes, shows that moral degradation of this kind may accompany one type of advancing civilization.

The reaction which commenced after these most corrupt Roman times, was greatly furthered by Christianity. The furtherance, however, cannot be ascribed to a true conception of the relations of the sexes, and a sentiment appropriate to it, but rather to an asceticism which reprobated the acceptance of pleasures and applauded the submission to pains. The prompting motive was an other-worldly one more than an intrinsically moral one; though the other-worldly motive probably fostered the moral motive. But in this case, as in countless other cases, the general law of rhythm was illustrated. Following this violent reaction came in time a violent re-reaction; so that after a period of sexual restraints came a period of sexual excesses–a period in which the relation between action and reaction was further illustrated by the fact that the nominally celibate clergy and nuns became worse than the laity who were not bound to celibacy.

It should be added that the peoples of Northern Europe, among whom the relations of the sexes seem to have been originally good, also exhibited in course of time, though in a less marked degree, the sexual retrogression that may go along with some kinds of social progression. In modern days, however, the advance to higher political types and more settled social states, has been accompanied by an average improvement in this respect as in other respects.

§ 186. Satisfactory interpretation of these many strange contrasts and variations is impracticable: the causation is too complex. We may however, note certain causes which seem to have been occasionally influential, though we cannot say to what extent.

The extreme laxity of the Tahitians may possibly have been encouraged by the immense fertility of their habitat. Commenting on the abundance of food almost spontaneously produced by their soil, Cook says of the Tahitians: "They seem to be exempted from the first general curse, that ‘man should eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.’" Where self-maintenance and, by implication, the maintenance of children, is thus extremely easy it seems that comparatively little mischief results if a mother is left to rear a child or children without the aid of a father; and in the absence of those evil effects on both parent and offspring which result where the necessaries of life are difficult to get, there may not tend to arise that social reprobation of incontinence which arises where its mischievous consequences are conspicuous.

Africa furnishes us with the hint of another cause of laxity which may sometimes operate. The fact that "the Dahoman, like almost all semibarbarians, considers a numerous family the highest blessing"–a fact which recalls kindred ones implied in the Bible–becomes comprehensible when we remember that in early stages, characterized by constant antagonisms, internal and external, it is important to maintain not only the numbers of the tribe in face of other tribes, but also the numbers of the families and clans; since the weaker of these go to the wall when struggles take place. Hence it results that not only is barrenness a reproach but fertility a ground of esteem; and hence possibly the reason why in East Africa "it is no disgrace for an unmarried woman to become the mother of a family": the remark of one traveler, which I cannot now find, concerning another tribe, being that a woman’s irregularities are easily forgiven, if she bears many children.

This fact seems to point to the conclusion, pointed to by many preceding facts, that there is a connection between unchastity and a militant regime; seeing that production of many children is a desideratum only where the mortality from violence is great. For suspecting this connection we find a further reason in the degraded position of women which uniformly accompanies pronounced militancy (see Principles of Sociology, Part III, chap. X, "The Status of Women"). Where, as among peoples constantly fighting, the hard work is done by slaves and women–where women are spoils of war to be dealt with as the victors please–where, when not stolen or gained by conquest, they are bought; it is manifest that the wills of women being in abeyance, the unchecked egoism of men must conflict with the growth of chastity. And in the settled polygamy of societies which lose great numbers of men in battle, the large harems of kings and chiefs, the buying of female slaves–all of them characteristic of the militant type–we similarly see relations of the sexes adverse to any moral restrictions. If we remember that the extreme profligacy of Rome was reached after long centuries of conquests; if we remember that there survived during the feudal organization resulting from war, the jus primoe noetis; if of Russia, exclusively organized for war, we read that any girl on his estate was until recently at the lord’s disposal; we see further reason for suspecting that the militant type of society is unfavorable to elevated relations of the sexes.

We must not conclude, however, that chastity always characterizes societies of the nonmilitant type. Though sundry of the above–named peaceful tribes are distinguished from uncivilized tribes at large by the purity of their sexual relations, it is not so with another peaceful tribe, the Todas: these are characterized rather by the opposite trait. The Esquimaux, too, among whom there is exchange of wives, do not even know what war is.

§ 187. It remains only to emphasize the truth, discernible amid all complexities and varieties, that without a prevailing chastity we do not find a good social state. Though comparison of intermediate types of society does not make this clear, it is made clear by comparison of extreme types. Among the lowest we have such a group as the Ku-Ka-tha clan, inhabiting Western South Australia, whose chief characteristics are "treachery, ingratitude, lying and every species of deceit and cunning," who have "no property" "no punishment of offenders," "no idea of right and wrong," and who show absolute lack of the sentiment in question: "chastity or fidelity being quite unknown to them." At the other extreme come the most advanced societies of Europe and America, in which, along with a relatively high standard of chastity (for women at least), there exist high degrees of the various traits required for social life which are wanting in these Australians. Nor does comparison of different stages of civilized nations fail to furnish evidence; as witness the contrast between our own time and the time after the Restoration, in respect alike of chastity and of general welfare.

There are three ways in which chastity furthers a superior social state. The first is that indicated at the outset–conduciveness to the nurture of offspring. Nearly everywhere, but especially where the stress of competition makes the rearing of children difficult, lack of help from the father must leave the mother overtaxed, and entail inadequate nutrition of progeny. Unchastity, therefore, tends towards production of inferior individuals, and if it prevails widely must cause decay of the society.

The second cause is that, conflicting as it does with the establishment of normal monogamic relations, unchastity is adverse to those higher sentiments which prompt such relations. In societies characterized by inferior forms of marriage, or by irregular connections, there cannot develop to any great extent that powerful combination of feelings–affection, admiration, sympathy–which in so marvelous a manner has grown out of the sexual instinct. And in the absence of this complex passion, which manifestly presupposes a relation between one man and one woman, the supreme interest in life disappears, and leaves behind relatively subordinate interests. Evidently a prevalent unchastity severs the higher from the lower components of the sexual relation: the root may produce a few leaves, but no true flower.

Sundry of the keenest aesthetic pleasures must at the same time be undermined. It needs but to call to mind what a predominant part in fiction, the drama, poetry, and music, is played by the romantic element in love, to see that anything which militates against it tends to diminish, if not to destroy the chief gratifications which should fill the leisure part of life.

[I-464]

CHAPTER XIV.

SUMMARY OF INDUCTIONS.↩

§ 188. There the data are few and exact, definite conclusions can be drawn; but where they are numerous and inexact, the conclusions drawn must be proportionately indefinite. Pure mathematics exemplifies the one extreme, and sociology the other. The phenomena presented by individual life are highly complex, and still more complex are the phenomena presented by the life of aggregated individuals; and their great complexity is rendered still greater by the multiformity and variability of surrounding conditions.

To the difficulties in the way of generalization hence arising, must be added the difficulties arising from uncertainty of the evidence–the doubtfulness, incompleteness, and conflicting natures, of the statements with which we have to deal. Not all travelers are to be trusted. Some are bad observers, some are biased by creed or custom, some by personal likings or dislikings; and all have but imperfect opportunities of getting at the truth. Similarly with historians. Very little of what they narrate is from immediate observation. The greater part of it comes through channels which color, and obscure, and distort; while everywhere party feeling, religious bigotry, and the sentiment of patriotism, cause exaggerations and suppressions. Testimonies concerning moral traits are hence liable to perversion.

Many of the peoples grouped under the same name present considerable diversities of character: instance the Australians, of whom it is remarked that some tribes are quiet and tractable while others are boisterous and difficult to deal with. Further, the conduct, sentiments, and ideas of native peoples often undergo such changes that travelers between whose visits many years have elapsed, give quite different accounts. The original feelings and beliefs are frequently obscured by missionary influences, and, in a still greater degree, by contact with white traders and settlers. From all parts of the world we get proofs that aborigines are degraded by intercourse with Europeans. Here, then, are further causes which distort the evidence.

Yet again there are the complications consequent on changes of habitats and occupations. In this place tribes are forced into antagonism with their neighbors, and in that place they are led into quiet lives: one of the results being that conceptions and feelings appropriate to an antecedent state, surviving for a long time in a subsequent state, appear incongruous with it.

Thus we must expect to meet with anomalies, and must be content with conclusions which hold true on the average.

§ 189. Before we can fully understand the significance of the inductions drawn, we must reconsider the essential nature of social cooperation. As we pointed out in section 48, from the sociological point of view "ethics becomes nothing else than a definite account of the forms of conduct that are fitted to the associated state"; and in subsequent sections it was made clear that, rising above those earliest groups in which the individuals simply live in contiguity without mutual interference and without mutual aid, the associated state can be maintained only by effectual cooperation: now for external defense, now for internal sustentation. That is to say the prosperity of societies depends, other things equal, on the extents to which there are fulfilled in them the conditions to such cooperation. Whence, through survival of the fittest, it follows that principles of conduct implying observance of these conditions, and sentiments enlisted in support of such principles, become dominant; while principles of conduct which concern only such parts of the lives of individuals as do not obviously affect social cooperation, do not acquire sanctions of such pronounced and consistent kinds.

This appears to be the explanation of the fact which must have struck many readers of the last two chapters, that the ideas and sentiments respecting temperance and chastity, display less intelligible relations to social type and social development, than do the ideas and sentiments concerning cooperative conduct, internal and external. For if, scattered throughout the community there are men who eat or drink to excess, such evils as are entailed on the community are indirect. There is, in the first place, no direct interference with military efficiency so long as within the armed force there is no such drunkenness or gluttony as sensibly affects discipline. And in the second place, there is no direct interference with the process of social sustentation, so long as one who eats or drinks to excess does not aggress upon his neighbor or in any way inconvenience him. While erring in either of these ways, a man may respect the persons and property of his fellows and may invariably fulfill his contracts–may, therefore, obey the fundamental principles of social cooperation. Whatever detriment society receives from his conduct arises from the deterioration in one of its units. Much the same thing holds with disregard of chastity; there is no necessary or immediate interference with the carrying on of cooperations, either external or internal; but the evil caused is an ultimate lowering of the population in number or quality. In both these cases the social consciousness, not distinctly awakened to the social results, does not always generate consistent social sentiments.

It is otherwise with those kinds of conduct which directly and obviously transgress the conditions to social cooperation, external or internal. Cowardice, or insubordination, diminishes in a very obvious way the efficiency of a fighting body; and hence, in respect of these, there are readily established consistent ideas and sentiments. So, too, the murdering or assaulting of fellow citizens, the taking away their goods, the breaking of contracts with them, are actions which so conspicuously conflict with the actions constituting social life, that reprobation of them is with tolerable regularity produced. Hence, though there are wide divergences of opinion and of feeling relative to such classes of offenses in different societies, yet we find these related to divergences in the types of social activities–one or other set of reprobations being pronounced according as one or other set of activities is most dominant.

Taken together, the preceding chapters show us a group of moral traits proper to a life of external enmity. Where the predominant social cooperations take the form of constant fighting with adjacent peoples, there grows up a pride in aggression and robbery, revenge becomes an imperative duty, skilful lying is creditable, and (save in small tribes which do not develop) obedience to despotic leaders and rulers is the greatest virtue; at the same time there is a contempt for industry and only such small regard for justice within the society as is required to maintain its existence. On the other hand, where the predominant social cooperations have internal sustentation for their end, while cooperations against external enemies have either greatly diminished or disappeared, unprovoked aggression brings but partial applause or none at all; robbery, even of enemies, ceases to be creditable; revenge is no longer thought a necessity; lying is universally reprobated; justice in the transactions of citizens with one another is insisted upon; political obedience is so far qualified that submission to a despot is held contemptible; and industry, instead of being considered disgraceful, is considered as, in some form or other, imperative on every one.

Of course the varieties of nature inherited by different kinds of men from the past, the effects of customs sanctified by age, the influences of religious creeds, together with the circumstances peculiar to each society complicate and qualify these relations; but in their broad outlines they are sufficiently clear–as clear as we can expect them to be.

§ 190. Hence the fact that the ethical sentiments prevailing in different societies, and in the same society under different conditions, are sometimes diametrically opposed. Multitudinous proofs of this truth have been given in preceding chapters, but it will be well here to enforce it by a series of antitheses.

Among ourselves, to have committed a murder disgraces for all time a man’s memory, and disgraces for generations all who are related to him; but by the Pathâns a quite unlike sentiment is displayed. One who had killed a Mollah (priest), and failed to find refuge from the avengers, said at length: "I can but be a martyr. I will go and kill a Sahib." He was hanged after shooting a sergeant, perfectly satisfied "at having expiated his offense."

The prevailing ethical sentiment in England is such that a man who should allow himself to be taken possession of and made an unresisting slave, would be regarded with scorn; but the people of Drekete, a slave-district of Fiji, "said it was their duty to become food and sacrifices for the chiefs," and "that they were honored by being considered adequate to such a noble task."

Less extreme, though akin in nature, is the contrast between the feelings which our own history has recorded within these few centuries. In Elizabeth’s time, Sir John Hawkins initiated the slave trade, and in commemoration of the achievement was allowed to put in his coat of arms "a demimoor proper bound with a cord": the honorableness of his action being thus assumed by himself and recognized by Queen and public. But in our days, the making slaves of men, called by Wesley "the sum of all villainies," is regarded with detestation; and for many years we maintained a fleet to suppress the slave trade.

Peoples who have emerged from the primitive family-and-clan organization, hold that one who is guilty of a crime must himself bear the punishment, and it is thought extreme injustice that the punishment should fall upon anyone else; but our remote ancestors thought and felt differently as do still the Australians, whose "first great principle with regard to punishment is, that all the relatives of a culprit, in the event of his not being found, are implicated in his guilt": "the brothers of the criminal conceive themselves to be quite as guilty as he is."

By the civilized, the individualities of women are so far recognized that the life and liberty of a wife are not supposed to be bound up with those of her husband; and she now having obtained a right to exclusive possession of property contends for complete independence, domestic and political. But it is, or was, otherwise in Fiji. The wives of the Fijian chiefs consider it a sacred duty to suffer strangulation on the deaths of their husbands. A woman who had been rescued by Williams "escaped during the night, and, swimming across the river, and presenting herself to her own people, insisted on the completion of the sacrifice which she had in a moment of weakness reluctantly consented to forgo"; and Wilkes tells of another who loaded her rescuer "with abuse, and ever afterward manifested the most deadly hatred towards him."

Here, and on the Continent, the religious prohibition of theft and the legal punishment of it, are joined with a strong social reprobation; so that the offense of a thief is never condoned. In Beloochistan, however, quite contrary ideas and feelings are current. There "a favorite couplet is to the effect that the Biloch who steals and murders, secures heaven to seven generations of ancestors."

In this part of the world reprobation of untruthfulness is strongly expressed, alike by the gentleman and the laborer. But in many parts of the world it is not so. In Blantyre, for example, according to Macdonald, "to be called a liar is rather a compliment."

English sentiment is such that the mere suspicion of incontinence on the part of a woman is enough to blight her life; but there are peoples whose sentiments entail no such effect, and in some cases a reverse effect is produced: "unchastity is with the Wotyaks a virtue."

So that in respect of all the leading divisions of human conduct, different races of men, and the same races at different stages, entertain opposite beliefs and display opposite feelings.

§ 191. I was about to say that the evidence set forth in foregoing chapters, brought to a focus in the above section, must dissipate once for all the belief in a moral sense as commonly entertained. But a long experience prevents me from expecting this. Among men at large, lifelong convictions are not to be destroyed either by conclusive arguments or by multitudinous facts.

Only to those who are not by creed or cherished theory committed to the hypothesis of a supernaturally created humanity will the evidence prove that the human mind has no originally implanted conscience. Though, as shown in my first work, Social Statics, I once espoused the doctrine of the intuitive moralists (at the outset in full, and in later chapters with some implied qualifications), yet it has gradually become clear to me that the qualifications required practically obliterate the doctrine as enunciated by them. It has become clear to me that if, among ourselves, the current belief is that a man who robs and does not repent will be eternally damned, while an accepted proverb among the Bilochs is that "God will not favor a man who does not steal and rob," it is impossible to hold that men have in common an innate perception of right and wrong.

But now, while we are shown that the moral-sense doctrine in its original form is not true, we are also shown that it adumbrates a truth, and a much higher truth. For the facts cited, chapter after chapter, unite in proving that the sentiments and ideas current in each society become adjusted to the kinds of activity predominating in it. A life of constant external enmity generates a code in which aggression, conquest, revenge, are inculcated, while peaceful occupations are reprobated. Conversely a life of settled internal amity generates a code inculcating the virtues conducing to harmonious cooperation–justice, honesty, veracity, regard for other’s claims. And the implication is that if the life of internal amity continues unbroken from generation to generation, there must result not only the appropriate code, but the appropriate emotional nature–a moral sense adapted to the moral requirements. Men so conditioned will acquire to the degree needful for complete guidance, that innate conscience which the intuitive moralists erroneously suppose to be possessed by mankind at large. There needs but a continuance of absolute peace externally and a rigorous insistence on nonaggression internally to ensure the molding of men into a form naturally characterized by all the virtues.

This general induction is reinforced by a special induction. Now as displaying this high trait of nature, now as displaying that, I have instanced those various uncivilized peoples who, inferior to us in other respects, are morally superior to us; and have pointed out that they are one and all free from intertribal antagonisms. The peoples showing this connection are of various races. In the Indian hills, we find some who are by origin Mongolian, Kolarian, Dravidian; in the forests of Malacca, Burma, and in secluded parts of China, exist such tribes of yet other bloods; in the East Indian Archipelago, are some belonging to the Papuan stock; in Japan there are the amiable Ainos, who "have no traditions of internecine strife"; and in North Mexico exists yet another such people unrelated to the rest, the Pueblos. No more conclusive proof could be wished than that supplied by these isolated groups of men who, widely remote in locality and differing in race, are alike in the two respects, that circumstances have long exempted them from war and that they are now organically good.

The goodness which may be attained to under these conditions excites the wonder of those who know only such goodness as is attained by peoples who plume themselves on their superiority. Witness General Fytche’s comment on the report of Mr. O’Riley concerning the Let-htas: "The account given by him of their appreciation of moral goodness, and the purity of their lives, as compared with the semicivilized tribes amongst whom they dwell, almost savors of romance."

May we not reasonably infer that the state reached by these small uncultured tribes may be reached by the great cultured nations, when the life of internal amity shall be unqualified by the life of external enmity?

§ 192. That the contemplation of such an eventuality will be agreeable to all, I do not suppose. To the many who, in the East, tacitly assume that Indians exist for the benefit of Anglo-Indians, it will give no pleasure. Such a condition will probably seem undesirable to men who hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, and think themselves absolved by a command from Downing Street. As, among anthropophagi, the suppression of man-eating is not favorably regarded; so in sociophagous nations like ours, not much pleasure is caused by contemplating the cessation of conquests. No strong desire for such a state can be felt by our leading General, who says that the duties of a soldier "are the noblest that fall to man’s lot," and whose motto is–"Man is as a wolf towards his fellow man."

Nor, strange though it appears, will this prospect be rejoiced over even by those who preach "peace and goodwill to men"; for the prospect is not presented in association with their creed. The belief that humanity can be made righteous only by acceptance of the Christian scheme, is irreconcilable with the conclusion that humanity may be molded into an ideal form by the continued discipline of peaceful cooperation. Better far to our theologians seems the doctrine that man, intrinsically bad, can be made good only by promises of heaven and threats of hell, than does the doctrine that man, not intrinsically bad, will become good under conditions which exercise the higher feelings and give no scope for the lower. Facts which apparently show that unchristianized human nature is incurably vicious, give to them satisfaction as justifying their religion; and evidence tending to prove the contrary is repugnant as showing that their religion is untrue.

And it is by no means certain that their attitude is to be regretted; for there has to be maintained a congruity between the prevailing cult and the social state and the average nature. If any one says that the men who form the land-grabbing nations of Europe, cannot be ruled in their daily lives by an ethical sentiment, but must have it enforced by the fear of damnation, I am not prepared to contradict him. If a writer who, according to those who know represents truly the natures of the gentlemen we send abroad, sympathetically describes one of them as saying to soldiers shooting down tribes fighting for their independence–"Give ’em hell, men"; I think those are possibly right who contend that such natures are to be kept in check only by fear of a God who will "give ’em hell" if they misbehave. It is, I admit, a tenable supposition that belief in a deity who calmly looks on while myriads of his creatures suffer eternal torments, may fitly survive during a state of the world in which naked barbarians and barbarians in skins are being overrun by barbarians in broadcloth.

But to the few who, looking back on the changes which past thousands of years have witnessed, look forward to the kindred changes which future thousands of years may be expected to bring, it will be a satisfaction to contemplate a humanity so adapted to harmonious social life that all needs are spontaneously and pleasurably fulfilled by each without injury to others.

[I-477]

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY.↩

§ 193. The foregoing fourteen chapters have shown that ethical sentiments and ideas are, in each place and time, determined by the local form of human nature, the social antecedents, and the surrounding circumstances. Hence the question arises–How from all which is special and temporary shall we separate that which is general and permanent?

We have been shown, if not overtly yet tacitly, that the very language used in speaking of moral questions, so involves the current beliefs that men are scarcely able to think away from them: the words used are question-begging words. "Duty" and "obligation," for example, carry with them the thought of obedience, subordination, subjection to authority; and thus, imply that right and wrong conduct are not such by their intrinsic natures, but are such by their extrinsic enactments. How, then, shall we free ourselves from the influence of the particular code we have been brought up under, and the misleading connotations of our terms?

Evidently we must for a time ignore established doctrines and expressions. We must go direct to the facts and study them afresh, apart from all preconceptions. I do not mean that the old ideas and the old words are to be rejected. Far from it. We shall find that the greater part of them are well warranted and have to be reinstated: in some cases with added authority and in other cases with more or less of qualification.

Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution. Let no one anticipate any loss of authority. Instead of finding that evolutionary ethics gives countenance to lower forms of conduct than those at present enjoined, we shall find that, contrariwise, evolutionary ethics is intolerant of much which those who profess to have the highest guidance think harmless or justifiable.

§ 194. Integration being the primary process of evolution, we may expect that the aggregate of conceptions constituting ethics enlarges, at the same time that its components acquire heterogeneity. definiteness, and that kind of cohesion which system gives to them. As fulfilling this expectation, we may first note that while drawing within its range of judgment numerous actions of men towards one another which at first were not recognized as right or wrong, it finally takes into its sphere the various divisions of private conduct–those actions of each individual which directly concern himself only, and in but remote ways concern his fellows.

Nearly all these actions are usually supposed to lie beyond ethical rule: not only those multitudinous ones which are indifferent, and, like our movements from minute to minute, may be as well one way as another, but those numerous ones which bring some good or evil to self. But a theory of right and wrong which takes no cognizance of nine-tenths of the conduct by which life is carried on, is a folly. Life in general is a desideratum or it is not. If it is a desideratum, then all those modes of conduct which are conductive to a complete form of it are to be morally approved. If, contrariwise, life is not a desideratum, the subject lapses: life should, not be maintained, and all questions concerning maintenance of it, including the ethical, disappear. As commonly conceived, ethics consists solely of interdicts on certain kinds of acts which men would like to do and of injunctions to perform certain acts which they would like not to do. It says nothing about the great mass of acts constituting normal life; just as though these are neither warranted nor unwarranted. So influential are traditional sentiments and expressions, that the mass of readers will even now be unable to conceive that there can be an ethical justification for the pursuit of positive gratifications.

Such private conduct as errs in the direction of sensual excess, like drunkenness, they do indeed include as subject to ethical judgment and resulting condemnation: a perceived injury. primarily to self and secondarily to others, being the ground for the condemnation. But they ignore the truth that if injury to self is, in this case, a reason for moral reprobation, then benefit to self (so long as there is no contingent injury to others or remote injury to self) is a reason for moral approbation.

§ 195. Far above other creatures though he is, man remains, in common with them, subject to the laws of life; and the requirement for him, as for them, is conformity to these laws. By him, as by every living thing, self-preservation is the first requisite; since without self-preservation, the discharge of all other obligations, altruistic as well as egoistic, becomes impossible.

But self-preservation is effected only by the performance of actions which are prompted by desires. Therefore the satisfaction of these desires is to be enjoined if life should be maintained. That this is so with the sensations which prompt breathing, eating, drinking, and avoidance of extremes of temperature, needs no proof: pain and death result from disobedience and pleasure from obedience. And as taking each of our primary pleasures directly furthers the vital activities, so, taking each of our secondary pleasures furthers them indirectly:

Unquestionably, then, there is a division of ethics which yields sanctions to all the normal actions of individual life, while it forbids the abnormal ones. This most general view at once evolutionary and hedonistic, harmonizes with several more special views.

§ 196. As was pointed out in the preface, a disastrous effect is produced on the majority of minds by presenting ethics as a stern monitor, denouncing certain kinds of pleasures while giving no countenance to pleasures of other kinds. If it does not openly assert that all gratifications are improper, yet, by forbidding a number of them and saying nothing about the rest, it leaves the impression that the rest, if not to be condemned, are not to be approved. By this one-sided treatment of conduct it alienates multitudes who would otherwise accept its teachings.

Assuming that general happiness is to be the aim (for if indifference or misery were to be the aim, nonexistence would be preferable), then the implication is that the happiness of each unit is a fit aim; and a sequent implication is that for each individual, as a unit, his own happiness is a fit aim. Happiness as experienced by him, as much adds to the total amount as does happiness experienced by another; and if happiness may not be pursued for self, why may it be pursued for anyone else? If the totality of happiness could be made greater by each pursuing another’s happiness, while his own was pursued for him by others, something might be said for the theory of absolute altruism. But, in the first place, the greater part of the grateful consciousness possible for each is achievable only by himself–is a consciousness accompanying certain activities, and cannot exist without them. In the second place, even were it otherwise, loss would arise if each pursued only the happiness of others; since as each of the others would have to do the like, there would be required the same amount of effort joined with a further amount of effort consequent on misunderstandings from cross-purposes. Imagine A feeding B while B fed A, and so on with C, D, &c., and instead of increase of satisfactions there would be decrease. The like would happen with the majority of other wants to be satisfied. As shown at the outset (secs. 82, 91), a system of ethics which insists on altruism and ignores egoism, is suicidal.

Such a system is, if the expression may be admitted, doubly suicidal; since, while its immediate operation must be detrimental, its remote operation must be still more detrimental. A loss of capacity for happiness must be the effect produced on all. For many of our pleasures are organically bound up with performance of functions needful for bodily welfare; and nonacceptance of them involves a lower degree of life, a decreased strength, and a diminished ability to fulfill all duties.

§ 197. A further implication, almost universally ignored, must be here again emphasized. Already, in section 71, I have drawn attention to the obvious truth that the individual is not alone concerned in the matter, but that all his descendants are concerned.

In the utter disregard of this truth we see more clearly than usual how low is the average human intelligence. Sometimes, when observing on the Continent how the women, with faces unshaded, are, to keep out the bright sunlight, obliged to half-close their eyes and wrinkle up the corners of them, so producing, by daily repetition, crows’ feet some ten or twenty years earlier than need be; I have thought it astonishing that, anxious though these women are to preserve beauty, they should have failed to perceive so simple a relation between cause and effect. But it may be held that an instance of stupidity even more extreme (if the expression may pass), is furnished by the inability of people to see that disregard of self involves disregard of offspring. There are two ways in which it does this.

Inability to provide for them adequately is one evil consequence. Without bodily welfare in parents there cannot be effectual sustentation of children; and if the race should be maintained, then care of self with a view to care of progeny becomes an obligation. This normal egoism must be such as results not merely in continued life, but in that vigorous life which gives efficiency. Nor is due care of self demanded only because the duties of the breadwinner cannot otherwise be fulfilled; but it is demanded also by regard for educational duties. Ill-health brings irritability and depression; incapacities for right behavior to children; and, by souring their tempers and deadening their sympathies, injures them for life.

Still more closely, however, is the welfare of descendants bound up with self-welfare. Good or ill treatment of his or her body or mind by each person, influences for good or ill the constitutions of his or her progeny. Unless it be held that stalwart and robust men may be expected to come from stunted and unhealthy parents, or that high intelligences and noble characters are likely to be inherited from stupid and criminal fathers and mothers, it must be admitted that any treatment of self which furthers bodily or mental development tends towards the benefit of the next generation (I say "tends" because there are complicating influences due to atavism), and that any treatment of self which undermines bodily health or injures the mind intellectually or emotionally, tends towards a lowering of the nature in the next generation. Yet while people daily make remarks about the likenesses of children to parents, and note the inheritance of this or that defect of mind or body, their criticisms on conduct entirely disregard the implication. They fail to draw the inference that if constitutions are transmitted, the actions which damage constitutions or improve them influence for good or ill the physical and mental characters of children and of children’s children.

In certain extreme cases there is, indeed, a distinct recognition of the mischiefs entailed by the transgressions of parents. Though reprobation of those who have transmitted acquired diseases to their children is not often heard, yet there can be no doubt that it is strongly felt. Probably most will agree that, if the amount of suffering inflicted be used as a measure, murder is a smaller crime than is the giving of offspring infected constitutions and consequent lifelong miseries. But even in its grossest form this transgression is thought little of by the transgressors. There are, indeed, kindred cases in which the sense of responsibility sometimes serves as a deterrent–cases, for example, where knowledge of the existence of insanity in the family causes abstention from marriage. Very generally, however, where the weaknesses, or disorders, or taints they are likely to communicate, are of less conspicuous kinds, people, in a lighthearted way, are ready to inflict uncounted evils on descendants.

Still less is an allied consciousness of responsibility There is no recognition of the truth that such persistent misuse of body or mind as injures it, involves the injury of descendants; and there is consequently no recognition of the truth that it is a duty so to carry on life as to preserve all parts of the system in their normal states.

These further reasons for due care of self have to be insisted upon. Each man’s constitution should be regarded by him as an entailed estate, which he is bound to pass on in as good a condition as he received it, if not better.

§ 198. Beyond this special altruism which makes imperative a normal egoism, there is a general altruism which also makes it in a measure obligatory. The obligation has both a negative and a positive aspect.

Such care of self as is needful to exclude the risk of burdening others, is implied in a proper regard for others. As, from those rude groups in which men lead lives so independent that they severally take the entire results of their own conduct, we advance to developed nations, fellow men become more and more implicated in our actions. Under a social system carried on by exchange of services, those on whom undue self-sacrifice has brought incapacity are commoniy obliged to break contracts partially or wholly, and so to inflict evil; and then any such incapacity as negatives breadwinning, ordinarily imposes, first on relatives and then on friends, or else on the public, a tax implying extra labor. Everyone, therefore, is bound to avoid that thoughtless unselfishness which is apt to bring evils on others–evils that are often greater than those which entire selfishness produces.

The altruistic justification of egoism referred to as of a positive kind, results, firstly, from the obligation to expend some effort for the benefit of particular persons or for the benefit of society–an obligation which cannot be properly discharged if health has been undermined. And it results, secondly, from the obligation to become, so far as inherited nature permits, a source of social pleasure to those around; to fulfill this requirement there must ordinarily be a flow of mental energy such as the invalid cannot maintain.

[I-485]

CHAPTER II

ACTIVITY.↩

§ 199. In a systematic treatise the express statement of certain commonplaces is inevitable. A coherent body of geometrical theorems, for instance, has to be preceded by self-evident axioms. This must be the excuse for here setting down certain familiar truths.

The infant at first feebly moves about its little limbs; by and by it crawls on the floor; presently it walks, and after a time runs. As it develops, its activities display themselves in games, in races, in long walks: the range of its excursions being gradually extended, as it approaches adult existence. Manhood brings the ability to make tours and exploring expeditions; including passages from continent to continent, and occasionally round the world. When middle life is passed and vigor begins to decline, these extreme manifestations of activities become fewer. Journeys are shortened; and presently they do not go beyond visits to the country or to the seaside. As old age advances, the movements become limited to the village and the surrounding fields; afterwards to the garden; later still to the house; presently to the room; finally to the bed; and at last, when the power to move, gradually decreasing, has ceased, the motions of the lungs and heart come to an end. Taken in its ensemble, life presents itself in the shape of movements which begin feebly, gradually increase up to maturity, and then culminating, decrease until they end as feebly as they began.

Thus life is activity; and the complete cessation of activity is death. Hence arises the general implication that since the most highly evolved conduct is that which achieves the most complete life, activity obtains an ethical sanction, and inactivity an ethical condemnation.

This is a conclusion universally accepted and needing no enforcement. Even from those who habitually evade useful activities, there comes reprobation for such of their class as are too inert even to amuse themselves; absolute sloth is frowned on by all.

§ 200. The kind of activity with which we are here chiefly concerned, is the activity directed primarily to self-sustentation, and secondarily to sustentation of family

In the order of nature the imperativeness of such activity effectually asserts itself. Among all subhuman creatures (excepting most parasites) individuals which lack it die, and after them their offspring, if they have any. Those only survive which are adequately active; and, among such, a certain advantage in self-sustentation and sustentation of offspring is gained by those in which activity is greater than usual: the general effect being to raise the activity to that limit beyond which disadvantage to the species is greater than advantage. Up to the time when men passed into the associated state, this law held of them as of the lower animals; and it held of them also throughout early social stages. Before the making of slaves began, no family could escape from the relation between labor and the necessaries of life. And the ethical sanction for this relation in primitive societies is implied in the fact that extreme inequality in the distribution of efforts and benefits between the sexes, must always have resulted in deterioration and eventual extinction.

Though, in the course of social evolution, there have arisen multiplied possibilities of evading the normal relation between efforts and benefits, so as to get the benefits without the efforts; yet, bearing in mind the foregoing general law of life, we must infer that the evasions call for reprobation more or less decided, according to circumstances.

Being here directly concerned only with the ethics of individual life, we need not take account of the implied relation between the idle individual and the society in which he exists. Ignoring all other cases, we may limit ourselves to those cases in which property equitably acquired by a parent, without undue tax on his energies, serves, when bequeathed, to support a son in idleness: cases in which there is no implied trespass on fellow citizens. On each of such cases the verdict is that though it is possible for the individual to fulfill the law of life, insofar as physical activities are concerned, by devoting himself to sports and games, and insofar as certain kinds of mental activities are concerned, by useless occupations; yet there lack those mental activities, emotional and intellectual, which should form part of his life as a social being; and insofar his life becomes an abnormal one.

§ 201. The chief question for us, however, is–What are the ethical aspects of labor considered in its immediate relations to pleasure and pain? From this point of view of absolute ethics, actions are right only when, besides being conducive to the future happiness of self, or others, or both, they are also immediately pleasurable. What then are we to say of necessary labor; most of which is accompanied by disagreeable feelings?

Such labor is warranted, or rather demanded, by the requirements of that relative ethics which is concerned not with the absolute right but with the least wrong. During the present transitional state of humanity, submission to such displeasurable feeling as labor involves, is warranted as a means of escaping from feelings which are still more displeasurable–a smaller pain to avoid a greater pain, or to achieve a pleasure, or both.

The state necessitating this compromise is the state of imperfect adaptation to social life. The change from the irregular activities of the savage man to the regular activities of the civilized man, implies a remolding–a repression of some powers which crave for action, and a taxing of other powers beyond the pleasurable limit: the capacity for persistent effort and persistent attention, being one especially called for, and one at present deficient. This adaptation has to be undergone, and the accompanying sufferings have to be borne.

And here seems a fit place for commenting on the varying amounts of displeasurable feeling, often rising to positive pain, necessitated by fulfillment of the obligation to work. The majority of people speak of effort, bodily or mental, as if the cost of it were the same to all. Though personal experience proves to them that when well and fresh, they put forth with ease a muscular force which, when prostrate with illness or exhausted by toil, it is painful to put forth–though they find, too, that when the mental energies are high they think nothing of a continuous attention which, when enfeebled, they are quite unequal to; yet they do not see that these temporary contrasts between their own states, are paralleled by permanent contrasts between states of different persons.

Ethical judgments must take account of the fact that the effort, bodily or mental, which is easy to one is laborious to another.

§ 202. We come now to a question of special interest to us–Can the human constitution be so adapted to its present conditions, that the needful amount of labor to be gone through will be agreeable?

An affirmative answer will, to most people, seem absurd. Limiting their observations to facts around, or at most extending them to such further facts as the records of civilized people furnish, they cannot believe in the required change of nature. Such evidence as that which, in the first part of this work (secs. 63—67), was assigned to prove that pleasures and pains are relative to the constitution of the organism, and that in virtue of the unlimited modifiability of constitution, actions originally painful may become pleasurable, does not weigh with them. Though they probably know some who so love work that it is difficult to restrain them–though here and there they meet one who complains that a holiday is a weariness; yet it does not seem to them reasonable to suppose that the due tendency to continuous labor, which is now an exceptional trait, may become a universal trait.

It is undeniable that there are various expenditures of energy bodily and mental–often extreme expenditures–which are willingly entered upon and continued eagerly: witness field sports, games, and the intellectual efforts made during social intercourse. In these cases the energy expended is often far greater than that expended in daily avocations. What constitutes the difference? In the one class of actions emulation makes possible the pleasurable consciousness which accompanies proved efficiency and the pleasurable consciousness of the admiration given to efficiency; while, in the other class, the absence of emulation, or at any rate of direct visible emulation, implies the absence of a large proportion of this pleasurable consciousness. Nevertheless, what remains may become a powerful stimulus, making continuous application agreeable. Hobbies exemplify this truth. I can name two cases in which occupations of this kind are, without need, pursued so eagerly as scarcely to leave time for meals. Though in these cases the pleasurable exercise of skill is a large factor, and though in many occupations there seems but small scope for this, yet, nearly everywhere, the satisfaction attendant on the doing of work in the most perfect manner, may be sufficient to render the work agreeable, when joined with that overflowing energy which is to be anticipated as the concomitant of a normally developed nature.

§ 203. It remains to consider whether, concluding that labor up to a certain limit is obligatory, there is any reason for concluding that beyond that limit it is the reverse of obligatory. The present phase of human progress fosters the belief that the more work the more virtue; but this is an unwarranted belief.

Absolute ethics does not dictate more work than is requisite for efficient self-sustentation, efficient nurture of dependents, and discharge of a due share of social duties. As in the lowest creatures, so in the highest, survival is the primary end to be achieved by actions; and though, in an increasing degree as we ascend, actions themselves with their associated feelings become secondary ends, yet pursued to the detriment of the primary end in all its fulness–the leading of a life complete, not in length only but in breadth and depth. The hedonistic view, which is involved in the evolutionary view, implies an ethical sanction for that form of conduct which conduces in the highest degree to self-happiness and the happiness of others; and it follows that labor which taxes the energies beyond the normal limit, or diminishes more than is needful the time available for other ends, or both, receives no ethical sanction.

If adaptation to the social state must in time produce a nature such that the needful labor will be pleasurable, a concomitant conclusion is that it will not produce a capacity for labor beyond this limit. Hence labor in excess of this limit will be abnormal and improper. For as labor inevitably entails physical cost–as the waste involved by it has to be made good out of the total supply which the organic actions furnish; then superfluous labor, deducting from this supply more than is necessary, diminishes the amount available for life at large–diminishes the extent or the intensity of that life.

Obviously, however, this reasoning refers to that fully evolved form of life which absolute ethics contemplates, rather than to the present form, which has to be guided by relative ethics. In our transitional state, with its undeveloped capacity for work, frequent overstepping of the limit is requisite, and must be regarded as incident to the further development of the capacity. All we may fairly say is that, at present, the limit should not be so transgressed as to cause physical deterioration, and that it should be respected where there exists no weighty reason for going beyond it.

§ 204. Connected as each man’s actions are with the actions of others in multitudinous ways, it follows that the ethics of individual life cannot be completely separated from the ethics of social life. Conduct of which the primary results are purely personal, has often secondary results which are social. Hence we must in each case consider the ways in which acts that directly concern self indirectly concern others.

In the present case it scarcely needs saying that beyond that obligation to labor which is deducible from the laws of individual life, there is a social obligation reinforcing it. Though, in a primitive community it is possible for an individual to take upon himself all the results of his inactivity; yet, in an advanced community consisting of citizens not devoid of sympathy it becomes difficult to let the idle individual suffer in full the results of his idleness, and still more difficult to let his offspring do this. Even should it be decided by fellow citizens that the extreme consequences of idleness shall be borne, yet this decision must be at the cost of sympathetic pain. In any case, therefore, evil is inflicted on others as well as on self, and the conduct inflicting it is, for this further reason, to be ethically reprobated.

Reprobation, though quite of another quality. is also deserved by conduct of the opposite kind–by the carrying of labor to such extreme as to cause illness, prostration, and incapacity For by this conduct, too, burdens and pains are entailed on others.

Hence altruistic motives join egoistic motives in prompting labor up to a certain limit, but not beyond that limit.

[I-493]

CHAPTER III.

REST.↩

§ 205. Though the ethically enjoined limitation of life-sustaining activities, specified towards the close of the last chapter, apparently implies that rest is ethically enjoined, and in a large measure does so, yet this corollary must be definitely stated and enlarged on for severnl reasons.

The first is that there are various activities, not of a life-sustaining kind, which may be entered on when the activities devoted to sustentation of life are ended; and hence the conclusion drawn in the last chapter does not involve insistence upon absolute rest.

Further, we have to observe the several kinds of rest, which, if not complete, are approximately so; and the need for each of these kinds must be pointed out.

Something has to be said under each of the several heads–rest at intervals during work; nightly rest; rest of a day after a series of days; and occasional long rest at long intervals.

§ 206. Rhythm, shown throughout the organic functions as elsewhere, has for its concomitant the alternation of waste and repair. Every contraction of the heart, every inflation of the lungs, is followed by a momentary relaxation of the muscles employed. In the process of alimentation, we have the short rhythms constituting the peristaltic motion, compounded with the longer rhythms implied by the periodicity of meals. Far deeper, indeed, than at first appears, is the conformity to this law; for some organic actions which appear continuous are in truth discontinuous. A muscle which maintains for a time a persistent contraction, and seems in a uniform state, is made up of multitudinous units which are severally alternating between action and rest–these relaxing while those are contracting; and so keeping up a constant strain of the whole muscle by the inconstant strains of its competent fibres.

The law thus displayed in each organ and part of an organ, from moment to moment, is displayed throughout the longer and larger cooperations of parts. Combined muscular strains which tax the powers of the system in any considerable degree, cannot with impunity be continually repeated without cessation, even during the period devoted to activity. Waste in such cases overruns repair to a considerable extent, and makes needful a cessation during which arrears may be in some measure made up–an interval for "taking breath," as the expression is. Long unbroken persistence, even in moderate efforts, is injurious; and though such unresting action when occasional does no permanent harm, if it recurs daily loss of power is the final result. Scriveners’ palsy illustrates a local form of this evil; as do also various atrophies of overused muscles.

Nor is this true of bodily actions only. It is true of mental actions also. A concentrated attention which is too continuous produces, after a time, nervous disturbance and inability. Daily occupation for many hours in even so simple a thing as removing the small defects in machine made lace, not unfrequently brings on chronic brain disorder. Some single-line railways in the United States, the movements of trains on which are regulated by telegraph from a central office, furnish a striking instance in the fact that the men who have thus to conduct the traffic, and cannot for a moment relax under penalty of causing accidents, never last for more than a few years; they become permanently incapable.

These unduly persistent strains, bodily and mental, are always indicated more or less clearly by the painful feelings accompanying them. The sensations protest, and their protests cannot with impunity be ignored.

§ 207. Insistence on the need for that complete rest which we call sleep, is not called for; but something may fitly be said concerning its duration–now too small, now too great.

Current criticisms on the habits of those around, imply the erroneous belief that for persons of the same sex and age, the same amount of sleep is required–a professed belief which is, nevertheless, continually traversed by remarks on the unlike numbers of hours of repose which different persons can do with. The truth is that the required amount of sleep depends on the constitution. According as the vigor is small or great, there may be taken many hours to little purpose or few hours to great purpose. To understand what are the vital requirements, and, by implication, the habits which, from our present standpoint, we regard as having ethical sanction, we must pause a moment to look at the physiology of the matter.

The difference between waking and sleeping is that in the one waste gets ahead of repair, while in the other repair gets ahead of waste. Proof that repair is always going on, but that it varies in rate, is furnished by what are known as photogenes. During early life, while the blood is rich and the circulation good, the destruction of nerve tissue produced by each impression the eye receives, is made up for instantaneously so that the eye is at once ready to appreciate perfectly a new impression; but in later life diminished vigor is shown by the greater time required for restoring the sensitiveness of the retinal elements; and connected nerves, after each visual impression–a time which is quite appreciable when the impression has been strong. The result is that a new image received is to some extent confused by the persistence of the preceding image, presented in its complementary colors.

Now these differences in the rates of repair at different stages in the life of the same individual, are paralleled by differences in the rates of repair in different individuals; and hence the unlike amounts of sleep required. There is a double cause for the unlikeness. In the vigorous person repair during the waking state is relatively so rapid as not to fall very far in arrear of the waste caused by action; the consequence being that at the end of the day less repair is required. And then, from the same cause, it results that during sleep such repair as has to be made is more rapidly made. Conversely in the individual with low nutrition and slow circulation, action is sooner followed by exhaustion, and the parts wasted by action take a longer rest to make them fit for action.

But while the implication is that not unfrequently one who is condemned as a sluggard is taking no more absolute rest than is required by him, and is rightly prompted to take it by his sensations, we must not infer that there is no such thing as sleep in excess. There is a very general tendency to take not only more than is needful but more than is beneficial. Passing a certain limit, the state of entire quiescence does not invigorate but prostrates. Lacking their stimuli the vital organs flag, and when the quiescence is continued after repairs have been effected, a further fall in their activities disables them from carrying on the repairs needed during working life at the ordinary rate: a sense of weariness being the consequence. Probably for those whose systems are so far in a normal state that they sleep soundly, the first complete waking marks the proper limit to the night’s rest. Some times a day after sleep thus limited is a day of unusual vivacity.

Here we have to recognize a seeming exception to the general law that for maintenance of bodily welfare the sensations are adequate guides. This lack of adjustment is most likely associated with our transitional state, during which the average life is so uninteresting, and often so wearisome, that the prospective renewal of it on waking does not serve as a stimulus to get up, but rather the contrary; for everyone has found that when the forthcoming day promises an enjoyment, say an excursion, there is no difficulty in rising early. It may be, therefore, that greater adaptation to the social state and its needful occupations, will render easy that normal abridgment of sleep which is now difficult. But for a long time to come, it will be an implication of relative ethics that guidance by the sensations must here be supplemented by judgments based on experience.

§ 208. Civilized mankind have fallen into the habit of taking a further periodical rest–a weekly rest; and without accepting their reasons given for taking it, we may admit the propriety of taking it for other reasons.

Monotony, no matter of what kind, is unfavorable to life. Not only does there need some discontinuity in the activities carried on during the waking state, and not only must the activities be made discontinuous by intervals of sleep, but that continuity of activities which consists in repetition of days similarly occupied, also seems to require breaking by days of rest. There is a cumulative weariness which is not met by the periodical cessations which nights bring: there require larger periodical cessations at longer intervals. The persistent strain of daily occupations is in all cases a strain falling on some parts of the system more than on others; and that daily repair which suffices to bring the system at large into working order again, appears not to suffice for bringing into working order again parts that have been specially taxed. So that a recurring day of rest has, if not a religious sanction, still an ethical sanction.

We may too, agree with the Sabbatarians so far as to admit that a periodical cessation of daily business is requisite as a means to mental health. Even as it is, most people largely fail to emancipate themselves from those prosaic conceptions of the world and life which mechanical routine tends to produce; and they would fail utterly were all their days passed in work. There require intervals of passivity during which the vast process of things amid which we live may be contemplated, and receptivity of the appropriate thoughts and feelings fostered.

§ 209. I need not insist on the physical and mental benefits gained from those longer intermissions of labor which now commonly recur annually. Not to dwell on the positive pleasures obtained by them (which, however, must be counted as effects to be deliberately sought), it suffices to recall the reinvigoration and increased fitness for work which they usually produce, to show that they are ethically sanctioned, or rather, where circumstances permit, ethically enjoined.

Without further elaboration I pass to the altruistic reasons which justify rest, and show the taking of it in due amount to be obligatory. The claims of dependents and the claims of fellow citizens with whom engagements have been made, alike forbid excess of work: energy must not be so wastefully expended as to jeopardize fulfillment of them. A sane judgment has to balance between the demand for such efforts as are required to make these claims, and the demand for such rest as will prevent exhaustion and incapacity. Duty to others forbids overtax of self.

But strong as is the interdict hence arising, there is a still stronger interdict–peremptory, if not for all, yet for those who are likely to have offspring. As pointed out emphatically in the preliminary chapter, preservation of a sound body as well as of a sound mind, is a duty to posterity. Deterioration of physique must result from persistence in undue activity. To suppose that whether a life which is physically normal has been led by a parent, or one which is physically abnormal, matters not to children, is absurd. If there has been habitual deficiency of rest and consequent deficiency of repair, the abnormality produced must, like every other, leave its trace in descendants–not always conspicuously since each child, besides inheriting from two parents, inherits from many lines of ancestors; but, nevertheless, in due degree somewhere.

[I-500 ]

CHAPTER IV.

NUTRITION.↩

§ 210. Except perhaps in agreeing that gluttony is to be reprobated and that the gourmet, as well as the gourmand, is a man to be regarded with scant respect, most people will think it is absurd to imply as the above title does, that ethics has anything to say about the taking of food. Though, by condemning excesses of the kinds just indicated, they imply that men ought not to be guilty of them, and by the use of this word class them as wrong; yet they ignore the obvious fact that if there is a wrong in respect of the taking of food there must also be a right.

The truth appears to be that daily actions performed in ways which do not obviously deviate from the normal, cease to be thought of as either right or wrong. As the most familiar mathematical truths, such as twice two are four, are not ordinarily thought of as parts of mathematics–as the knowledge which a child gains of surrounding objects is not commonly included under education, though it forms a highly important part of it; so this all-essential ministration to life by food, carried on as a matter of course, is dropped out of the theory of conduct. And yet, as being a part of conduct which fundamentally affects welfare, it cannot properly be thus dropped.

How improper is the ignoring of it as a subject matter for ethical judgments, we shall see on observing the ways in which current opinion respecting it goes wrong.

§ 211. Already, in section 174, the extreme instances furnished by the Esquimaux, the Yakuts, and the Australians, have shown us that enormous quantities of food are proper under certain conditions, and that satisfaction of the seemingly inordinate desires for them is not only warranted but imperative: death being the consequence of inability to take a sufficient quantity to meet the expenditure entailed by severe climate or by long fasts. To which here let me add the experiences of Arctic voyagers, who, like the natives of the Arctic regions, acquire great appetites for blubber.

Mention of these facts is a fit preliminary to the question whether, in respect of food, desires ought or ought not to be obeyed. As already said, treatment of this inquiry as ethical will be demurred to by most and by many ridiculed. Though, when not food but drink is in question, their judgments, very strongly expressed, are of the kind they class as moral; yet they do not see that since the question concerns the effect of things swallowed, it is absurd to regard the conduct which causes these effects as moral or immoral when the things are liquid but not when they are solid.

Adaptation goes on everywhere and always, in the human race as in inferior races, and, among other results, is the adjustment of the desire for food to the need for food. Even were this not shown us by the extreme instances above given, it would be an inevitable corollary from the law of the survival of the fittest. Every maladjustment of the two must have been injurious, and, other things equal, the tendency must ever have been for maladjustment to cause the dying-out of individuals in which it existed. On the average, then, there must be a fair balance: what there is of deviation from the normal, bearing but a small ratio to what there is of normal.

Some deviation doubtless occurs. We still see inheritance of traits appropriate to the primitive wild life and inappropriate to settled civilized life; and among such traits is that tendency to take food in excess of immediate need, which was good in the irregularly living savage but which is not good in the regularly living European. Further, it may be admitted that men who lead monotonous lives, as most do, presenting much to bear and little to enjoy are apt to prolong unduly the few actions which are pleasurable; and of these eating is one. When the occupation to be entered upon at the end of a meal is pleasurable, there is comparatively little wish to eke out the meal.

But the more or less of excess apt to result from these causes, is consequent not upon obedience to the sensations naturally arising, but rather from solicitation of the sensations: a perverting factor made possible by that imagination which has evil effects as well as good effects. It is not that an immediate desire prompts the action, but that the action is prompted by the hope of experiencing the agreeable feeling which accompanies fulfillment of a desire. There are kindred evils arising from sitting down to table when appetite does not suggest–partaking of periodically recurring meals whether hungry or otherwise. Very often people eat as a matter of course, not in conformity with their sensations but notwithstanding the protests of their sensations. And then, oddly enough, there comes from these transgressors the assertion that sensations are not fit guides! Having suffered from constantly disobeying them, they infer that they are not to be obeyed!

It is doubtless true that those who are out of health occasionally entail on themselves mischiefs by eating as much as they desire; and some who are not in obvious ways unwell, now and then do the like. But a demurrer drawn from these experiences is not sustainable. In such cases the adjustments between all the various needs of the organism, and the various sensations which prompt fulfillment of them, have been chronically deranged by disobedience. When by persistent indoor life, or by overwork, or by ceaseless mental worry or by inadequate clothing, or by breathing bad air, the bodily functions have been perverted, guidance by the sensations ceases to be reliable. It then becomes needful either, as in some cases, to restrain appetite, or, as in other cases, to take food without appetite: an abnormal state having been brought about by physiological sins, artificial regulation is called for to supplement natural regulation. But this proves nothing. After prolonged starvation, satisfaction of ravenous hunger by a good meal is said to be fatal. The prostration is so great that any considerable quantity of food cannot be digested, and administration in small quantities is needful. But it is not thence inferred that satisfaction of appetite by a good meal will ordinarily be fatal. Similarly is it throughout. The evils which occasionally arise from taking as much as appetite prompts, must be ascribed to the multitudinous preceding disobediences to sensations, and not to this particular obedience to them.

While there is recognition of the evils resulting from excesses in eating, there is little recognition of the evils consequent on eating too little. The ascetic bias given by their religion and by their education, leads most people to think themselves meritorious if they do with as little food as possible and tempts them to restrict the food of others. Disastrous effects follow. Inadequate nutrition, especially while growth is going on, is an unquestionable cause of imperfect development, either in size, or in quality of tissue, or in both; and parents who are responsible for it are responsible for invalid lives. No cattle breeder or horse breeder dreams of obtaining a fine animal on a stinted diet. No possessor of a fine animal expects him to do good service on the road or in the field unless he is well fed. Science and common sense unite in recognizing the truth that growth and vigor are alike dependent on a good supply of the materials from which body and brain are built up when young and repaired when adult. The taking of an adequate quantity of food is insured if appetite is obeyed, while if the supply is restricted spite of the demands of appetite, there will inevitably be more or less of defect in size or in strength.

Speaking generally then, we may say that there is an ethical sanction for yielding in full to the desire for food: both because satisfaction of the desire is itself one element to be counted among the normal gratifications life offers, and because satisfaction of it indirectly conduces to subsequent fullness of life and the power of discharging all the obligations of life.

§ 212. One who complains of the monotony of his meals and is thereupon reproached for seeking the enjoyments which change of diet gives (I name a fact), is, by the reproach, tacitly condemned from a moral point of view. Whence the implication is that a doctrine of right and wrong has something to say respecting the propriety or impropriety of yielding to the wish for variety. Everyone, therefore, who does not agree in the opinion of the pious Scotchwoman just referred to, must hold the opposite opinion: the desire for variety of food should be gratified–has a sanction like that of the desire for due quantity of food.

This is of course not a fit place for entering on the topics of variety, quality, and preparation of food–topic the mere mention of which will seem out of place to those who have not accepted the doctrines implied in the first chapter of this work, that every part of conduct which directly or indirectly affects welfare has an ethical aspect. Here, what has to be said or hinted under the three head-named, may come under the one general head of satisfaction of the palate, as distinguished from the satisfaction of the appetite–distinguished in a measure but not wholly since the one serves as a normal stimulus to the other. Partly as a further sequence of asceticism, and partly as a reaction against the gross sensualism which history occasionally records from Roman days down to recent days, it has come to be thought that the pleasures of the table are to be reprobated; or, if not positively reprobated, yet passed over as not proper to be regarded. Those who take this view are, indeed, like others, discontent with insipid food; and are no less ready than others to dismiss cooks who cannot prepare enjoyable dinners. But while practically they pursue gastronomic satisfactions, they refuse to recognize their theoretical legitimacy

Here, I cannot imitate this uncandid mode of dealing with the matter; and find myself obliged to assert that due regard for the needs of the palate is not only proper but disregard of them is wrong. The contrary view involves the belief that it matters not to the body whether it is the seat of pleasurable feelings, or indifferent feelings, or painful feelings. But it matters very much. As asserted in an early chapter (sec. 36), pleasures raise the tide of life while pains lower it; and among the pleasures which do this are gustatory pleasures. There are two reasons why, when food is liked, digestion of it is furthered, and when disliked is hindered. In common with every agreeable sensation an agreeable taste raises the action of the heart, and, by implication, the vital functions at large; while simultaneously it excites in a more direct way the structures which secrete the digestive fluids. It needs but to remember the common observation that an appetizing odor makes the mouth water, to understand that the alimentary canal as a whole is made active by a pleasurable stimulation of the palate, and that digestion is thus aided. And since on good digestion depends good nutrition, and on good nutrition depends the energy needed for daily work, it follows that due regard to gratification of the palate is demanded.

Those who have had any experience of invalid life, know well how small a quantity can be eaten of food which is indifferent or distasteful, and how trying is the digestion of such food, while the converse holds of food which is grateful: the resulting adequate meals of such food better digested, being a condition to recovery and the resumption of responsibilities. And if the benefit of such ministrations to the palate is made thus manifest where the vitality is low it unquestionably exists, though less manifestly where the vitality is high.

Of course, as in respect of quantity so in respect of quality and variety, there may be, and often is, excess: the last kind of excess being conducive to the first. But no more in this case than in any other case is abuse an argument against use.

§ 213. Before ending this chapter, which I must now do lest it should become a chapter on dietetics, I must say something on the altruistic bearings of the conclusions drawn; only making, in further repudiation of the ordinary ascetic view, the remark that the Hebrew myth which represents the eating of the apple by Eve as prompted by the serpent, seems in many minds to have been expanded into a general theory of our relations to food: their asceticism tacitly implying that gustatory promptings are suggestions of the devil.

Of the altruistic bearings to be noted, the first concerns the indirect effects of excess, suffered by those around, from the occasional illness and more frequent ill-temper which it produces: injuries to others the prospect of which should serve as a deterrent, no less than prospective injury to self. And then a more remote altruistic bearing is seen in the effect wrought on the community if excess is general. Remembering that the stock of food which a community obtains is a limited quantity, it results that if its members consume more than is needful for complete self-sustentation, they diminish the amount of human life proper to the inhabited area. Clearly, if people at large eat, let us say, one-sixth more than is required for full life and vigor–if ten millions of people eat as much as would satisfactorily support twelve millions; then, assuming human life to be a desideratum, a wrong is done by thus preventing its increase. The share of each individual in the wrong may be inappreciable; but the aggregate wrong–preventing the existence of two millions of people–is appreciable enough.

The remaining altruistic bearing is that which concerns offspring. Chronic innutrition of parents injures children. In the case of mothers the inevitableness of this result is clear. Building up of the fetus has to go on simultaneously with the carrying on of material life, and nutritive materials are used up for both processes. Though, in the competition between the two, the first has a certain priority, and is effected at great cost to the second; yet, where the supply of nutritive materials is inadequate, fetal growth is checked, as well as maternal enfeeblement caused. A stinted development of the infant and a subsequent falling short of full life are the consequences. Regard for posterity thus peremptorily demands good feeding.

[I-508]

CHAPTER V.

STIMULATION.↩

§ 214. To write sundry chapters on the ethics of individual life and to say nothing about the taking of stimulants is out of the question. While, on large parts of private conduct, most men pass no moral judgments, and assume that they are subject to none; over that part of private conduct which concerns the drinking of fermented liquors, most men, passing strong moral judgments, unhesitatingly assume that ethics exercises peremptory rule; and the inclusion within the domain of ethics of questions concerning alcoholic stimulants, is followed by inclusion of questions concerning opium-eating.

We may observe here, as we have observed before, that the reprobation of practices which, in excess, are certainly injurious, and are held by many to be injurious altogether, is practically limited to practices which are primarily pleasurable. A man may bring on himself chronic rheumatism by daily careless exposure, or an incurable nervous disorder by overapplication; and though he may thus vitiate his life and diminish his usefulness in a far greater degree than by occasionally taking too much wine, yet his physical transgression meets with only mild disapproval, if even that. But in these cases the transgression is displeasurable, whereas excess in wine is pleasurable; and the damnable thing in the misconduct is the production of pleasure by it.

If it be said that this contrast of moral estimates is due to the perception that there is danger of falling into injurious habits which are primarily pleasurable, while there is no danger of falling into injurious habits which are primarily painful; the reply is that though we naturally suppose this to be true, yet it is not true. The obligations men are under, or suppose themselves to be under, lead them in multitudinous cases to persist in sedentary lives, to work too many hours, to breathe impure air, and so forth, spite of the feelings which protest–spite of continual proofs that they are injuring themselves. Clearly it is the vague notion that gratification is vicious, which causes the condemnation of gratifying transgressions while ungratifying transgressions are condemned but slightly or not at all.

Here we have to consider the matter, as far as we can, apart from popular judgments, and guided only by physiological considerations.

§ 215. It cannot, I think, be doubted that from the point of view of absolute ethics, stimulants of every kind must be reprobated; or, at any rate, that daily use of them must be reprobated. Few, if any, will contend that they play a needful part in complete life.

All normal ingesta subserve the vital processes either by furnishing materials which aid in the formation and repair of tissues, or materials which, during their transformations, yield heat and force, or the material–water–which serves as a vehicle. A stimulant, alcoholic or other, is neither tissue food, nor heat food, nor force food. It simply affects the rate of molecular change-exalting it and then, under ordinary circumstances, if taken in considerable quantity, depressing it. Now matters which can be used neither for building up the body nor as stores of force, do not increase the sum of vital manifestations, but only alter the distribution of them. And since, in a being fully fitted for the life it has to lead, the functions are already adjusted to the requirements, it does not seem that any advantage can be obtained by changing the established balance.

This inference is far reaching-carries us beyond the point to which the total abstainers from fermented liquors wish to go. Tea and coffee also must be excluded from dietaries. The vegeto-alkalies, to which they owe their effects, are just as little akin to food properly so called, as is alcohol; and, like alcohol, simply modify for a time the rate of molecular change, causing greater genesis of energy during one interval with the effect of diminishing it during another. From the physiological point of view, therefore, the use of these must be condemned if the use of alcohol is condemned.

Should it be said that the condemnation of the last is evoked by the liability to abuse, it may be replied that the liability to abuse holds of the others also; though the mischiefs wrought are neither so frequent nor so conspicuous. In France there are occasional deaths from coffee dririking, and in England undue drinking of tea not infrequently causes nervousness.

§ 216. But while, from the point of view of absolute ethics, the use of stimulants seems indefensible, we may still ask whether relative ethics affords any justification for it–whether, under existing conditions, imperfectly adapted as we are to the social state, and obliged to diverge from natural requirements, we may not use stimulants to countervail the consequent mischiefs.

It is a fact of some significance that throughout the world, among unallied races and in all stages of progress, we find in use one or other agent which agreeably affects the nervous system–opium in China, tobacco among the American Indians, bang in India, hashish in sundry Eastern places, a narcotic fungus in Northern Asia, kava among the Polynesians, chica and coca in Ancient Peru, and various fermented liquors besides the wine of Europeans, and the beer of various African tribes–the soma of the primitive Aryans and the pulque of the Mexicans. Not that this universality of habits of stimulation justifies them in face of the evidence that diseases often result; but it suggests the question whether there is not a connection between the use of some exciting or sedative agent, and the kind of life circumstances entail–a life here monotonous, there laborious, and in other places full of privations. Possibly these drugs and liquors may sometimes make tolerable an existence which would be otherwise intolerable; or, at any rate, so far mitigate the bodily or mental pains caused, as to diminish the mischiefs done by them.

Various testimonies are to the effect that where the daily life is one entailing much wear and tear of brain, the sedative influence of tobacco is useful–serves to check that nervous waste which otherwise the continuance of thought and anxiety would produce. In a normal state, those parts of the system which have been taxed cease to act when the strain is over: the supply of blood is shut off, and they become quiescent. But in the abnormal states established in many by over-work, it is otherwise. The parts which have been active become congested, and remain active when action is no longer demanded. Thinking and feeling cannot be stopped, and there occurs an expenditure which is not only useless but injurious. Hence a justification for using an agent which prevents waste of tissue and economizes the energies.

Again, where the constitutional powers are flagging, and a day’s work proves so exhausting that the ability to digest partially fails, it may be held that vascular action and nervous discharge may advantageously be raised by alcohol to the extent needful for effectually dealing with food; since a good meal well digested serves to render the system fit for another day’s work, which otherwise it would not be.

There are those, too, in whom undue application establishes a state of nervous irritation which is mitigated or ended by a dose of opium; and the life may sometimes be such that the state thus dealt with frequently recurs. If this happens the use of the remedy appears justified.

§ 217. Even total abstainers admit that alcoholic beverages may rightly be used for medicinal purposes; and their admission, consistently interpreted, implies that, as above contended, stimulants in general may properly be employed, not only where positive illness exists, but where there is inability to cope with the requirements of life. For if a very conspicuous departure from the normal state may often be best treated by brandy or wine, it cannot well be denied that a less conspicuous departure, occurring perhaps daily may similarly be treated. Constitutional debility, or the debility which comes with advancing years, may like the debility of an invalid, be advantageously met by temporarily raising the power of the system at times when it has to do work conducive to restoration–that is, when food has to be digested, and sometimes when sleep has to be obtained. But there hence results a defense only for such uses of stimulants as aid the system in repairing itself. When, as by taking alcoholic liquors between meals, or by the hypodermic injection of morphia, there is achieved a temporary exaltation of power or feeling, which conduces to no restorative end, reprobation rightly takes the place of approbation. In the order of nature, normal pleasures are the concomitants of normal activities, and pleasures which are achieved by gratuitous deviations from the normal have no ethical sanctions.

One exception only should be made. Stimulants may be taken with advantage when the monotony of ordinary life is now and then broken by festive entertainments. As implied in a preceding chapter, daily repetition of the same activities, which in our state are inevitably specialized, necessitates undue taxing of certain parts of the system. Breaches in the uniformity therefore yield benefits by furthering restoration of equilibrium. The functions, chronically kept out of balance, are aided in returning to a balance. Hence it happens that social meetings at which, along with mental exhilaration, there goes the taking of abundant and varied food, and wine even in large quantity, often prove highly salutary–are not followed by injurious reactions but leave behind invigoration. Such means used for such ends, however, must be used but occasionally: if often repeated they defeat themselves.

§ 218. To sum up what has been said in a tentative way on this difficult question: we may, in the first place, conclude that absolute ethics, insofar as it concerns individual life, can give no countenance to the daily use of stimulants. They can have no place in a perfectly normal order.

In such approximately normal life as that enjoyed during their early days by vigorous persons, there is also no place for them. So long as there is nothing to prevent the full discharge of all the organic functions, there can be no need for agents which temporarily exalt them. What ethics has to say in the matter must take the form of an interdict.

Only when the excessive obligations which life often entails produce more or less of daily prostration, or when from constitutional feebleness or the diminished strength of old age, the ordinary tax on the energies is somewhat greater than can be effectually met, does there seem a valid reason for using exciting agents, alcoholic or other; and then only when they are taken in such wise as to aid reparative processes.

Beyond this there is a defense for such occasional uses of these agents as serves, when joined with raised nutrition and enlivening circumstances, to take the system out of its routine, which in all cases diverges somewhat, if not much, from a perfect balance.

[I-514]

CHAPTER VI.

CULTURE.↩

§ 219. Taken in its widest sense, culture means preparation for complete living. It includes, in the first place, all such discipline and all such knowledge as are needful for, or conducive to, efficient self-sustentation and sustentation of family. And it includes, in the second place, all such development of the faculties at large, as fits them for utilizing those various sources of pleasure which nature and humanity supply to responsive minds.

The first of these two divisions of culture has more than an ethical sanction: it is ethically enjoined. Acquisition of fitness for carrying on the business of life is primarily a duty to self and secondarily a duty to others. If under the head of this fitness we comprise, as we must, such skill as is needful for those who are to be manually occupied, as well as skill of every higher kind, it becomes manifest that (save with those who have sustentation gratis) lack of it makes a healthy physical life impracticable, and makes impracticable the nurture of dependents. Further, the neglect to acquire a power of adequately maintaining self and offspring necessitates either the burdening of others in furnishing aid, or else, if they refuse to do this, necessitates that infliction of pain upon them which the contemplation of misery causes.

Concerning the second division of culture, peremptory obligation is not to be alleged. Those who take an ascetic view of life have no reason for that discipline of faculties which aims to increase one or other refined pleasure; and, as among the Quakers, we see that there does in fact result a disregard of, and often a reprobation of, such discipline, or of parts of it. Only those who accept hedonism can consistently advocate this exercise of intellect and feeling which prepares the way for various gratifications filling leisure hours. They only can regard it as needful for attaining complete life, and as therefore having an ethical sanction.

From these general ideas of culture, essential and nonessential, let us go on to consider the several divisions of it.

§ 220. There is a part of culture, usually neglected, which should be recognized alike by those to whom it brings means of living and by those who do not seek material profit from it, which may fitly stand first. I mean the acquirement of manual dexterity.

That this is a proper preparation for life among those occupied in productive industry, will not be disputed; though at present, even the boys who may need it are but little encouraged to acquire manipulative skill: only those kinds of skill which games give are cultivated. But manipulative skill and keenness of perception ought to be acquired by those also who are to have careers of higher kinds. Awkwardness of limb and inability to use the fingers deftly, continually entail small disasters and occasionally great ones; while expertness frequently comes in aid of welfare, either of self or others. One who has been well practiced in the uses of his senses and his muscles, is less likely than the unpracticed to meet with accidents; and, when accidents occur, is sure to be more efficient in rectifying mischiefs. Were it not that this obvious truth is ignored, it would be absurd to point out that, since limbs and senses exist to the end of adjusting the actions to surrounding objects and movements, it is the business of every one to gain skill in the performance of such actions.

Let it not be supposed that I am here advocating the extension of formal culture in this direction: very much to the contrary. The shaping of all education into lessons is one of the vices of the time. Cultivation of manipulative skill, in common with expertness in general, should be acquired in the process of achieving ends otherwise desired. In any rationally conducted education there must be countless occasions for the exercise of those faculties which the artisan and the experimenter bring perpetually into play.

§ 221. Intellectual culture under its primary aspect links on to the culture just described; for as discipline of the limbs and senses is a fitting of them for direct dealings with things around, so intelligence, in its successive grades, is an agent for guiding dealings of indirect kinds, greater and greater in their complexity. The higher acquisitions and achievements of intellect have now become so remote from practical life, that their relations to it are usually lost sight of. But if we remember that in the stick employed to heave up a stone, or the paddle to propel a boat, we have illustrations of the uses of levers; while in the pointing of an arrow so as to allow for its fall during flight, certain dynamical principles are tacitly recognized; and that from these vague early cognitions the progress may be traced step by step to the generalizations of mathematicians and astronomers; we see that science has gradually emerged from the crude knowledge of the savage. And if we remember that as this crude knowledge of the savage served for simple guidance of his life-sustaining actions, so the developed sciences of mathematics and astronomy serve for guidance in the workshop and the countinghouse and for steering of vessels, while developed physics and chemistry preside over all manufacturing processes; we see that at the one extreme as at the other, furtherance of men’s ability to deal effectually with the surrounding world, and so to satisfy their wants, is that purpose of intellectual culture which precedes all others.

Even for these purposes we distinguish as practical, that intellectual culture which makes us acquainted with the natures of things, should be wider than is commonly thought needful. Preparation for this or that kind of business is far too special. There cannot be adequate knowledge of a particular class of natural facts without some knowledge of other classes. Every object and every action simultaneously presents various orders of phenomena–mathematical, physical, chemical–with, in many cases, others which are vital; and these phenomena are so interwoven that full comprehension of any group involves partial comprehension of the rest. Though at first sight the extent of intellectual culture thus suggested as requisite may seem impracticable, it is not so. When education is rightly carried on, the cardinal truths of each science may be clearly communicated and firmly grasped, apart from the many corollaries commonly taught along with them. And after there has been gained such familiarity with these cardinal truths of the several sciences as renders their chief implications comprehensible, it becomes possible to reach rational conceptions of any one group of phenomena, and to be fully prepared for a special occupation.

That division of intellectual culture which comprises knowledge of the sciences, while having an indirect ethical sanction as conducing to self-sustentation and sustentation of others, has also a direct sanction irrespective of practical ends. To the servant girl, the ploughboy, the grocer, nay even to the average classical scholar or man of letters, the world, living and dead, with the universe around it, present no such grand panorama as they do to those who have gained some conception of the actions, infinite and infinitesimal, everywhere going on, and can contemplate them under other aspects than the technical. If we imagine that into a gorgeously decorated hall a rush light is brought, and, being held near to some part of the wall, makes visible the pattern over a small area of it, while everything else remains in darkness; and if, instead of this, we imagine that electric lights turned on reveal simultaneously the whole room with its varied contents; we may form some idea of the different appearance under which nature is contemplated by the utterly uncultured mind and by the highly cultured mind. Whoever duly appreciates this immense contrast will see that, rightly assimilated, science brings exaltation of mental life.

One further result must be recognized. That study of all orders of phenomena which, while it gives adequate general conceptions of them, leads, now in this direction and now in that, to limits which no exploration can transcend, is needful to make us aware of our relation to the ultimate mystery of things; and so to awaken a consciousness which we may properly consider germane to the ethical consciousness.

§ 222. In its full acceptation, knowledge of science includes knowledge of social science; and this includes a certain kind of historical knowledge. Such of it as is needful for political guidance, each citizen should endeavor to obtain. Though the greater parts of the facts from which true sociological generalizations may be drawn, are presented only by those savage and semicivilized societies ignored in our educational courses, there are also required some of the facts furnished by the histories of developed nations.

But beyond the impersonal elements of history which chiefly demand attention, a certain attention may rightly be given to its personal elements. Commonly these occupy the entire attention. The great-man theory of history, tacitly held by the ignorant in all ages and in recent times definitely enunciated by Mr. Carlyle, implies that knowledge of history is constituted by knowledge of rulers and their doings; and by this theory there is fostered in the mass of minds a love of gossip about dead individuals, not much more respectable than the love of gossip about individuals now living. But while no information concerning kings and popes, and ministers and generals, even when joined to exhaustive acquaintance with intrigues and treaties, battles and sieges, gives any insight into the laws of social evolution–while the single fact that division of labor has been progressing in all advancing nations regardless of the wills of lawmakers, and unobserved by them, suffices to show that the forces which mold societies work out their results apart from, and often in spite of, the aims of leading men; yet a certain moderate number of leading men and their actions may properly be contemplated. The past stages in human progress, which every one should know something about, would be conceived in too shadowy a form if wholly divested of ideas of the persons and events associated with them. Moreover, some amount of such knowledge is requisite to enlarge adequately the conception of human nature in general–to show the extremes, occasionally good but mostly bad, which it is capable of reaching.

With culture of this kind there naturally goes purely literary culture. That a fair amount of this should be included in the preparation for complete living, needs no saying. Rather does it need saying that in a duly proportioned education, as well as in adult life, literature should be assigned less space than it now has. Nearly all are prone to mental occupations of easy kinds, or kinds which yield pleasurable excitements with small efforts; and history, biography, fiction, poetry, are, in this respect, more attractive to the majority than science–more attractive than that knowledge of the order of things at large which serves for guidance.

Still, we must not here forget that from the hedonistic point of view, taking account of this pleasure directly obtained, literary culture has a high claim; and we may also admit that, as conducing to wealth and force of expression by furnishing materials for metaphor and allusion, it increases mental power and social effectiveness. In the absence of it conversation is bald.

§ 223. In culture, as in other things, men tend towards one or other extreme. Either, as with the great majority, culture is scarcely pursued at all, or, as with the few, it is pursued almost exclusively and often with disastrous results.

Emerson says of the gentleman that the first requisite is to be a good animal, and this is the first requisite for every one. A course of life which sacrifices the animal, though it may be defensible under special conditions is not defensible as a general policy. Within the sphere of our positive knowledge we nowhere see mind without life; we nowhere see life without a body; we nowhere see a full life–a life which is high alike in respect of intensity. breadth, and length–without a healthy body. Every breach of the laws of bodily health produces a physical damage, which eventually damages in some way though often in an invisible way the mental health.

Culture has therefore to be carried on subject to other needs. Its amount must be such as consists with, and is conducive to, physical welfare; and it must be also such as consists with, and is conducive to, normal activity not only of the mental powers exercised, but of all others. When carried to an extent which diminishes vivacity, and produces indifference to the various natural enjoyments, it is an abuse; and still more is it an abuse when, as often happens, it is pushed so far as to produce disgust with the subjects over which attention has been unduly strained.

Especially in the case of women is condemnation of overculture called for, since immense mischief is done by it. We are told that the higher education, as now carried on at Girton and Newnham, is not inconsistent with maintenance of good health; and if we omit those who are obliged to desist, this appears to be true. I say advisedly "appears to be true." There are various degrees of what is called good health. Commonly it is alleged and admitted where no physical disturbance is manifest; but there is a wide space between this and that full health which shows itself in high spirits and overflowing energy In women, especially, there may be maintained a health which seems good, and yet falls short of the requirements of the race. For in women, much more than in men, there is constitutionally provided a surplus vitality devoted to continuance of the species. When the system is overtaxed the portion thus set aside is considerably diminished before the portion which goes to carry on individual life is manifestly trenched upon. The cost of activity, and especially of cerebral activity, which is very costly, has to be met; and if expenditure is excessive it cannot be met without deduction from that reserve power which should go to race maintenance. The reproductive capacity is diminished in various degrees–sometimes to the extent of inability to bear children, more frequently to the extent of inability to yield milk, and in numerous cases to a smaller extent which I must leave unspecified. I have good authority for saying that one of the remoter results of overculture, very frequently becomes a cause of domestic alienation.

Let me add that an adequately high culture, alike of men and women, might be compassed without mischief were our curriculum more rational. If the worthless knowledge included in what is now supposed to be a good education were omitted, all that which is needful for guidance, most of that which is desirable for general enlightenment, and a good deal of that which is distinguished as decorative, might be acquired without injurious reactions.

§ 224. To the egoistic motives for culture have to be added the altruistic motives. A human being devoid of knowledge, and with none of that intellectual life which discipline of the faculties gives, is utterly uninteresting. To become a pleasure-yielding person is a social duty. Hence culture, and especially the culture which conduces to enlivenment, has an ethical sanction and something more.

Especially is this true of aesthetic culture, of which no note has thus far been taken. While it is to be enjoined as aiding that highest development of self required for the fullest life and happiness, it is also to be enjoined as increasing the ability to gratify those around. Though practices in the plastic arts, in music, and in poetry, are usually to be encouraged chiefly as producing susceptibility to pleasures, which the aesthetically uncultured cannot have; yet those who are endowed with something more than average ability, should be led to develop it by motives of benevolence also. In the highest degree this is so with music; and concerted music, subordinating as it does the personal element, is above all other kinds to be cultivated on altruistic grounds. It should be added, however, that excess of aesthetic culture, in common with excess of intellectual culture, is to be reprobated: Not in this case because of the overtax entailed, but because of the undue expenditure of time–the occupation of too large a space in life. With multitudes of people, especially women, the pursuit of beauty in one or other form is the predominant pursuit. To the achievement of prettiness much more important ends are sacrificed. Though aesthetic culture has to be recognized as ethically sanctioned, yet instead of emphasizing the demand for it, there is far greater occasion for condemning the excess of it. There needs a trenchant essay on aesthetic vices, which are everywhere shown in the subordination of use to appearance.

[I-523]

CHAPTER VII.

AMUSEMENTS.↩

§ 225. I have closed the last chapter with a division, the sub-matter of which links it on to the subject matter of this chapter. We pass insensibly from the activities and passivities implied by aesthetic culture, to sundry of those which come under the head of relaxations and amusements. These we have now to consider from the ethical point of view.

To the great majority who have imbibed more or less of that asceticism which, though appropriate to times of chronic militancy and also useful as a curb to ungoverned sensualism, has swayed too much men’s theory of life, it will seem an absurd supposition that amusements are ethically warranted. Yet unless, in common with the Quakers and some extreme evangelicals, they hold them to be positively wrong, they must either say that amusements are neither right nor wrong, or, they must say that they are positively right–are to be morally approved.

That they are sanctioned by hedonistic ethics goes without saying. They are pleasure-giving activities; and that is their sufficient justification, so long as they do not unduly interfere with activities which are obligatory. Though most of our pleasures are to be accepted as concomitants of those various expenditures of energy conducive to self-sustentation and sustentation of family; yet the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake is to be sanctioned, and even enjoined, when primary duties have been fulfilled.

So, too, are they to be approved from the physiological point of view. Not only do the emotional satisfactions which accompany normal life-sustaining labors exalt the vital functions, but the vital functions are exalted by those satisfactions which accompany the superfluous expenditures of energy implied by amusements: much more exalted in fact. Such satisfactions serve to raise the tide of life, and taken in due proportion conduce to every kind of efficiency.

Yet once more there is the evolutionary justification. In section 534 of The Principles of Psychology, it was shown that whereas, in the lowest creatures, the small energies which exist are wholly used up in those actions which serve to maintain the individual and propagate the species; in creatures of successively higher grades, there arises an increasing amount of unused energy: every improvement of organization achieving some economy and so augmenting the surplus power. This surplus expends itself in the activities we call play. Among the superior vertebrata the tendency to these superfluous activities becomes conspicuous; and it is especially conspicuous in man, when so conditioned that stress of competition does not make the sustentation of self and family too laborious. The implication is that in a fully developed form of human life, a considerable space will be filled by the pleasurable exercise of faculties which have not been exhausted by daily activities.

§ 226. In that division of The Principles of Psychology above referred to (secs. 533—40), in which I have drawn this distinction between life-sustaining activities and activities not of a life-sustaining kind, which are pursued for pleasure’s sake, I have not drawn the further distinction between those of the sensory structures and those of the motor structures. There is a distinction between gratifications which aesthetic perceptions yield and those yielded by games and sports. This distinction it was left for Mr. Grant Allen to point out in his Physiological Aesthetics. It cannot be made an absolute distinction, however; since gratifications derived from certain excitements of the senses are often associated with, and dependent upon, muscular actions; and since the gratifications of muscular actions, whatever their kind, are achieved under guidance of the senses. Moreover, with each of them there usually exists a large emotional accompaniment more important than either. Still the division is a natural one, and Mr. Grant Allen has established it beyond question.

Even ascetically minded people do not repudiate those enjoyments, intellectual and emotional, which traveling yields. Pursuit of the aesthetic delights derived from beautiful scenery, the mountains, the sea–primarily those due to the visual impressions which forms and colors give, but secondarily and mainly those due to the poetical sentiments aroused by association–is approved by all. So, too, in a measure, is pursuit of the gratifications yielded by exploration of the unknown forms of human life and its products–foreign peoples, their towns, their ways. One is sometimes saddened to think what a vast majority of men come into the world and go out of it again knowing scarcely at all what kind of world it is. And this thought suggests that while it is to be sanctioned for gratification’s sake, traveling is to be further sanctioned for the sake of culture; since the accompanying enlargement of the experiences profoundly affects the general conceptions and rationalizes them. Modern social changes and changes of belief, are in considerable measure due to facilitation of intercourse with unlike forms of life, and character, and habit, which railways have brought about.

After the pleasures given by actual presentations of new scenes, may fitly be named the pleasures yielded by pictorial representations of them. While in many cases these fall short of those which the realities give, in many other cases they exceed them. By its reproduction on canvas there is given to a rural view or a domestic interior an artificial interest; so that something intrinsically commonplace is transfigured into something beautiful: possibly because the mind in presence of the object itself was so much occupied with its other aspects as to give no attention to its aesthetic aspects. Be the cause what it may, however, works of art open new fields of delight, and by hedonism acceptance of this delight is sanctioned, or rather enjoined. Few pleasures are more entirely to be approved, and less open to abuse, than those yielded by paintmgs, and of course also by sculptures.

It seems undesirable to insist that there is an ethical sanction for the pleasures given by light literature, seeing that there is so general a tendency to excess in the pursuit of them. Perhaps such exaltation of feeling as the reading of good poetry produces, is not sought in an undue degree; but, unquestionably, there is far too much reading of fiction; often excluding, as it does, all instructive reading, and causing neglect of useful occupations. While ethical approval must be given to occasional indulgence in that extreme gratification produced by following out the good and ill fortunes of imaginary persons made real by vivid character drawing; yet there much more needs ethical reprobation of the too frequent indulgence in it which is so common: this emotional debauchery undermines mental health. Nor let us omit to note that while sanction may rightly be claimed for fiction of a humanizing tendency, there should be nothing but condemnation for brutalizing fiction–for that culture of bloodthirst to which so many stories are devoted.

Of course much that has just been said concerning fiction may be said concerning the drama. Higher even than the gratification yielded by a good novel, is that yielded by a good play; and the demoralization caused by excess of it would be still greater were there the same opportunity for continuous absorption. Pleasures which are intense must be sparingly partaken of. The general law of waste and repair implies that in proportion to the excitement of a faculty must be its subsequent prostration and unfitness for action–an unfitness which continues until repair has been made. Hence, overwhelming sympathy felt for personages in a fiction or drama, is felt at the cost of some subsequent callousness. As the eye by exposure to a vivid light is momentarily incapacitated for appreciating those feeble lights through which objects around are distinguished; so, after a tearful fellow feeling with the sufferers of imaginary woes, there is for a time a lack of fellow feeling with persons around. Much theatergoing, like much novel reading, is therefore to be ethically reprobated.

Perhaps among gratifications of the aesthetic class, that which music yields is that which may be indulged in most largely without evil consequences. Though after a concert, as after a fiction or a play, life in general seems tame; yet there is a less marked reaction, because the feelings excited are more remotely akin to those associated with daily intercourse. Still, the pleasures of music are frequently enjoyed to an excess which, if not otherwise injurious, is injurious by the implied occupation of time–by the filling of too large a space in life.

§ 227. Throughout the foregoing class of pleasures, resulting from the superfluous excitements of faculties, the individual is mainly passive. We turn now to the class in which he is mainly active; which again is subdivisible into two classes–sports and games. With sports, ethics has little concern beyond graduating its degrees of reprobation. Such of them as involve the direct infliction of pain, especially on fellow beings, are nothing but means to the gratification of feelings inherited from savages of the baser sort. That after these thousands of years of social discipline, there should still be so many who like to see the encounters of the prize ring or witness the goring of horses and riders in the arena, shows how slowly the instincts of the barbarian are being subdued. No condemnation can be too strong for these sanguinary amusements which keep alive in men the worst parts of their natures and thus profoundly vitiate social life. Of course in a measure, though in a smaller measure, condemnation must be passed on field sports–in smaller measure because the obtainment of food affords a partial motive, because the inffiction of pain is less conspicuous, and because the chief pleasure is that derived from successful exercise of skill. But it cannot be denied that all activities with which there is joined the consciousness that other sentient beings, far inferior though they may be, are made to suffer, are to some extent demoralizing. The sympathies do, indeed, admit of being so far specialized that the same person who is unsympathetic toward wild animals may be in large measure sympathetic toward fellow men; but a full amount of sympathy cannot well be present in the one relation and absent in the other. It may be added that the specializing of the sympathies has the effect that they become smaller as the remoteness from human nature becomes greater; and that hence the killing of a deer sins against them more than does the killing of a fish.

Those expenditures of energy which take the form of games, yield pleasures from which there are but small, if any, drawbacks in the entailed pains. Certain of them, indeed, as football, are as much to be reprobated as sports, than some of which they are more brutalizing; and there cannot be much ethical approbation of those games, so-called, such as boat races, in which a painful and often injurious overtax of the system is gone through to achieve a victory, pleasurable to one side and entailing pain on the other. But there is ethical sanction for those games in which, with a moderate amount of muscular effort, there is joined the excitement of a competition not too intense, kept alive from moment to moment by the changing incidents of the contest. Under these conditions the muscular actions are beneficial, the culture of the perceptions is useful, while the emotional pleasure has but small drawbacks. And here I am prompted to denounce the practice, now so general, of substituting gymnastics for games–violent muscular actions, joined with small concomitant pleasures, for moderate muscular actions joined with great pleasures. This usurpation is a sequence of that pestilent asceticism which thinks that pleasure is of no consequence, and that if the same amount of exercise be taken, the same benefit is gained: the truth being that to the exaltation of the vital functions which the pleasure produces, half the benefit is due.

Of indoor games which chiefly demand quickness of perception, quickness of reasoning, and quickness of judgment, general approval may be expressed with qualifications of no great importance. For young people they are especially desirable as giving to various of the intellectual faculties a valuable training, not to be given by other means. Under the stress of competition, the abilities to observe rapidly perceive accurately and infer rightly are increased; and in addition to the immediate pleasures gained, there are gained powers of dealing more effectually with many of the incidents of life. It should be added that such drawbacks as there are, from the emotions accompanying victory and defeat, are but small in games which involve chance as a considerable factor, but are very noticeable where there is no chance. Chess, for example, which pits together two intelligences in such a way as to show unmistakably the superiority of one to the other in respect of certain powers, produces, much more than whist, a feeling of humiliation in the defeated, and if the sympathies are keen this gives some annoyance to the victor as well as to the vanquished.

Of course, such ethical sanction as is given to games, cannot be given where gambling or betting is an accompaniment. Involving, as both do, in a very definite way and often to an extreme degree, the obtainment of pleasure at the cost of another’s pain, they are to be condemned both for this immediate effect and for their remote effect–the repression of fellow feeling.

§ 228. Before passing to the altruistic aspect of amusements, there should be noted a less familiar egoistic aspect. Unless they have kept up during life an interest in pastimes, those who have broken down from overwork (perhaps an overwork entailed on them by imperative duties) usually find themselves incapable of relaxing in any satisfactory way: they are no longer amusable. Capacities for all other pleasures are atrophied, and the only pleasure is that which business gives. In such cases recovery is, if not prevented, greatly retarded by the lack of exhilarating occupations. Frequently dependents suffer.

This last consideration shows that these, like other classes of actions which primarily concern the individual, concern, to some extent, other individuals. But they concern other individuals in more direct and constant ways also. On each person there is imposed not only the peremptory obligation so to carry on his life as to avoid inequitably interfering with the carrying on of others’ lives, and not only the less peremptory obligation to aid under various circumstances the carrying on of their lives, but there is imposed some obligation to increase the pleasures of their lives by sociality and by the cultivation of those powers which conduce to sociality A man may be a good economical unit of society. while remaining otherwise an almost worthless unit. If he has no knowledge of the arts, no aesthetic feelings, no interest in fiction, the drama, poetry, or music–if he cannot join in any of those amusements which daily and at longer intervals fill leisure spaces in life–if he is thus one to whom others cannot readily give pleasure, at the same time that he can give no pleasure to others; he becomes in great measure a dead unit, and unless he has some special value might better be out of the way.

Thus, that he may add his share to the general happiness, each should cultivate in due measure those superfluous activities which primarily yield self-happiness.

[I-532]

CHAPTER VIII.

MARRIAGE.↩

§ 229. Up to the present point there has been maintained, if not absolutely yet with tolerable clearness, the division between the ethics of individual life and the ethics of social life; but we come, in this chapter and the chapter which follows it, to a part of ethics which is in a sense intermediate. For in the relations of marriage and parenthood, others are concerned, not contingently and indirectly, but in ways that are necessary and direct. The implied divisions of conduct, while their primary ethical sanctions refer to the proper fulfillment of individual life, are yet inseparable from those divisions which treat of conduct that is to be ethically approved or disapproved because of its effects on those around.

Let us glance first at the general obligation under which the individual lies to aid in maintaining the species, while fulfilling the needs of his own nature.

§ 230. In The Principles of Biology (secs. 334—51) was explained the necessary antagonism between individuation and reproduction–between the appropriation of nutriment and energy for the purposes of individual life, and the appropriation of them for the initiation, development, and nurture of other lives. Extreme cases in which, after an existence of a few hours or a day, the body of a parent divides, or else breaks up into numerous germs of new individuals, and less extreme cases in which a brief parental existence ends by the transformation of the skin into a protective case, while the interior is wholly transformed into young ones, illustrate in an unmistakable way the sacrifice of individual life for the maintenance of species life. It was shown that as we ascend to creatures of more complex structure and greater activity and especially as we ascend to creatures of which the young have to be fostered, the expenditure of parental life in producing and rearing other lives becomes gradually less. And then, in The Principles of Sociology (secs. 275—77), when considering the "diverse interests of the species, of the parents, and of the offspring," we saw that in mankind there is reached such conciliation of these interests that along with preservation of the race there go moderated individual sacrifices; and further, that with the ascent from lower to higher types of men, we tend toward an ideal family in which "the mortality between birth and the reproductive age falls to a minimum, while the lives of adults have their subordination to the rearing of children reduced to the smallest possible."

To the last, however, the antagonism between individuation and reproduction holds–holds in a direct way, because of the physical tax which reproduction necessitates, and holds in an indirect way because of the tax, physical and mental, necessitated by rearing children: a tax which, though it is pleasurably paid in fulfillment of the appropriate instincts and emotions, and is in so far a fulfillment of individual life, is nevertheless a tax which restricts individual development in various directions.

But here the truth which it chiefly concerns us to note is that, assuming the preservation of the race to be a desideratum, there results a certain kind of obligation to pay this tax and to submit to this sacrifice. Moreover, something like natural equity requires that as each individual is indebted to past individuals for the cost of producing and rearing him, he shall be at some equivalent cost for the benefit of future individuals.

In tribes and small societies, where maintenance of numbers is important, this obligation becomes appreciable; and, as we see in the reproach of barrenness, failure to fulfill it brings disapproval. But of course in large nations where multiplication is rather an evil than a benefit, this obligation lapses; and the individual may, in many cases, fitly discharge his or her indebtedness in some other way than by adding to the population.

§ 231. Leaving here these considerations which pertain, perhaps, more to the ethics of social life than to the ethics of individual life, and returning to the consideration of marriage as a part of individual life, we have first to note its ethical sanctions as so considered. All activities fall into two great groups–those which constitute and sustain the life of the individual, and those which further the life of the race; and it seems inferable that if for full health the structures conducive to the one must severally perform their functions, so must the structures conducive to the other. Such part of the organization as is devoted to the production of offspring, can scarcely be left inert and leave the rest of the organization unaffected. The not infrequent occurrence of hysteria and chlorosis shows that women, in whom the reproductive function bears a larger ratio to the totality of the functions than it does in men, are apt to suffer grave constitutional evils from that incompleteness of life which celibacy implies: grave evils to which there probably correspond smaller and unperceived evils in numerous cases. As before remarked, there are wide limits of deviation in what we call good health; and there are everywhere, in men and women, many shortcomings of full health which are not perceived to be such shortcomings, however, which may be recognized on remembering the contrast between the ordinary state of body and mind, and that which is shown after an invigorating holiday. That the physiological effects of a completely celibate life on either sex are to some extent injurious, seems an almost necessary implication of the natural conditions.

But whether or not there be disagreement on this point, there can be none respecting the effects of a celibate life as mentally injurious. A large part of the nature–partly intellectual but chiefly emotional–finds its sphere of action in the marital relation, and afterwards in the parental relation; and if this sphere be closed, some of the higher feelings must remain inactive and others but feebly active. Directly, to special elements of the mind, the relation established by marriage is the normal and needful stimulus, and indirectly to all its elements.

There is in the first place to be recognized an exaltation of the energies. Continuous and strenuous efforts to succeed in life are often excited by an engagement to marry–efforts which had previously not been thought of. Then, subsequently, the consciousness of family responsibilities when these have arisen, serves as a sharper spur to exertion: often, indeed, a spur so sharp that in the absence of prudential restraints it leads to overwork. But the most noteworthy fact is that under these conditions, an amount of activity becomes relatively easy and even pleasurable, which before was difficult and repugnant.

The immediate cause of this greater energy is the increased quantity of emotion which the marital relation, and after it the parental relation, excite; and there is to be recognized both a greater body of emotion, and a higher form of emotion. To the lower egoistic feelings which previously formed the chief, if not only stimuli, are now added those higher egoistic feelings which find their satisfaction in the affections, together with those altruistic feelings which find their satisfaction in the happiness of others. What potent influences on character thus come into play is shown in the moral transformation which marriage frequently effects. Often the vain and thoughtless girl, caring only for amusements, becomes changed into the devoted wife and mother; and often the man who is ill-tempered and unsympathetic, becomes changed into the self-sacrificing husband and careful father. To which add that there is usually exercised, more than before, the discipline of self-restraint.

Some effect, too, is wrought on the thinking faculties; not, perhaps, in their power, but in their balance. In women the intellectual activity is frequently diminished; for the antagonism between individuation and reproduction, which is in them most pronounced, tells more especially on the brain. But to both husband and wife there daily come many occasions for exercises of judgment, alike in their relations to domestic affairs, to one another, and to children–exercises of judgment which in the celibate state were not called for; and hence an increase of intellectual stability and sense of proportion.

It must, however, be remarked that the beneficial effects to be expected from marriage, as giving a sphere to a large part of the nature otherwise relatively inert, presuppose a normal marriage–a marriage of affection. If, instead, it is one of the kind to be ethically reprobated–a mercantile marriage–there may follow debasement rather than elevation.

§ 232. But now comes a difficult question. If, on the one hand, as being a condition to fulfillment of individual life, marriage is ethically sanctioned and, indeed, ethically enjoined; and if, on the other hand, there is ethical reprobation for all acts which will certainly or probably entail evil–reprobation if the evil is likely to come on self, and still more if it is likely to come on others; then what are we to say of improvident marriage?

There needs no insistence on the truth that if domestic responsibilities are entered upon without a fair prospect of efficiently discharging them, a wrong is done: especially to children and, by implication, to the race. To take a step from which will result a poverty-stricken household, containing a half-starved and half-clothed family, is, if estimated by entailed miseries, something like a crime. When, after long years of pain, anxiety, cold and hunger, to adults and young, some out of the many born have been reared to maturity, ill-grown, unhealthy, and incapable of the efforts needed for self-support; it becomes manifest that there have been produced beings who are at once curses to themselves and to the community. Severe condemnation must be passed on the conduct which has such consequences.

And yet, on the other hand, what would happen if no marriages took place without a satisfactory prospect of maintaining a family? Suppose that an average delay of ten years were submitted to, so that there might be no such risks of evil as are now commonly run. The usual supposition is that such persistent self-restraint would be purely beneficial. This is far from being true, however.

I do not refer to the fact that ten years of partially abnormal life is a serious evil; although this should be taken account of in estimating the total results. Nor am I thinking of the increased liability to domestic dissension which arises when added years have given to each of the married pair greater fixity of beliefs and diminished modifiability of feelings. But I am thinking chiefly of the effects on progeny. The tacit assumption made by those who advocate the Malthusian remedy for overpopulation, is, that it matters not to children whether they are born to young parents or to old parents. This is a mistake.

Because many factors cooperate, the evidence is so obscured that attention is not commonly drawn to the effects indicated; but they certainly arise. The antagonism between individuation and reproduction implies, among other things, that the surplus vitality available for the maintenance of species life is that which remains after the maintenance of individual life. Hence the effects on offspring of early, medium, and late marriages, are not constant; because the surplus, though it has a general relation to age, is not constant at any age. But from this general relation it results, in the first place, that children born of very early marriages are injuriously affected; since where the development of parents, or more especially the mother, is not complete, the available surplus is less than that which exists after it is complete. It results also that where maternal vigor is great and the surplus vitality consequently large, a long series of children may be borne before any deterioration in their quality becomes marked; while, on the other hand, a mother with but a small surplus may soon cease altogether to reproduce. Further, it results that variations in the states of health of parents, involving variations in the surplus vitality, have their effects on the constitutions of offspring, to the extent that offspring borne during greatly deranged maternal health are decidedly feebler. And then, lastly and chiefly, it results that after the constitutional vigor has culminated, and there has commenced that gradual decline which in some twenty years or so brings absolute infertility, there goes on a gradual decrease in that surplus vitality on which the production of offspring depends, and a consequent deterioration in the quality of such offspring. This, which is an a priori conclusion, is verified a posteriori. Mr. J. Matthews Duncan, in his work on Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, and Allied Topics, has given results of statistics which show that mothers of five-and-twenty bear the finest infants, and that from mothers whose age at marriage ranges from twenty to five-and-twenty there come infants which have a lower rate of mortality than those resulting from marriages commenced when the mother’s age is either smaller or greater: the apparent slight incongruity between these two statements, being due to the fact that whereas marriages commenced between twenty and five-and-twenty cover the whole of the period of highest vigor, marriages commenced at five-and-twenty cover a period which lacks the years during which vigor is rising to its climax, and includes only the years of decline from the climax.

Now this fact that infants born of mothers married between twenty and five-and-twenty have a lower rate of mortality than infants born of mothers married earlier or later, shows that the age of marriage is not a matter of indifference to the race, and that the question of early or late marriages is less simple than appears. While the children of a relatively early marriage improvidently entered upon, may suffer from inadequate sustentation; the children of a later marriage are likely to suffer from initial imperfection–imperfection which may be consistent with good health and fair efficiency but yet may negative that high efficiency requisite for the best and most successful life. For especially nowadays, under our regime of keen competition, a small falling-short of constitutional vigor may entail failure.

Thus, except in the positive reprobation of marriages at an earlier age than twenty (among the higher races of mankind) ethical considerations furnish but indefinite guidance. Usually there has to be a compromise of probabilities. While recklessly improvident marriages must be strongly condemned, yet it seems that in many cases some risk may rightly be run, lest there should be entailed the evils flowing from too long a delay.

§ 233. But what has ethics to say concerning choice in marriage–the selection of wife by husband and husband by wife? It has very decisive things to say.

Current conversation proves how low is current thought and sentiment about these questions. "It will be a very good match for her," is the remark you hear respecting some young lady engaged to a wealthy man. Or concerning the choice of some young gentleman it is said, "She is an accomplished girl and well connected; and her friends will help to advance him in his profession." Another engaged pair are described as well suited: he is a domestic man, and she does not care much for society. Or, perhaps, the impending marriage is applauded on the ground that the lady will be a good housekeeper, and make the best of a small income; or that the proposed husband is good-tempered and not too fastidious. But about the fitness of the connection as considered not extrinsically but intrinsically little or nothing is said.

The first ground of ethical judgment is the reciprocal state of feeling prompting the union. Where there exists none of that mutual attraction which should be the incentive, evolutionary ethics and hedonistic ethics alike protest; whatever ethics otherwise derived may do. Marriages of this class are reversions to marriage of earlier types, such as those found among the rudest savages. The marriage de convénance has been called, with some show of reason, legalized prostitution.

But passing over the interdict which ethics utters on marriages which are mercantile, or which arise from other motives than affection, we have to notice its further interdicts physiologically originating. Here we see, as was pointed out in the preliminary chapter, how prevalent is the blindness to all effects save proximate ones; unquestionable as may be the genesis of remoter effects. Only in extrerne cases do either those directly concerned or their friends, think of the probable quality of the offspring when discussing the propriety of a marriage. Disapproval, perhaps rising to reprobation, may be expressed when the proposed union is between cousins, or is a union with one who probably inherits insanity; but consideration of the effects to be borne by descendants goes scarcely beyond this. A feeble mind or a bad physique is but rarely thought a sufficient reason for rejecting a suitor. Thin, flat-chested girls, debilitated men perpetually ailing, some who are constitutionally wanting in bodily energy, others who have no activity either of intellect or feeling, and many who are from this or that defect so inferior as to be unfit to carry on the battle of life, are ordinarily considered good enough for marriage and parenthood. In a manner that seems almost deliberate there are thus entailed households in which illness and dullness and bad-temper prevail, and out of which there come unhealthy and incapable children and grandchildren.

Ethical considerations should here serve as rigid restraints. Though guidance by the feelings is to be so far respected that marriages not prompted by them must be condemned, yet guidance by the feelings must not therefore be regarded as so authoritative that all marriages prompted by them should be approved. A certain perversion of sentiment has to be guarded against. Relative weakness, appealing for protection, is one of the traits in women which excites in men the sentiment of affection–"the tender emotion," as Bain styles it; and sometimes a degree of relative weakness which exceeds the natural, strongly excites this feeling: the pity which is akin to love ends in love. There are converse cases in which a woman of unusual power of nature becomes attached to a man who is feeble in body or mind. But these deviations from normal inclinations have to be resisted. Ethics demands that judgment shall here come in aid of instinct and control it.

§ 234. There remains a question uniformly passed over because difficult to discuss, but the ignoring of which is fraught with untold disasters–a question concerning which ethics, in its comprehensive form, has a verdict to give, and cannot without falling short of its functions decline to give it.

The saying "the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life" not only is exemplified by the way in which observance of religious ceremonies replaces observance of the essential injunctions of religion, but is exemplified everywhere. As in the primitive legal system of the Romans, before it was qualified by infusion of the Jus Centium, the essential thing was fulfillment of formalities rather than maintenance of right–as, among ourselves, the sacrifice of justice to the technicalities of law led to the supplementary system of equity, intended to rectify the entailed injustices–as, again, in the system of equity the observance of rules and conforming to orders, ever complicating, became in course of time so burdensome that equity, lost sight of, was replaced by inequity, or iniquity; so is it throughout. Wherever requirements which have their roots in the order of nature, come to be enforced by an extrinsic authority, obedience to that extrinsic authority takes the place of obedience to the natural requirements.

It is thus in a considerable degree with marriage. I do not mean merely that unions of an essentially illegitimate kind are supposed to be legitimized by a church service or a registration; but I mean more. I mean that when the civil requirements have been fulfilled, and the ecclesiastical sanction has been obtained, it is supposed that no further control has to be recognized–that when the religious restraints and the social restraints on the relations of the sexes have been duly respected, there remain no other restraints. The physiological restraints, not having received official recognition, are not supposed to exist, or are disregarded. Hence a vast amount of evil.

The antagonism between individuation and reproduction comes into play throughout the entire process of race maintenance. It is true that the fulfillment of individual life largely consists in furthering species life; but it is nonetheless true that from beginning to end, the last puts a limit to the first. We have but to consider that, delighted as the mother is in yielding food to her infant, she yet suffers a serious physical tax in addition to the physical tax entailed by production of it, to see that great though the maternal gratification may be, it entails loss of gratifications which a more developed individual life might have brought; and that when many children are produced and reared, the sacrifices of individual life and of the pleasures which a higher development would bring, become very great. This law inevitably holds throughout the entire reproductive function from beginning to end–with the initial part as with the terminal part; and ignorance of, or indifference to, it entails profound injuries, physical and mental. If the physiological restraints are not respected the life is undermined in all ways.

When, out of the total resources which the sustaining organs furnish in materials and forces, the part required for the carrying on of individual life is trenched upon beyond the normal ratio, by the part constitutionally appropriated to species life, there comes a diminution of energy which affects the vital processes and all dependent processes. Chronic derangements of health supervene, diminished bodily activity. decline of mental power, and sometimes even insanity. Succeeding the mischiefs thus caused, even when they are not so extreme, there come the mischiefs entailed on family and others; for inability to discharge obligations, depression of spirits, and perturbed mental state, inevitably injure those around. Several specialists, who have good means of judging, agree in the opinion that the aggregate evils arising from excesses of this kind are greater than those arising from excesses of all other kinds put together.

If, then, ethics as rightly conceived has to pass judgment on all conduct which affects the well-being, immediate or remote, of self or others, or both; then the lack of self-restraint which it condemns in other cases, it must condemn in this case also.

[I-544]

CHAPTER IX.

PARENTHOOD.↩

§ 235. The subject matter of this chapter is of course only in part separable from the subject matter of the last chapter. But though in discussing the ethics of marriage, as primarily concerning the relations of parents to each other, it has been needful to take account of the relations of parents to offspring, it has seemed best to reserve the full consideration of these last relations for a distinct chapter.

Already it has been pointed out that in the order of nature–"so careful of the type . . . so careless of the single life"–the welfare of progeny takes precedence of the welfare of those who produce them. Though the happiness or misery of the married pair is ordinarily the result chiefly contemplated, this result must be held of secondary importance in comparison with the results reached in offspring–the superiority or inferiority of the children born and reared to maturity. For in proportion as race maintenance is well- or ill-achieved in each case, must be the tendency of the species or variety to prosper or decline.

Hence all requirements touching the proximate end, marriage, are to be considered in subordination to requirements touching the ultimate end–the raising up members of a new generation. Evolutionary ethics demands that this last end shall be regarded as the supreme end.

§ 236. Obviously the parental instincts in large measure secure fulfillment of this supreme end; since any species or variety in which they are not strong enough to do this, must presently become extinct. Here, then, we are introduced to the truth that achievement of those pleasures which parenthood brings, has a double sanction–that which the ethics of individual life directly yields, and that which is yielded indirectly by the ethics of social life.

But satisfaction of the parental affections, while not to be ignored as an end in itself, is, as above implied, chiefly to be regarded as a spur to the discharge of parental responsibilities. The arrangements of things are dislocated if the two are not kept in relation–if the responsibilities, instead of being discharged by parents, are shouldered upon others. It might have been thought that this truth is too obvious to need enunciation; but, unhappily it is far otherwise. We have fallen upon evil times, in which it has come to be an accepted doctrine that part of the responsibilities are to be discharged not by parents but by the public–a part which is gradually becoming a larger part and threatens to become the whole. Agitators and legislators have united in spreading a theory which, logically followed out, ends in the monstrous conclusion that it is for parents to beget children and for society to take care of them. The political ethics now in fashion, makes the unhesitating assumption that while each man, as parent, is not responsible for the mental culture of his own offspring, he is, as citizen, along with other citizens, responsible for the mental culture of all other men’s offspring! And this absurd doctrine has now become so well established that people raise their eyebrows in astonishment if you deny it. A self-evident falsehood has been transformed into a self-evident truth! Along with the almost universal superstition that society is a manufacture and not a growth, there goes the unwavering belief that legislators, prompted by electors, can with advantage set aside one of the fundamental arrangements under which organic nature at large, and human nature in particular, has evolved thus far! Men who have proved cunning in business speculation, men who ride well to hounds and are popular in their counties, men who in courts of justice are skilled in making the worse cause appear the better, men who once wrote good Latin verses or proved themselves learned about the misbehavior of the Greek gods, unite in trying to undo organized dependencies resulting from millions of years of discipline. Men whose culture is so little relevant to the functions they have assumed, that they do not even see that everything in social life originates from certain traits of individual life, that individual human life is but a specialized part of life at large, and that therefore until the leading truths presented by life at large are comprehended, there can be no right comprehension of society–men who are thus ignorant of the great facts which it chiefly concerns them to know, have promised to do the behests of men who are ignorant not only of such facts but of most other things. The half-blind elected by the wholly blind take upon themselves the office of creation menders! Daily accustomed to discover that established laws are bad and must be repealed by act of Parliament, they have unawares extended their thought to laws not of human origin, and calmly undertake to repeal by act of Parliament a law of nature!

But this ignoring of the truth that only by due discharge of parental responsibilities has all life on the earth arisen, and that only through the better discharge of them have there gradually been made possible better types of life, is in the long run fatal. Breach of natural law will in this case, as in all cases, be followed in due time by nature’s revenge–a revenge which will be terrible in proportion as the breach has been great. A system under which parental duties are performed wholesale by those who are not the parents, under the plea that many parents cannot or will not perform their duties–a system which thus fosters the inferior children of inferior parents at the necessary cost of superior parents and consequent injury of superior children–a system which thus helps incapables to multiply and hinders the multiplications of capables, or diminishes their capability, must bring decay and eventual extinction. A society which persists in such a system must, other things equal, go to the wall in the competition with a society which does not commit the folly of nurturing its worst at the expense of its best.

The ethical code of nature, then, allows of no escape of parents from their obligations. While under its hedonistic aspect it sanctions in an emphatic way the gratification of parental affections, under its evolutionary aspect it peremptorily requires fulfillment of all those actions by which the young are prepared for the battle of life. And if the circumstances are such that part of these actions must be performed by deputy, it still requires that the implied cost and care shall be borne, and not transferred to others’ shoulders.

§ 237. The time will come when, along with full recognition of parental duties, there will go an unyielding resistance to the usurpation of those duties. While the parent, as he ought to be, will conscientiously satisfy all the demands which his parenthood entails, he will sternly deny the right of any assemblage of men to take his children from him and mold them as they please. We have outgrown the stage during which the despot, with an army at his back, could impose his will on all citizens; but we have not yet outgrown the stage during which a majority of citizens, with police at their back, can impose their will, concerning all matters whatever, upon citizens not of their number. But when there has passed away this contemptible superstition that, having the power, the majority have the right, to do as they please with the persons and property and actions of those who happen to be in the minority–when it is understood that governmental orders are limited by ethical injunctions; every parent will hold his sphere as one into which the state may not intrude. And if under such conditions there occasionally, though rarely, happens a nonperformance of parental duties, the entailed evil brings, in nature’s stern way, its own cure. For with mankind as with lower kinds, the ill-nurtured offspring of the inferior fail in the struggle for existence with the well-nurtured offspring of the superior; and in a generation or two die out, to the benefit of the species. A harsh discipline this, most will say. True; but nature has much discipline which is harsh, and which must, in the long run, be submitted to. The necessities which she imposes on us are not to be evaded, even by the joint efforts of university graduates and workingmen delegates; and the endeavor to escape her harsh discipline results in a discipline still harsher. Measures which prevent the dwindling away of inferior individuals and families, must, in the course of generations, cause the nation at large to dwindle away.

At the same time that intrusion into the parental sphere must, in a normal social state, be resented as a trespass, it will be further resented as a deprivation of those daily pleasures yielded by furthering the development of the young in body and mind. For when there have died out the stupidities of an education which may be briefly described as denying the mind that which it wants and forcing upon it that which it does not want, there will have come a time when the superintendence of education, at any rate in all its simpler parts, will be at once easy and enjoyable. The general law that through successive stages of organic evolution, there is an elongation of the period during which parental care is given, shown finally in the contrast between the human race and inferior races, as well as in the contrast between uncivilized and civilized, is a law which, involving as now a long and careful physical nurturing of the young by their parents, will hereafter involve a long and careful psychical nurturing by them; and though the higher and more special educational functions will have to be discharged by proxy, yet the proxy discharge will be under parental superintendence.

People feel no adequate pride in bringing to maturity fine human beings. It is true that the mother, exhibiting each infant with triumph, and during the childhood of each pleasing herself by presenting it to visitors prettily clothed and with hair on which much time has been spent morning and evening, is not wholly neglectful of diet, and takes care that the day’s lessons are attended to. It is true, also, that the father, commonly leaving fashion to determine the places of education for his boys, sometimes makes inquiries and exercises independent judgment; and, more-over, looks with satisfaction on a well-grown youth and one who has brought home prizes. But it is nevertheless true that scarcely anywhere do we see proper solicitude. Grave mischiefs are daily done in almost every family by ignorance of physiological requirements; and in the absence of guiding knowledge in parents, innumerable children grow up with constitutions damaged for life. At the same time there is no such thoughtful ministration to the mind of each child as is called for–no search for a course of intellectual culture which is rational in matter and method, and nothing beyond a rough and ready moral discipline. On observing what energies are expended by father and mother to achieve worldly success and fulfill social ambitions, we are reminded how relatively small is the space occupied by the ambition to make their descendants physically, morally, and intellectually superior. Yet this is the ambition which will replace those they now so eagerly pursue; and which, instead of perpetual disappointments, will bring permanent satisfactions.

And then, following on the discharge of these high parental functions, will come that reward in old age consisting of an affectionate care by children, much greater than is now known.

§ 238. Anything like due fulfillment of parental functions as thus conceived, is possible only under conditions commonly disregarded–conditions the disregard of which is supposed not to fall within the range of ethical judgments.

"Providence has sent me a large family," is a remark which may occasionally be heard from one who has more children than he can provide for. Though, in other directions, he does not profess an oriental fatalism, in this direction he does. "God has willed it so," appears to be his thought; and thinking this, he holds himself absolved from blame in bringing about the distresses of a poverty-stricken household.

If, however, improvident marriages are to be reprobated–if to bring children into the world when there will probably be no means of maintaining any is a course calling for condemnation; then there must be condemnation for those who bring many children into the world when they have means of properly rearing only a few. Improvidence after marriage cannot be considered right, if improvidence before marriage is considered wrong.

The stunted and ill-formed bodies of dwellers in the East end of London, tell of the meager diet and deficient clothing from which the many children of parents with narrow means, have suffered during their early days; and even in country villages, where the sanitary conditions are relatively good, one may see in feeble and sickiy people, the results of attempting to rear large families on small wages. This reckless multiplication, while it infficts the daily-recurring pains of unsatisfied appetites and the miseries of insufficient warmth–while it is to be debited with that lack of bodily strength which makes efficient work impracticable, commonly involves also a stupidity which negatives all but the most mechanical functions; for mental power cannot be got from ill-fed brains. Unhappy and wearisome lives are thus entailed by parents who beget more children than they can properly bring up.

Matters are made worse, too, by the undue tax brought on the parents themselves–on the father, if he is conscientious by an injurious amount of labor; and still more on the mother, whose system, exhausted by the bearing of many children, is still further exhausted by the cares which all day long the many children need. Manifestly hedonistic ethics if we regard it as contemplating, more especially, immediate effects on happiness, severely denounces conduct which thus creates miseries all round; while evolutionary ethics, if we consider it as more especially contemplating future results, severely denounces conduct which thus bequeaths lower natures instead of higher to subsequent generations.

Even where parents have means sufficient to provide abundantly for the bodily welfare of many children, there must still be an insufficient provision for their mental welfare. Though, in a family of several, the children amuse and teach one another, and thus mutually aid mental growth; yet, when the number is large, the parental attention they severally need becomes too much subdivided; and the daily display of parental affection, which is a large factor in the moral development of children, cannot be given in adequate amount to each.

§ 239. With the ethical censure of this improvident multiplication, must be joined a like censure of an improvidence habitually associated with it, and in large measure the cause of it. The nature of this will best be shown by citing some facts furnished by races which, being uncivilized, are regarded as therefore in all respects our inferiors.

The first of them comes from a society utterly brutal in most of its usages–Uganda: "The women rarely have more than two or three children, and the law is that when a woman has borne a child she must live apart from her husband for two years, at which age the children are weaned."

In a still more brutal society–that of the Fijians–we meet with a kindred fact. Says Seemann:

After childbirth, husband and wife keep apart for three, even four years, so that no other baby may interfere with the time considered necessary for suckling children. . . . I heard of a white man, who being asked how many brothers and sisters he had, frankly replied, "Ten!" "But that could not be," was the rejoinder of the natives, "one mother could scarcely have so many children." When told that these children were born at annual intervals, and that such occurrences were common in Europe, they were very much shocked, and thought it explained sufficiently why so many white people were "mere shrimps."

In these cases, however, polygamy prevails: in Uganda, for instance, the enormous preponderance of women, due partly to the destruction of men in war and partly to the capture of women by war, rendering it almost universal. Here, therefore, the usage, insofar as it affects men, is not so remarkable. But in two leading districts of New Guinea, there are monogamous peoples among whom a like rule holds. The Rev. J. Chalmers tells us that in Motu-Motu, the parents, after the birth of a child, "do not live together again until the child is strong, walking, and weaned, and all that time he [the husband] sleeps in dubu. His friends cook food for him." Similarly of the Motu tribe, he tells us that the parents keep apart "until the child walks and is weaned." To ascertain the current opinion on the matter he asked the question, "If another child is born before the first is big and able to walk, are they ashamed?" To which he got the answer, "Yes, terribly; and all the village will be talking about it."

Even these warlike and sanguinary peoples then, and still more these trading, peaceful, and monogamous tribes of New Guinea, show us a deep consciousness of the truth that too frequent childbearing is injurious to the race–tells against the fullest development of both the already born child and the child to be presently born. Beyond that constant surplus vitality which, in the female economy, remains after meeting the expenditure of individual life, there is also what we may call a reserve of vital capital, accumulated during intervals in which the surplus is not being demanded. This reserve, used up during the interval in which an infant is being developed, takes some time to replace–a time shorter or longer according as the constitutional vigor is great or small. And if, much before the end of that time, the reproductive system is again called into action, the double result is an overtax of the maternal system, and an infant which falls short of the fullest development; at the same time that its predecessor is too early deprived of its natural supply of food. These are necessary consequences. They are collateral results of that general cause which makes reproduction impossible before and after certain ages.

Here then, as in sundry preceding cases, evolutionary ethics utters an interdict which current ethics, from whatever source derived, shows no signs of uttering.

§ 240. How then are there to be reconciled the interests of the individual and the interests of the race? This question, which here unavoidably presents itself, is one difficult, if not impossible to answer–perhaps they cannot be reconciled.

As already many times said, men have been long in course of acquiring fitness for that social state into which increase of numbers has forced them, and have still but partially acquired fitness for it. In multitudinous ways the survival of instincts appropriate to the presocial stage, has been a chronic cause of miseries; and in multitudinous ways the lack of sentiments appropriate to the social stage, has been a chronic cause of other miseries.

While it has continually increased that pressure of population which has been a cause of progress, excess of fertility has been among the chief factors in the production of these miseries, and must long continue to be such; but, as is shown in The Principles of Biology, sections 373—74, the implication of the general law traceable throughout the whole animal kingdom, is that still a higher development of mind, brought about by still increasing pressure of population, and still greater cerebral activity entailed by it, will gradually diminish the fertility. until the excess practically disappears: the highest degree of individuation entailing the lowest degree of reproduction. And the further implication, there pointed out, is that this degree of individuation, especially shown in a more exalted mental life–wider intelligence and more intense feelings–will not involve conscious stress, but will be the natural outcome of an organization adjusted to the requirements of a more costly self-sustentation. Hence, if there are deprivations which ethics dictates, they must step by step be accompanied by compensations, probably greater in amount.

Only in the slow course of ages, however, can any such change of balance be wrought. Whether, in the meantime, there may arise any qualifications of the process, it is impossible to say. One thing, however, is certain. No conclusion can be sustained which does not conform to the ultimate truth that the interests of the race must predominate over the interests of the individual.

[I-555]

CHAPTER X.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS.↩

§ 241. The title of this division–"The Ethics of Individual Life"–has excited a publicly expressed curiosity respecting the possible nature of its contents. Nothing beyond prudential admonitions could, it was thought, be meant; and there was evident surprise that ethical sanction should be claimed for these.

The state of mind thus implied is not, I believe, exceptional. Ordinary individual life, when it is such as not directly to affect others for good or evil, is supposed to lie outside the sphere of ethics; or rather, there is commonly entertained no thought about the matter. Ethics, as usually conceived, having made no formal claim to regulate this part of conduct is assumed to be unconcerned with it. It is true that now and then come expressions implying a half-conscious belief to the contrary. "You ought not to have overtaxed your strength by so great an exertion"; "you ought not to have gone so long without food"; are not unfrequent utterances. "You were quite right to throw up the situation if your health was giving way," is said to one; while on another is passed the criticism, "He is wrong in idling away his time, wealthy though he may be." And we occasionally hear insistence on the duty of taking a holiday to avoid an illness: especially in view of responsibilities to be discharged. That is to say the words ought, right, wrong, duty are used in connection with various parts of private conduct; and such uses of these words, which in other cases have ethical significance, imply that they have ethical significance in these cases also.

Moreover, as pointed out in the opening chapter, there are some modes of individual life concerning which ethical convictions of the most pronounced kinds prevail–excess in drinking, for example. Recognition of the immense evils entailed by this prompts strong reprobation. But there is no consciousness of the obvious truth that if, because of its mischievous consequences, this deviation from normal life is to be condemned; so, too, are all deviations which have mischievous consequences, however relatively small. It must be admitted that, conceived in its fully developed form, ethics has judgments to give upon all actions which affect individual welfare.

Throughout the foregoing series of chapters, it has, I think, been made sufficiently manifest that there is great need for ethical rule over this wider territory.

§ 242. Doubtless this rule must be of an indefinite kind–may be compared rather with that of a suzerain than with that of an acting governor. For throughout the greater part of this territory, there have to be effected compromises among various requirements; and in the majority of cases ethical considerations can do little more than guide us toward rational compromises.

This will probably be regarded as a reversion to the ancient doctrine of the mean–a doctrine expressed in a manner generally vague, but occasionally distinct, by Confucius, and definitely elaborated by Aristotle. And it must be admitted that throughout most classes of actions which do not directly affect other persons, paths lying between extremes have to be sought and followed. The doctrine of the mean is not, as Aristotle admitted, universally applicable; and its inapplicability is conspicuous in respect of that part of conduct which stands above all others in importance–justice; not, indeed, justice as legally formulated, nor justice as it is conceived by communists and others such, but justice as deducible from the conditions which must be maintained for the carrying on of harmonious social cooperation. Ethics does not suggest partial fulfillment of a contract, as being the mean between non-fulfillment and complete fulfillment. It does not countenance moderate robbery of your neighbor, rather than the taking from him everything or the taking nothing. Nor does it dictate the assault of a fellow man as intermediate between murdering him and not touching him. Contrariwise, in respect of justice ethics insists on the extreme-enjoins complete fulfillment of a contract, absolute respect for property, entire desistance from personal injury. So likewise is it with veracity. The right does not lie between the two extremes of falsehood and truth: complete adherence to fact is required. And there are sundry kinds of conduct classed as vices, which are also not contemplated by the doctrine; since they are to be interdicted not partially but wholly. In respect of ordinary private life, however, the doctrine of the mean may be considered to hold in the majority of cases.

But admitting this, there still presents itself the question–How to find the mean? Until the positions of the extremes have been ascertained, the position of the mean cannot be known. As has rightly been remarked, "It is impracticable to define the position of that, which is excessive on the one hand, and defective on the other, till excess and defect have been themselves defined." And here it is that the ethics of individual life finds its subject matter. The guidance of uncultured sense, ordinarily followed throughout private conduct, it replaces by a guidance which, though still mainly empirical, is relatively trustworthy; since it results from a deliberate and methodic study of the requirements–a study which dissipates misapprehensions and reduces vague ideas to definite ones. In respect of nutrition, for instance, it is doubtless true that abstinence on the one hand, and gluttony on the other, are to be avoided–that food is to be taken in moderation. But it may rightly be contended that eating is not to be guided by observation of the mean between these two extremes; but is to be guided by reaching that which may in a sense, be called an extreme–the complete satisfaction of appetite. And here we are shown the need for critical inquiry, For the conception of a mean between abstinence and gluttony is confounded with the conception of a mean between no satisfaction of appetite and complete satisfaction of appetite; and in consequence of the confusion this last mean is by some prescribed. But the notion, not infrequently expressed, that it is best to leave off eating while still hungry would never have been enunciated were there not so many people who lead abnormal lives, and so many people who eat before appetite prompts. In that state of health which exists where there has not been, on the part of either self or ancestors, a chronic disregard of physiological needs, proper nutrition is achieved not by partial fulfillment of the desire for food but by entire fulfillment of it–by going up to the limit set by inclination.

Remembrance of the various conclusions drawn in preceding chapters, such as those which concern activity and rest, culture and amusement, will make it clear that it is everywhere the business of the ethics of individual life thus to dissipate erroneous beliefs, by systematic observation and analysis of private conduct and its results.

§ 243. Remembrance of these conclusions suggests that beyond giving a definite conception of the mean, when the mean is to be adopted, the ethics of individual life gives definiteness to a kindred idea–the idea of proportion. I do not refer to that proportion which is implied by the doctrine of the mean, and connotes a just estimation of excess and defect; but I mean that proportion which obtains among different parts of conduct.

While, within each division of the activities, the middle place may be duly regarded, there may be no due regard for proportion among the several divisions of the activities. There are various kinds of bodily action, some needed for self-sustentation and some not; there are various kinds of mental action, aiding in different ways and degrees the maintenance of individual life, and various others which do not aid this maintenance, or do so in but remote ways. And then, beyond the preservation of a right proportion between the lifesubserving occupations and the occupations which do not directly subserve life, there is the preservation of right proportions among the subdivisions of these last–right proportions between culture and amusement and between different kinds of culture and different kinds of amusements. The conception of a mean does not touch the numerous problems thus presented; since it implies a compromise between two things, and not a number of compromises among many things.

Any one on glancing round may see that the great majority of lives are more or less distorted by failure to maintain balanced amounts of the activities, bodily and mental, required for complete health and happiness; and that there are here, therefore, many problems with which the ethics of individual life has to concern itself.

§ 244. But while this division of ethics which has the control of private conduct for its function, may, by its ordered judgments, serve to prevent each kind of activity from diverging very far on either side of moderation; and while it may serve to prevent extreme disproportions among the different kinds of activities; it cannot be expected to produce by its injunctions a perfectly regulated conduct.

Only by the gradual remolding of human nature into fitness for the social state, can either the private life or the public life of each man, be made what it should be. In respect of private life, especially the problems presented are so complex and so variable, that nothing like definite solutions of them can be reached by any intellectual processes, however methodic and however careful. They can be completely solved only by the organic adjustment of constitution to conditions. All inferior creatures, incapable of elaborating reasoned codes of conduct, are guided entirely by the promptings of instincts and desires, severally adapted to the needs of their lives. In each species the feelings are kept duly adjusted in their strengths to the requirements, and duly proportioned to one another, by direct or indirect equilibration, or by both; since, inevitably, the individuals in which the balance of them is not good, disappear, or fail to rear progeny. There are many who, while they recognize this necessity as operative throughout subhuman life, tacitly deny that it is operative throughout human life, or, at any rate, ignore its operation; and they do this notwithstanding their knowledge of the immense divergences of habits and sentiments, which multiform human nature itself has acquired under the different circumstances it has been subject to. Any one, however, who contemplates the contrast between those who witness with pleasure the tortures of men and animals, and those who cannot be induced to witness such tortures because of the sympathetic pain they experience, may infer from this single contrast, a capacity for modification which makes possible an approximately complete adjustment of the nature to the life which has to be led–an adjustment towards which there will be appreciable progress, when there have died out the fatuous legislators who are continually impeding it.

Eventually, then, the degree of each of the activities constituting private conduct, and the proportions among the different activities, must be spontaneously regulated by the natural promptings. In the meantime, all which the ethics of individual life can do, is to keep clearly in view and continually to emphasize, the needs to which the nature has to be adjusted.

§ 245. Finally, there must be uttered a caution against striving too strenuously to reach the ideal–against straining the nature too much out of its inherited form. For the normal remolding can go on but slowly.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

END OF VOL. I.

[II-3]

CHAPTER I.

ANIMAL-ETHICS.↩

§ 246. Those who have not read the first division of this work will be surprised by the above title. But the chapters "Conduct in General" and "The Evolution of Conduct" will have made clear to those who have read them that something which may be regarded as animal ethics is implied.

It was there shown that the conduct which ethics treats of is not separable from conduct at large; that the highest conduct is that which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life; and that, by implication, there is a conduct proper to each species of animal, which is the relatively good conduct–a conduct which stands toward that species as the conduct we morally approve stands toward the human species.

Most people regard the subject matter of ethics as being conduct considered as calling forth approbation or reprobation. But the primary subject matter of ethics is conduct considered objectively as producing good or bad results to self or others or both.

Even those who think of ethics as concerned only with conduct which deserves praise or blame, tacitly recognize an animal ethics; for certain acts of animals excite in them antipathy or sympathy. A bird which feeds its mate while she is sitting is regarded with a sentiment of approval. For a hen which refuses to sit upon her eggs there is a feeling of aversion; while one which fights in defense of her chickens is admired.

Egoistic acts, as well as altruistic acts, in animals are classed as good or bad. A squirrel which lays up a store of food for the winter is thought of as doing that which a squirrel ought to do; and, contrariwise, one which idly makes no provision and dies of starvation, is thought of as properly paying the penalty of improvidence. A dog which surrenders its bone to another without a struggle, and runs away, we call a coward–a word of reprobation.

Thus, then, it is clear that acts which are conducive to preservation of offspring or of the individual we consider as good relatively to the species, and conversely.

§ 247. The two classes of cases of altruistic acts and egoistic acts just exemplified, show us the two cardinal and opposed principles of animal ethics.

During immaturity benefits received must be inversely proportionate to capacities possessed. Within the family group most must be given where least is deserved, if desert is measured by worth. Contrariwise, after maturity is reached benefit must vary directly as worth: worth being measured by fitness to the conditions of existence. The ill fitted must suffer the evils of unfitness, and the well fitted profit by their fitness.

These are the two laws which a species must conform to if it is to be preserved. Limiting the proposition to the higher types (for in the lower types, parents give to offspring no other aid than that of laying up small amounts of nutriment with their germs: the result being that an enormous mortality has to be balanced by an enormous fertility)–thus limiting the proposition, I say, it is clear that if, among the young, benefit were proportioned to efficiency the species would disappear forthwith; and that if, among adults, benefit were proportioned to inefficiency, the species would disappear by decay in a few generations (see Principles of Sociology, sec. 322)

§ 248. What is the ethical aspect of these principles? In the first place, animal life of all but the lowest kinds has been maintained by virtue of them. Excluding the protozoa, among which their operation is scarcely discernible, we see that without gratis benefits to offspring, and earned benefits to adults, life could not have continued.

In the second place, by virtue of them life has gradually evolved into higher forms. By care of offspring, which has become greater with advancing organization, and by survival of the fittest in the competition among adults, which has become more habitual with advancing organization, superiority has been perpetually fostered and further advances caused.

On the other hand, it is true that to this self-sacrificing care for the young and this struggle for existence among adults, has been due the carnage and the death by starvation which have characterized the evolution of life from the beginning. It is also true that the processes consequent on conformity to these principles are responsible for the production of torturing parasites, which outnumber in their kinds all other creatures.

To those who take a pessimist view of animal life in general, contemplation of these principles can of course yield only dissatisfaction. But to those who take an optimist view, or a meliorist view of life in general, and who accept the postulate of hedonism, contemplation of these principles must yield greater or less satisfaction, and fulfillment of them must be ethically approved.

Otherwise considered, these principles are, according to the current belief, expressions of the Divine will, or else, according to the agnostic belief, indicate the mode in which works the Unknowable Power throughout the universe; and in either case they have the warrant hence derived.

§ 249. But here, leaving aside the ultimate controversy of pessimism versus optimism, it will suffice for present purposes to set out with a hypothetical postulate, and to limit it to a single species. If the preservation and prosperity of such species is to be desired, there inevitably emerge one most general conclusion and from it three less general conclusions.

The most general conclusion is that, in order of obligation, the preservation of the species takes precedence of the preservation of the individual. It is true that the species has no existence save as an aggregate of individuals; and it is true that, therefore, the welfare of the species is an end to be subserved only as subserving the welfares of individuals. But since disappearance of the species, implying disappearance of all individuals, involves absolute failure in achieving the end, whereas disappearance of individuals, though carried to a great extent, may leave outstanding such number as can, by the continuance of the species, make subsequent fulfillment of the end possible; the preservation of the individual must, in a variable degree according to circumstances, be subordinated to the preservation of the species, where the two conflict. The resulting corollaries are these:

First, that among adults there must be conformity to the law that benefits received shall be directly proportionate to merits possessed: merits being measured by power of selfsustentation. For, otherwise, the species must suffer in two ways. It must suffer immediately by sacrifice of superior to inferior, which entails a general diminution of welfare; and it must suffer remotely by further increase of the inferior which, by implication, hinders increase of the superior, and causes a general deterioration, ending in extinction if it is continued.

Second, that during early life, before self-sustentation has become possible, and also while it can be but partial, the aid given must be the greatest where the worth shown is the smallest–benefits received must be inversely proportionate to merits possessed: merits being measured by power of self-sustentation. Unless there are gratis benefits to offspring, unqualified at first and afterward qualified by decrease as maturity is approached, the species must disappear by extinction of its young. There is, of course, necessitated a proportionate self-subordination of adults.

Third, to this self-subordination entailed by parenthood has, in certain cases, to be added a further self-subordination. If the constitution of the species and its conditions of existence are such that sacrifices, partial or complete, of some of its individuals, so subserve the welfare of the species that its numbers are better maintained than they would otherwise be, then there results a justification for such sacrifices.

Such are the laws by conformity to which a species is maintained; and if we assume that the preservation of a particular species is a desideratum, there arises in it an obligation to conform to these laws, which we may call, according to the case in question, quasi-ethical or ethical.

[II-8]

CHAPTER II.

SUB-HUMAN JUSTICE.↩

§ 250. Of the two essential but opposed principles of action by pursuance of which each species is preserved, we are here concerned only with the second. Passing over the law of the family as composed of adults and young, we have now to consider exclusively the law of the species as composed of adults only.

This law we have seen to be that individuals of most worth, as measured by their fitness to the conditions of existence, shall have the greatest benefits, and that inferior individuals shall receive smaller benefits, or suffer greater evils, or both–a law which, under its biological aspect, has for its implication the survival of the fittest. Interpreted in ethical terms, it is that each individual ought to be subject to the effects of its own nature and resulting conduct. Throughout subhuman life this law holds without qualification; for there exists no agency by which, among adults, the relations between conduct and consequence can be interfered with.

Fully to appreciate the import of this law, we may with advantage pause a moment to contemplate an analogous law; or, rather, the same law as exhibited in another sphere. Besides being displayed in the relations among members of a species, as respectively well sustained or ill sustained according to their well-adapted activities or ill-adapted activities, it is displayed in the relations of the parts of each organism to one another.

Every muscle, every viscus, every gland, receives blood in proportion to function. If it does little it is ill fed and dwindles; if it does much it is well fed and grows. By this balancing of expenditure and nutrition, there is, at the same time, a balancing of the relative powers of the parts of the organism; so that the organism as a whole is fitted to its existence by having its parts continuously proportioned to the requirements. And clearly this principle of self-adjustment within each individual, is parallel to that principle of self-adjustment by which the species as a whole keeps itself fitted to its environment. For by the better nutrition and greater power of propagation which come to members of the species that have faculties and consequent activities best adapted to the needs, joined with the lower sustentation of self and offspring which accompany less adapted faculties and activities, there is caused such special growth of the species as most conduces to its survival in face of surrounding conditions.

This, then, is the law of subhuman justice, that each individual shall receive the benefits and the evils of its own nature and its consequent conduct.

§ 251. But subhuman justice is extremely imperfect, alike in general and in detail.

In general, it is imperfect in the sense that there exist multitudinous species the sustentation of which depends on the wholesale destruction of other species; and this wholesale destruction implies that the species serving as prey have the relations between conduct and consequence so habitually broken that in very few individuals are they long maintained. It is true that in such cases the premature loss of life suffered from enemies by nearly all members of the species, must be considered as resulting from their natures–their inability to contend with the destructive agencies they are exposed to. But we may fitly recognize the truth that this violent ending of the immense majority of its lives, implies that the species is one in which justice, as above conceived, is displayed in but small measure.

Subhuman justice is extremely imperfect in detail, in the sense that the relation between conduct and consequence is in such an immense proportion of cases broken by accidents–accidents of kinds which fall indiscriminately upon inferior and superior individuals. There are the multitudinous deaths caused by inclemencies of weather, which, in the great majority of cases, the best members of the species are liable to like the worst. There are other multitudinous deaths caused by scarcity of food, which, if not wholly still in large measure, carries off good and bad alike. Among low types, too, enemies are causes of death which so operate that superior as well as inferior are sacrificed. And the like holds with invasions by parasites, often widely fatal. These frequently destroy the best individuals as readily as the worst.

The high rate of multiplication among low animals, required to balance the immense mortality, at once shows us that among them long survival is not insured by superiority; and that thus the subhuman justice, consisting in continued receipt of the results of conduct, holds individually in but few cases.

§ 252. And here we come upon a truth of great significance–the truth that subhuman justice becomes more decided as organization becomes higher.

Whether this or that fly is taken by a swallow, whether among a brood of caterpillars an ichneumon settles on this or that, whether out of a shoal of herrings this or that is swallowed by a cetacean, is an event quite independent of individual peculiarity: good and bad samples fare alike. With high types of creatures it is otherwise. Keen senses, sagacity agility. give a particular carnivore special power to secure prey. In a herd of herbivorous creatures, the one with quickest hearing, clearest vision, most sensitive nostril, or greatest speed, is the one most likely to save itself.

Evidently, in proportion as the endowments, mental and bodily, of a species are high, and as, consequently, its ability to deal with the incidents of the environment is great, the continued life of each individual is less dependent on accidents against which it cannot guard. And, evidently. in proportion as this result of general superiority becomes marked, the results of special superiorities are felt. Individual differences of faculty play larger parts in determining individual fates. Now deficiency of a power shortens life, and now a large endowment prolongs it. That is to say. individuals experience more fully the results of their own natures–the justice is more decided.

§ 253. As displayed among creatures which lead solitary lives, the nature of subhuman justice is thus sufficiently expressed; but on passing to gregarious creatures we discover in it an element not yet specified.

Simple association, as of deer, profits the individual and the species only by that more efficient safeguarding which results from the superiority of a multitude of eyes, ears, and noses over the eyes, ears, and nose of a single individual. Through the alarms more quickly given, all benefit by the senses of the most acute. Where this, which we may call passive cooperation, rises into active cooperation, as among rooks where one of the flock keeps watch while the rest feed, or as among the cimarrons, a much-hunted variety of mountain sheep in Central America, which similarly place sentries, or as among beavers where a number work together in making dams, or as among wolves where, by a plan of attack in which the individuals play different parts, prey is caught which would otherwise not be caught; there are still greater advantages to the individuals and to the species. And, speaking generally, we may say that gregariousness, and cooperation more or less active, establish themselves in a species only because they are profitable to it; since, otherwise, survival of the fittest must prevent establishment of them.

But now mark that this profitable association is made possible only by observance of certain conditions. The acts directed to self-sustentation which each performs, are performed more or less in presence of others performing like acts; and there tends to result more or less interference. If the interference is great, it may render the association unprofitable. For the association to be profitable the acts must be restrained to such extent as to leave a balance of advantage. Survival of the fittest will else exterminate that variety of the species in which association begins.

Here, then, we find a further factor in subhuman justice. Each individual, receiving the benefits and the injuries due to its own nature and consequent conduct, has to carry on that conduct subject to the restriction that it shall not in any large measure impede the conduct by which each other individual achieves benefits or brings on itself injuries. The average conduct must not be so aggressive as to cause evils which outbalance the good obtained by cooperation. Thus, to the positive element in subhuman justice has to be added, among gregarious creatures, a negative element.

§ 254. The necessity for observance of the condition that each member of the group, while carrying on self-sustentation and sustentation of offspring, shall not seriously impede the like pursuits of others, makes itself so felt, where association is established, as to mould the species to it. The mischiefs from time to time experienced when the limits are transgressed, continually discipline all in such ways as to produce regard for the limits; so that such regard becomes, in course of time, a natural trait of the species. For, manifestly, regardlessness of the limits, if great and general, causes dissolution of the group. Those varieties only can survive as gregarious varieties in which there is an inherited tendency to maintain the limits.

Yet further, there arises such general consciousness of the need for maintaining the limits, that punishments are inflicted on transgressors–not only by aggrieved members of the group, but by the group as a whole. A "rogue" elephant (always distinguished as unusually malicious) is one which has been expelled from the herd: doubtless because of conduct obnoxious to the rest–probably aggressive. It is said that from a colony of beavers an idler is banished, and thus prevented from profiting by labors in which he does not join: a statement made credible by the fact that drones, when no longer needed, are killed by worker-bees. The testimonies of observers in different countries show that a flock of crows, after prolonged noise of consultation, will summarily execute an offending member. And an eyewitness affirms that among rooks, a pair which steals the sticks from neighboring nests has its own nest pulled to pieces by the rest.

Here, then, we see that the a priori condition to harmonious cooperation comes to be tacitly recognized as something like a law; and there is a penalty consequent on breach of it.

§ 255. That the individual shall experience all the consequences, good and evil, of its own nature and consequent conduct, which is that primary principle of subhuman justice whence results survival of the fittest, is, in creatures that lead solitary lives, a principle complicated only by the responsibilities of parenthood. Among them the purely egoistic actions of self-sustentation have, during the reproductive period, to be qualified by that self-subordination which the rearing of offspring necessitates, but by no other self-subordination. Among gregarious creatures of considerable intelligence, however, disciplined, as we have just seen, into due regard for the limits imposed by other's presence, the welfare of the species, besides demanding self-subordination in the rearing of offspring, occasionally demands a further self-subordination.

We read of bisons that, during the calving season, the bulls form an encircling guard round the herd of cows and calves, to protect them against wolves and other predatory animals: a proceeding which entails on each bull some danger, but which conduces to the preservation of the species. Out of a herd of elephants about to emerge from a forest to reach a drinking place, one will first appear and look round in search of dangers, and, not discerning any. will then post some others of the herd to act as watchers; after which the main body comes forth and enters the water. Here a certain extra risk is run by the few that the many may be the safer. In a still greater degree we are shown this kind of action by a troop of monkeys, the members of which will combine to defend or rescue one of their number, or will fitly arrange themselves when retreating from an enemy–"the females, with their young, leading the way. the old males bringing up the rear . . . the place of danger"; for though in any particular case the species may not profit, since more mortality may result than would have resulted, yet it profits in the long run by the display of a character which makes attack on its groups dangerous.

Evidently. then, if by such conduct one variety of a gregarious species keeps up, or increases, its numbers, while other varieties, in which self-subordination thus directed does not exist, fail to do this, a certain sanction is acquired for such conduct. The preservation of the species being the higher end, it results that where an occasional mortality of individuals in defense of the species furthers this preservation in a greater degree than would pursuit of exclusive benefit by each individual, that which we recognize as subhuman justice may rightly have this second limitation.

§ 256. It remains only to point out the order of priority, and the respective ranges, of these principles. The law of relation between conduct and consequence, which, throughout the animal kingdom at large, brings prosperity to those individuals which are structurally best adapted to their conditions of existence, and which, under its ethical aspect, is expressed in the principle that each individual ought to receive the good and the evil which arises from its own nature, is the primary law holding of all creatures; and is applicable without qualification to creatures which lead solitary lives, save by that self-subordination needed among the higher of them for the rearing of offspring.

Among gregarious creatures, and in an increasing degree as they cooperate more, there comes into play the law, second in order of time and authority, that those actions through which, in fulfillment of its nature, the individual achieves benefits and avoids evils, shall be restrained by the need for noninterference with the like actions of associated individuals. A substantial respect for this law in the average of cases, being the condition under which alone gregariousness can continue, it becomes an imperative law for creatures to which gregariousness is a benefit. But, obviously, this secondary law is simply a specification of that form which the primary law takes under the conditions of gregarious life; since, by asserting that in each individual the interactions of conduct and consequence must be restricted in the specified way. it tacitly reasserts that these interactions must be maintained in other individuals, that is in all individuals.

Later in origin, and narrower in range, is the third law, that under conditions such that, by the occasional sacrifices of some members of a species, the species as a whole prospers, there arises a sanction for such sacrifices, and a consequent qualification of the law that each individual shall receive the benefits and evils of its own nature.

Finally, it should be observed that whereas the first law is absolute for animals in general, and whereas the second law is absolute for gregarious animals, the third law is relative to the existence of enemies of such kinds that, in contending with them, the species gains more than it loses by the sacrifice of a few members; and in the absence of such enemies this qualification imposed by the third law disappears.

[II-17]

CHAPTER III.

HUMAN JUSTICE.↩

§ 257. The contents of the last chapter foreshadow the contents of this. As, from the evolution point of view, human life must be regarded as a further development of subhuman life, it follows that from this same point of view, human justice must be a further development of subhuman justice. For convenience the two are here separately treated, but they are essentially of the same nature, and form parts of a continuous whole.

Of man, as of all inferior creatures, the law by conformity to which the species is preserved, is that among adults the individuals best adapted to the conditions of their existence shall prosper most, and that individuals least adapted to the conditions of their existence shall prosper least–a law which, if uninterfered with, entails survival of the fittest, and spread of the most adapted varieties. And as before so here, we see that, ethically considered, this law implies that each individual ought to receive the benefits and the evils of his own nature and consequent conduct: neither being prevented from having whatever good his actions normally bring to him, nor allowed to shoulder off on to other persons whatever ill is brought to him by his actions.

To what extent such ill, naturally following from his actions, may be voluntarily borne by other persons, it does not concern us now to inquire. The qualifying effects of pity, mercy, and generosity, will be considered hereafter in the parts dealing with "Negative Beneficence" and "Positive Beneficence." Here we are concerned only with pure justice.

The law thus originating, and thus ethically expressed, is obviously that which commends itself to the common apprehension as just. Sayings and criticisms daily heard imply a perception that conduct and consequence ought not to be dissociated. When, of some one who suffers a disaster, it is said, "He has no one to blame but himself," there is implied the belief that he has not been inequitably dealt with. The comment on one whose misjudgment or misbehavior has entailed evil upon him, that "he has made his own bed, and now he must lie in it," has behind it the conviction that this connection of cause and effect is proper. Similarly with the remark, "He got no more than he deserved." A kindred conviction is implied when, conversely, there results good instead of evil. "He has fairly earned his reward"; "He has not received due recompense"; are remarks indicating the consciousness that there should be a proportion between effort put forth and advantage achieved–that justice demands such a proportion.

§ 258. The truth that justice becomes more pronounced as organization becomes higher, which we contemplated in the last chapter, is further exemplified on passing from subhuman justice to human justice. The degree of justice and the degree of organization simultaneously make advances. These are shown alike by the entire human race, and by its superior varieties as contrasted with its inferior.

We saw that a high species of animal is distinguished from a low species, in the respect that since its aggregate suffers less mortality from incidental destructive agencies, each of its members continues on the average for a longer time subject to the normal relation between conduct and consequence; and here we see that the human race as a whole, far lower in its rate of mortality than nearly all races of inferior kinds, usually subjects its members for much longer periods to the good and evil results of well-adapted and ill-adapted conduct. We also saw that as, among the higher animals, a greater average longevity makes it possible for individual differences to show their effects for longer periods, it results that the unlike fates of different individuals are to a greater extent determined by that normal relation between conduct and consequence which constitutes justice; and we here see that in mankind, unlikenesses of faculty in still greater degrees, and for still longer periods, work out their effects in advantaging the superior and disadvantaging the inferior in the continuous play of conduct and consequence.

Similarly is it with the civilized varieties of mankind as compared with the savage varieties. A still further diminished rate of mortality implies that there is a still larger proportion, the members of which gain good from well-adapted acts and suffer evil from ill-adapted acts. While also it is manifest that both the greater differences of longevity among individuals, and the greater differences of social position, imply that in civilized societies more than in savage societies, differences of endowment, and consequent differences of conduct, are enabled to cause their appropriate differences of results, good or evil: the justice is greater.

§ 259. More clearly in the human race than in lower races, we are shown that gregariousness establishes itself because it profits the variety in which it arises; partly by furthering general safety and partly by facilitating sustentation. And we are shown that the degree of gregariousness is determined by the degree in which it thus subserves the interests of the variety. For where the variety is one of which the members live on wild food, they associate only in small groups: game and fruits widely distributed, can support these only. But greater gregariousness arises where agriculture makes possible the support of a large number on a small area; and where the accompanying development of industries introduces many and various cooperations.

We come now to the truth–faintly indicated among lower beings and conspicuously displayed among human beings–that the advantages of cooperation can be had only by conformity to certain requirements which association imposes. The mutual hindrances liable to arise during the pursuit of their ends by individuals living in proximity, must be kept within such limits as to leave a surplus of advantage obtained by associated life. Some types of men, as the Abors, lead solitary lives, because their aggressiveness is such that they cannot live together. And this extreme case makes it clear that though, in many primitive groups, individual antagonisms often cause quarrels, yet the groups are maintained because their members derive a balance of benefit–chiefly in greater safety. It is also clear that in proportion as communities become developed, their division of labor complex, and their transactions multiplied, the advantages of cooperation can be gained only by a still better maintenance of those limits to each man's activities necessitated by the simultaneous activities of others. This truth is illustrated by the unprosperous or decaying state of communities in which the trespasses of individuals on one another are so numerous and great as generally to prevent them from severally receiving the normal results of their labors.

The requirement that individual activities must be mutually restrained, which we saw is so felt among certain inferior gregarious creatures that they inflict punishments on those who do not duly restrain them, is a requirement which, more imperative among men, and more distinctly felt by them to be a requirement, causes a still more marked habit of inflicting punishments on offenders. Though in primitive groups it is commonly left to any one who is injured to revenge himself on the injurer; and though even in the societies of feudal Europe, the defending and enforcing of his claims was in many cases held to be each man's personal concern; yet there has ever tended to grow up such perception of the need for internal order, and such sentiment accompanying the perception, that infliction of punishments by the community as a whole, or by its established agents, has become habitual. And that a system of laws enacting restrictions on conduct, and punishments for breaking them, is a natural product of human life carried on under social conditions, is shown by the fact that in numerous nations composed of various types of mankind, similar actions, similarly regarded as trespasses, have been similarly forbidden.

Through all which sets of facts is manifested the truth, recognized practically if not theoretically, that each individual carrying on the actions which subserve his life, and not prevented from receiving their normal results, good and bad, shall carry on these actions under such restraints as are imposed by the carrying on of kindred actions by other individuals, who have similarly to receive such normal results, good and bad. And vaguely, if not definitely, this is seen to constitute what is called justice.

§ 260. We saw that among inferior gregarious creatures, justice in its universal simple form, besides being qualified by the self-subordination which parenthood implies, and in some measure by the self-restraint necessitated by association, is, in a few cases, further qualified in a small degree by the partial or complete sacrifice of individuals made in defense of the species. And now, in the highest gregarious creature, we see that this further qualification of primitive justice assumes large proportions.

No longer, as among inferior beings, demanded only by the need for defense against enemies of other kinds, this further self-subordination is, among human beings, also demanded by the need for defense against enemies of the same kind. Having spread wherever there is food, groups of men have come to be everywhere in one another's way; and the mutual enmities hence resulting, have made the sacrifices entailed by wars between groups, far greater than the sacrifices made in defense of groups against inferior animals. It is doubtless true with the human race, as with lower races, that destruction of the group, or the variety, does not imply destruction of the species; and it follows that such obligation as exists for selfsubordination in the interests of the group, or the variety, is an obligation of lower degree than is that of care of offspring, without fulfillment of which the species will disappear, and of lower degree than the obligation to restrain actions within the limits imposed by social conditions, without fulfillment, or partial fulfillment, of which the group will dissolve. Still, it must be regarded as an obligation to the extent to which the maintenance of the species is subserved by the maintenance of each of its groups.

But the self-subordination thus justified, and in a sense rendered obligatory, is limited to that which is required for defensive war. Only because the preservation of the group as a whole conduces to preservation of its members' lives, and their ability to pursue the objects of life, is there a reason for the sacrifice of some of its members; and this reason no longer exists when war is offensive instead of defensive.

It may, indeed, be contended that since offensive wars initiate those struggles between groups which end in the destruction of the weaker, offensive wars, furthering the peopling of the earth by the stronger, subserve the interests of the race. But even supposing that the conquered groups always consisted of men having smaller mental or bodily fitness for war (which they do not; for it is in part a question of numbers, and the smaller groups may consist of the more capable warriors), there would still be an adequate answer. It is only during the earlier stages of human progress that the development of strength, courage, and cunning, are of chief importance. After societies of considerable size have been formed, and the subordination needed for organizing them produced, other and higher faculties become those of chief importance; and the struggle for existence carried on by violence, does not always further the survival of the fittest. The fact that but for a mere accident Persia would have conquered Greece, and the fact that the Tartar hordes very nearly overwhelmed European civilization, show that offensive war can be trusted to subserve the interests of the race only when the capacity for a high social life does not exist; and that in proportion as this capacity develops, offensive war tends more and more to hinder, rather than to further, human welfare. In brief we may say that the arrival at a stage in which ethical considerations come to be entertained, is the arrival at a stage in which offensive war, by no means certain to further predominance of races fitted for a high social life, and certain to cause injurious moral reactions on the conquering as well as on the conquered, ceases to be justifiable; and only defensive war retains a quasi-ethical justification.

And here it is to be remarked that the self-subordination which defensive war involves, and the need for such qualification of the abstract principle of justice as it implies, belong to that transitional state necessitated by the physical-force conflict of races; and that they must disappear when there is reached a peaceful state. That is to say, all questions concerning the extent of such qualifications pertain to what we have distinguished as relative ethics; and are not recognized by that absolute ethics which is concerned with the principles of right conduct in a society formed of men fully adapted to social life.

This distinction I emphasize here because, throughout succeeding chapters, we shall find that recognition of it helps us to disentangle the involved problems of political ethics.

[II-25]

CHAPTER IV.

THE SENTIMENT OF JUSTICE.↩

§ 261. Acceptance of the doctrine of organic evolution determines certain ethical conceptions. The doctrine implies that the numerous organs in each of the innumerable species of animals, have been either directly or indirectly moulded into fitness for the requirements of life by constant converse with those requirements. Simultaneously. through nervous modifications, there have been developments of the sensations, instincts, emotions, and intellectual aptitudes, needed for the appropriate uses of these organs; as we see in caged rodents which exercise their jaw muscles and incisors by purposeless gnawing, in gregarious creatures which are miserable if they cannot join their fellows, in beavers which, kept in confinement, show their passion for dam building by heaping up whatever sticks and stones they can find.

Has this process of mental adaptation ended with primitive man? Are human beings incapable of having their feelings and ideas progressively adjusted to the modes of life imposed on them by the social state into which they have grown? Shall we suppose that the nature which fitted them to the exigencies of savage life has remained unchanged, and will remain unchanged, by the exigencies of civilized life? Or shall we suppose that this aboriginal nature, by repression of some traits and fostering of others, is made to approach more and more to a nature which finds developed society its appropriate environment, and the required activities its normal ones? There are many believers in the doctrine of evolution who seem to have no faith in the continued adaptability of mankind. While glancing but carelessly at the evidence furnished by comparisons of different human races with one another, and of the same races in different ages, they ignore entirely the induction from the phenomena of life at large. But if there is an abuse of the deductive method of reasoning there is also an abuse of the inductive method. One who refused to believe that a new moon would in a fortnight become full and then wane, and, disregarding observations accumulated throughout the past, insisted on watching the successive phases before he was convinced, would be considered inductive in an irrational degree. But there might not unfairly be classed with him those who, slighting the inductive proof of unlimited adjustability, bodily and mental, which the animal kingdom at large presents, will not admit the adjustability of human nature to social life until the adjustment has taken place: nay, even ignore the evidence that it is taking place.

Here we shall assume it to be an inevitable inference from the doctrine of organic evolution, that the highest type of living being, no less than all lower types, must go on molding itself to those requirements which circumstances impose. And we shall, by implication, assume that moral changes are among the changes thus wrought out.

§ 262. The fact that when surfeit of a favorite food has caused sickness, there is apt to follow an aversion to that food, shows how, in the region of the sensations, experiences establish associations which influence conduct. And the fact that the house in which a wife or child died, or in which a long illness was suffered, becomes so associated with painful states of mind as to be shunned, sufficiently illustrates, in the emotional region, the mode in which actions may be determined by mental connections formed in the course of life. When the circumstances of a species make certain relations between conduct and consequence habitual, the appropriately linked feelings may come to characterize the species. Either inheritances of modifications produced by habit, or more numerous survivals of individuals having nervous structures which have varied in fit ways, gradually form guiding tendencies, prompting appropriate behavior and deterring from inappropriate. The contrast between fearless birds found on islands never before visited by man, and the birds around us, which show fear of man immediately they are out of the nest, exemplifies such adaptations.

By virtue of this process there have been produced to some extent among lower creatures, and there are being further produced in man, the sentiments appropriate to social life. Aggressive actions, while they are habitually injurious to the group in which they occur, are not unfrequently injurious to the individuals committing them; since, though certain pleasures may be gained by them, they often entail pains greater than the pleasures. Conversely, conduct restrained within the required limits, calling out no antagonistic passions, favors harmonious cooperation, profits the group, and, by implication, profits the average of its individuals. Consequently, there results, other things equal, a tendency for groups formed of members having this adaptation of nature, to survive and spread.

Among the social sentiments thus evolved, one of chief importance is the sentiment of justice. Let us now consider more closely its nature.

§ 263. Stop an animal's nostrils, and it makes frantic efforts to free its head. Tie its limbs together, and its struggles to get them at liberty are violent. Chain it by the neck or leg, and it is some time before it ceases its attempts to escape. Put it in a cage, and it long continues restless. Generalizing these instances, we see that in proportion as the restraints on actions by which life is maintained are extreme, the resistances to them are great. Conversely, the eagerness with which a bird seizes the opportunity for taking flight, and the joy of a dog when liberated, show how strong is the love of unfettered movement.

Displaying like feelings in like ways, man displays them in other and wider ways. He is irritated by invisible restraints as well as by visible ones; and as his evolution becomes higher, he is affected by circumstances and actions which in more remote ways aid or hinder the pursuit of ends. A parallel will elucidate this truth. Primitively the love of property is gratified only by possession of food and shelter, and, presently, of clothing; but afterwards it is gratified by possession of the weapons and tools which aid in obtaining these, then by possession of the raw materials that serve for making weapons and tools and for other purposes, then by possession of the coin which purchases them as well as things at large, then by possession of promises to pay exchangeable for the coin, then by a lien on a banker, registered in a passbook. That is, there comes to be pleasure in an ownership more and more abstract and more remote from material satisfactions. Similarly with the sentiment of justice. Beginning with the joy felt in ability to use the bodily powers and gain the resulting benefits, accompanied by irritation at direct interferences, this gradually responds to wider relations: being excited now by the incidents of personal bondage, now by those of political bondage, now by those of class privilege, and now by small political changes. Eventually this sentiment, sometimes so little developed in the Negro that he jeers at a liberated companion because he has no master to take care of him, becomes so much developed in the Englishman that the slightest infraction of some mode of formal procedure at a public meeting or in Parliament, which cannot intrinsically concern him, is vehemently opposed because in some distant and indirect way it may help to give possible powers to unnamed authorities who may perhaps impose unforeseen burdens or restrictions.

Clearly, then, the egoistic sentiment of justice is a subjective attribute which answers to that objective requirement constituting justice–the requirement that each adult shall receive the results of his own nature and consequent actions. For unless the faculties of all kinds have free play, these results cannot be gained or suffered, and unless there exists a sentiment which prompts maintenance of the sphere for this free play, it will be trenched upon and the free play impeded.

§ 264. While we may thus understand how the egoistic sentiment of justice is developed, it is much less easy to understand how there is developed the altruistic sentiment of justice. On the one hand, the implication is that the altruistic sentiment of justice can come into existence only in the course of adaptation to social life. On the other hand the implication is that social life is made possible only by maintenance of those equitable relations which imply the altruistic sentiment of justice. How can these reciprocal requirements be fulfilled?

The answer is that the altruistic sentiment of justice can come into existence only by the aid of a sentiment which temporarily supplies its place, and restrains the actions prompted by pure egoism–a proaltruistic sentiment of justice, as we may call it. This has several components which we must successively glance at.

The first deterrent from aggression is one which we see among animals at large–the fear of retaliation. Among creatures of the same species the food obtained by one, or place of vantage taken possession of by it, is in some measure insured to it by the dread which most others feel of the vengeance that may follow any attempt to take it away; and among men, especially during early stages of social life, it is chiefly such dread which secures for each man free scope for his activities, and exclusive use of whatever they bring him.

A further restraint is fear of the reprobation likely to be shown by unconcerned members of the group. Though in the expulsion of a "rogue" elephant from the herd, or the slaying of a sinning member of the flock by rooks or storks, we see that even among animals individuals suffer from an adverse public opinion; yet it is scarcely probable that among animals expectation of general dislike prevents encroachment. But among mankind, "looking before and after" to a greater extent, the thought of social disgrace is usually an additional check on ill-behavior of man to man.

To these feelings, which come into play before there is any social organization, have to be added those which arise after political authority establishes itself. When a successful leader in war acquires permanent headship, and comes to have at heart the maintenance of his power, there arises in him a desire to prevent the trespasses of his people one against another; since the resulting dissensions weaken his tribe. The rights of personal vengeance and, as in feudal times, of private war, are restricted; and, simultaneously, there grow up interdicts on the acts which cause them. Dread of the penalties which follow breaches of these, is an added restraint.

Ancestor worship in general, developing, as the society develops, into special propitiation of the dead chief's ghost, and presently the dead king's ghost, gives to the injunctions he uttered during life increased sanctity; and when, with establishment of the cult, he becomes a god, his injunctions become divine commands with dreaded punishments for breaches of them.

These four kinds of fear cooperate. The dread of retaliation, the dread of social dislike, the dread of legal punishment, and the dread of divine vengeance, united in various proportions, form a body of feeling which checks the primitive tendency to pursue the objects of desire without regard to the interests of fellow men. Containing none of the altruistic sentiment of justice, properly so called, this proaltruistic sentiment of justice serves temporarily to cause respect for one another's claims, and so to make social cooperation possible.

§ 265. Creatures which become gregarious tend to become sympathetic in degrees proportionate to their intelligences. Not, indeed, that the resulting sympathetic tendency is exclusively, or even mainly, of that kind which the words ordinarily imply; for in some there is little beyond sympathy in fear, and in others, little beyond sympathy in ferocity. All that is meant is that in gregarious creatures a feeling displayed by one is apt to arouse kindred feelings in others, and is apt to do this in proportion as others are intelligent enough to appreciate the signs of the feeling. In two chapters of the Principles of Psychology–"Sociality and Sympathy" and "Altruistic Sentiments"–I have endeavored to show how sympathy in general arises, and how there is eventually produced altruistic sympathy.

The implication is, then, that the associated state having been maintained among men by the aid of the proaltruistic sentiment of justice, there have been maintained the conditions under which the altruistic sentiment of justice itself can develop. In a permanent group there occur, generation after generation, incidents simultaneously drawing from its members manifestations of like emotions–rejoicings over victories and escapes, over prey jointly captured, over supplies of wild food discovered; as well as laments over defeats, scarcities, inclemencies, &c. And to these greater pleasures and pains felt in common by all, and so expressing themselves that each sees in others the signs of feelings like those which he has and is displaying, must be added the smaller pleasures and pains daily resulting from meals taken together, amusements, games, and from the not infrequent adverse occurrences which affect several persons at once. Thus there is fostered that sympathy which makes the altruistic sentiment of justice possible.

But the altruistic sentiment of justice is slow in assuming a high form, partly because its primary component does not become highly developed until a late phase of progress, partly because it is relatively complex, and partly because it implies a stretch of imagination not possible for low intelligences. Let us glance at each of these reasons.

Every altruistic feeling presupposes experience of the corresponding egoistic feeling. As, until pain has been felt there cannot be sympathy with pain, and as one who has no ear for music cannot enter into the pleasure which music gives to others; so, the altruistic sentiment of justice can arise only after the egoistic sentiment of justice has arisen. Hence where this has not been developed in any considerable degree, or has been repressed by a social life of an adverse kind, the altruistic sentiment of justice remains rudimentary.

The complexity of the sentiment becomes manifest on observing that it is not concerned only with concrete pleasures and pains, but is concerned mainly with certain of the circumstances under which these are obtainable or preventible. As the egoistic sentiment of justice is gratified by maintenance of those conditions which render achievement of satisfactions unimpeded, and is irritated by the breaking of those conditions, it results that the altruistic sentiment of justice requires for its excitement not only the ideas of such satisfactions but also the ideas of those conditions which are in the one case maintained and in the other case broken.

Evidently, therefore, to be capable of this sentiment in a developed form, the faculty of mental representation must be relatively great. Where the feelings with which there is to be sympathy are simple pleasures and pains, the higher gregarious animals occasionally display it: pity and generosity are from time to time felt by them as well as by human beings. But to conceive simultaneously not only the feelings produced in another, but the plexus of acts and relations involved in the production of such feelings, presupposes the putting together in thought of more elements than an inferior creature can grasp at the same time. And when we come to those most abstract forms of the sentiment of justice which are concerned with public arrangements, we see that only the higher varieties of men are capable of so conceiving the ways in which good or bad institutions and laws will eventually affect their spheres of action, as to be prompted to support or oppose them; and that only among these, therefore, is there excited, under such conditions, that sympathetic sentiment of justice which makes them defend the political interests of fellow citizens.

There is, of course, a close connection between the sentiment of justice and the social type. Predominant militancy, by the coercive form of organization it implies, alike in the fighting body and in the society which supports it, affords no scope for the egoistic sentiment of justice, but, contrariwise, perpetually tramples on it; and, at the same time, the sympathies which originate the altruistic sentiment of justice are perpetually seared by militant activities. On the other hand, in proportion as the regime of status is replaced by the regime of contract, or, in other words, as fast as voluntary cooperation which characterizes the industrial type of society. becomes more general than compulsory cooperation which characterizes the militant type of society, individual activities become less restrained, and the sentiment which rejoices in the scope for them is encouraged; while, simultaneously, the occasions for repressing the sympathies become less frequent. Hence, during warlike phases of social life the sentiment of justice retrogrades, while it advances during peaceful phases, and can reach its full development only in a permanently peaceful state.[1]

[II-35]

CHAPTER V.

THE IDEA OF JUSTICE.↩

§ 266. While describing the sentiment of justice the way has been prepared for describing the idea of justice. Though the two are intimately connected they may be clearly distinguished.

One who has dropped his pocketbook and, turning round, finds that another who has picked it up will not surrender it, is indignant. If the goods sent home by a shopkeeper are not those he purchased, he protests against the fraud. Should his seat at a theater be usurped during a momentary absence, he feels himself ill used. Morning noises from a neighbor's poultry he complains of as grievances. And, meanwhile, he sympathizes with the anger of a friend who has been led by false statements to join a disastrous enterprise, or whose action at law has been rendered futile by a flaw in the procedure. But though, in these cases, his sense of justice is offended, he may fail to distinguish the essential trait which in each case causes the offense. He may have the sentiment of justice in full measure while his idea of justice remains vague.

This relation between sentiment and idea is a matter of course. The ways in which men trespass on one another become more numerous in their kinds, and more involved, as society grows more complex; and they must be experienced in their many forms, generation after generation, before analysis can make clear the essential distinction between legitimate acts and illegitimate acts. The idea emerges and becomes definite in the course of the experiences that action may be carried up to a certain limit without causing resentment from others, but if carried beyond that limit produces resentment. Such experiences accumulate; and gradually, along with repugnance to the acts which bring reactive pains, there arises a conception of a limit to each kind of activity up to which there is freedom to act. But since the kinds of activity are many and become increasingly various with the development of social life, it is a long time before the general nature of the limit common to all cases can be conceived.[2]

A further reason for this slowness of development should be recognized. Ideas as well as sentiments must, on the average, be adjusted to the social state. Hence, as war has been frequent or habitual in nearly all societies, such ideas of justice as have existed have been perpetually confused by the conflicting requirements of internal amity and external enmity.

§ 267. Already it has been made clear that the idea of justice, or at least the human idea of justice, contains two elements. On the one hand, there is that positive element implied by each man's recognition of his claims to unimpeded activities and the benefits they bring. On the other hand, there is that negative element implied by the consciousness of limits which the presence of other men having like claims necessitates. Two opposite traits in these two components especially arrest the attention.

Inequality is the primordial idea suggested. For if the principle is that each shall receive the benefits and evils due to his own nature and consequent conduct, then, since men differ in their powers, there must be differences in the results of their conduct. Unequal amounts of benefit are implied.

Mutual limitations to men's actions suggest a contrary idea. When it is seen that if each pursues his ends regardless of his neighbor's claims, quarrels must result, there arises the consciousness of bounds which must be set to the doings of each to avoid the quarrels. Experience shows that these bounds are on the average the same for all. And the thought of spheres of action bounded by one another, which hence results, involves the conception of equality.

Unbalanced appreciations of these two factors in human justice, lead to divergent moral and social theories, which we must now glance at.

§ 268. In some of the rudest men the appreciations are no higher than those which we see among inferior gregarious animals. Here the stronger takes what he pleases from the weaker without exciting general reprobation–as among the Dogribs; while, elsewhere, there is practiced and tacitly approved something like communism–as among the Fuegians. But where habitual war has developed political organization, the idea of inequality becomes predominant. If not among the conquered, who are made slaves, yet among the conquerors, who naturally think of that which conduces to their interest as that which ought to be, there is fostered this element in the conception of justice which implies that superiority shall have the benefits of superiority.

Though the Platonic dialogues may not be taken as measures of Greek belief, yet we may gather from them what beliefs were general. Glaucon, describing a current opinion, says:

This, as they affirm, is the origin and nature of justice: there is a mean or compromise between the best of all, which is to do and not to suffer injustice, and the worst of all, which is to suffer without the power of retaliation; and justice, being the mean between the two, is tolerated not as good, but as the lesser evil. And immediately afterwards it is said that men are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law.

In this significant passage several things are to be noted. There is first a recognition of the fact, above indicated, that at an early stage the practice of justice is initiated by the dread of retaliation, and the conviction, suggested by experience, that on the whole it is desirable to avoid aggression and to respect the limit which compromise implies: there is no thought of intrinsic flagitiousness in aggression, but only of its impolicy. Furthers the limit to each man's actions, described as "a mean or compromise," and respect for which is called "the path of justice," is said to be established only "by the force of law." Law is not considered as an expression of justice otherwise cognizable, but as itself the source of justice; and hence results the meaning of a preceding proposition, that it is just to obey the law. Thirdly. there is an implication that were it not for retaliation and legal penalties, the stronger might with propriety take advantage of the weaker. There is a half-expressed belief that superiority ought to have all the advantages which superiority can take: the idea of inequality occupies a prominent place, while the idea of equality makes no definite appearance.

What was the opinion of Plato, or rather of Socrates, on the matter is not very easy to find out. Greek ideas on many matters had not yet reached the stage of definiteness, and throughout the dialogues the thinking is hazy. Justice, which is in some places exemplified by honesty, is elsewhere the equivalent of virtue at large, and then (to quote from Jowett's summary) is regarded as "universal order or well being, first in the state, and secondly in the individual." This last, which is the finished conclusion, implies established predominance of a ruling class and subjection of the rest. Justice consists "in each of the three classes doing the work of its own class": carpenter, shoemaker, or what not, "doing each his own business, and not another's"; and all obeying the class whose business it is to rule.[3] Thus the idea of justice is developed from the idea of inequality. Though there is some recognition of equality of positions and of claims among members of the same class, yet the regulations respecting community of wives &c. in the guardian class, have for their avowed purpose to establish, even within that class, unequal privileges for the benefit of the superior.

That the notion of justice had this general character among the Greeks, is further shown by the fact that it recurs in Aristotle. In Chapter V of his Politics, he concludes that the relation of master and slave is both advantageous and just.

But now observe that though in the Greek conception of justice there predominates the idea of inequality, while the idea of equality is inconspicuous, the inequality refers, not to the natural achievement of greater rewards by greater merits, but to the artificial apportionment of greater rewards to greater merits. It is an inequality mainly established by authority The gradations in the civil organization are of the same nature as those in the military organization. Regimentation pervades both; and the idea of justice is conformed to the traits of the social structure.

And this is the idea of justice proper to the militant type at large, as we are again shown throughout Europe in subsequent ages. It will suffice to point out that along with the different law-established positions and privileges of different ranks, there went gradations in the amounts paid in composition for crimes, according to the rank of the injured. And how completely the notion of justice was determined by the notion of rightly existing inequalities, is shown by the condemnation of serfs who escaped into the towns, and were said to have "unjustly" withdrawn themselves from the control of their lords.

Thus, as might be expected, we find that while the struggle for existence between societies is going on actively, recognition of the primary factor in justice which is common to life at large, human and subhuman, is very imperfectly qualified by recognition of the secondary factor. That which we may distinguish as the brute element in the conception is but little mitigated by the human element.

§ 269. All movements are rhythmical, and, among others, social movements, with their accompanying doctrines. After that conception of justice in which the idea of inequality unduly predominates, comes a conception in which the idea of equality unduly predominates.

A recent example of such reactions is furnished by the ethical theory of Bentham. As is shown by the following extract from Mr. Mill's Utilitarianism (p. 91), the idea of inequality here entirely disappears:

The Greatest-Happiness Principle is a mere form of words without rational signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as much as another's. Those conditions being supplied, Bentham's dictum, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary

Now though Bentham ridicules the taking of justice as our guide, saying that while happiness is an end intelligible to all, justice is a relatively unintelligible end, yet he tacitly asserts that his principle, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," is just; since, otherwise, he would be obliged to admit that it is unjust, and we may not suppose he would do so. Hence the implication of his doctrine is that justice means an equal apportionment of the benefits, material and immaterial, which men's activities bring. There is no recognition of the propriety of inequalities in men's shares of happiness, consequent on inequalities in their faculties or characters.

This is the theory which communism would reduce to practice. From one who knows him, I learn that Prince Krapotkin blames the English socialists because they do not propose to act out the rule popularly worded as "share and share alike." In a recent periodical, M. de Laveleye summed up the communistic principle as being "that the individual works for the profit of the state, to which he hands over the produce of his labor for equal division among all." In the communistic utopia described in Mr. Bellamy's Looking Backward, it is held that each "shall make the same effort," and that if by the same effort, bodily or mental, one produces twice as much as another, he is not to be advantaged by the difference. The intellectually or physically feeble are to be quite as well off as others: the assertion being that the existing regime is one of "robbing the incapable class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for."

The principle of inequality is thus denied absolutely. It is assumed to be unjust that superiority of nature shall bring superiority of results, or, at any rate, superiority of material results; and as no distinction appears to be made in respect either of physical qualities or intellectual qualities or moral qualities, the implication is not that strong and weak shall fare alike, but that foolish and wise, worthy and unworthy. mean and noble, shall do the same. For if, according to this conception of justice, defects of nature, physical or intellectual, ought not to count, neither ought moral defects, since they are all primarily inherited.

And here, too, we have a deliberate abolition of that cardinal distinction between the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state, emphasized at the outset: an abolition which, as we saw, must eventuate in decay and disappearance of the species or variety in which it takes place.

§ 270. After contemplating these divergent conceptions of justice, in which the ideas of inequality and equality almost or quite exclude one another, we are now prepared for framing a true conception of justice.

In other fields of thought it has fallen to my lot to show that the right view is obtained by coordinating the antagonistic wrong views. Thus, the association theory of intellect is harmonized with the transcendental theory on perceiving that when, to the effects of individual experiences, are added the inherited effects of experiences received by all ancestors, the two views become one. So, too, when the molding of feelings into harmony with requirements, generation after generation, is recognized as causing an adapted moral nature, there results a reconciliation of the expediency theory of morals with the intuitional theory. And here we see that a like mutual correction occurs with this more special component of ethics now before us.

For if each of these opposite conceptions of justice is accepted as true in part, and then supplemented by the other, there results that conception of justice which arises on contemplating the laws of life as carried on in the social state. The equality concerns the mutually limited spheres of action which must be maintained if associated men are to cooperate harmoniously. The inequality concerns the results which each may achieve by carrying on his actions within the implied limits. No incongruity exists when the ideas of equality and inequality are applied the one to the bounds and the other to the benefits. Contrariwise, the two may be, and must be, simultaneously asserted.

Other injunctions which ethics has to utter do not here concern us. There are the self-imposed requirements and limitations of private conduct, forming that large division of ethics treated of in Part III; and there are the demands and restraints included under "Negative Beneficence" and "Positive Beneficence," to be hereafter treated of, which are at once self-imposed and in a measure imposed by public opinion. But here we have to do only with those claims and those limits which have to be maintained as conditions to harmonious cooperation, and which alone are to be enforced by society in its corporate capacity.

§ 271. Any considerable acceptance of so definite an idea of justice is not to be expected. It is an idea appropriate to an ultimate state, and can be but partially entertained during transitional states; for the prevailing ideas must, on the average, be congruous with existing institutions and activities.

The two essentially different types of social organization, militant and industrial, based respectively on status and on contract, have, as we have above seen, feelings and beliefs severally adjusted to them; and the mixed feelings and beliefs appropriate to intermediate types, have continually to change according to the ratio between the one and the other. As I have elsewhere shown,[4] during the thirty–or rather forty–years' peace, and consequent weakening of the militant organization, the idea of justice became clearer: coercive regulations were relaxed and each man left more free to make the best of himself. But since then, the redevelopment of militancy has caused reversal of these changes; and, along with nominal increases of freedom, actual diminutions of freedom have resulted from multiplied restrictions and exactions. The spirit of regimentation proper to the militant type, has been spreading throughout the administration of civil life. An army of workers with appointed tasks and apportioned shares of products, which socialism, knowingly or unknowingly, aims at, shows in civil life the same characters as an army of soldiers with prescribed duties and fixed rations shows in military life; and every act of Parliament which takes money from the individual for public purposes and gives him public benefits, tends to assimilate the two. Germany best shows this kinship. There, where militancy is most pronounced, and where the regulation of citizens is most elaborate, socialism is most highly developed; and from the head of the German military system has now come the proposal of regimental regulations for the working classes throughout Europe.

Sympathy which, a generation ago, was taking the shape of justice, is relapsing into the shape of generosity; and the generosity is exercised by inflicting injustice. Daily legislation betrays little anxiety that each shall have that which belongs to him, but great anxiety that he shall have that which belongs to somebody else. For while no energy is expended in so reforming our judicial administration that everyone may obtain and enjoy all he has earned, great energy is shown in providing for him and others benefits which they have not earned. Along with that miserable laissez-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims, there goes activity in supplying them, at other men's cost, with gratis novel-reading!

[II-45]

CHAPTER VI.

THE FORMULA OF JUSTICE.↩

§ 272. After tracing up the evolution of justice in its simple form, considered objectively as a condition to the maintenance of life; after seeing how justice as so considered becomes qualified by a new factor when the life is gregarious, more especially in the human race; and after observing the corresponding subjective products–the sentiment of justice and the idea of justice–arising from converse with this condition; we are now prepared for giving to the conclusion reached a definite form. We have simply to find a precise expression for the compromise described in the last chapter.

The formula has to unite a positive element with a negative element. It must be positive in so far as it asserts for each that, since he is to receive and suffer the good and evil results of his actions, he must be allowed to act. And it must be negative in so far as, by asserting this of everyone, it implies that each can be allowed to act only under the restraint imposed by the presence of others having like claims to act. Evidently the positive element is that which expresses a prerequisite to life in general, and the negative element is that which qualifies this prerequisite in the way required when, instead of one life carried on alone, there are many lives carried on together.

Hence, that which we have to express in a precise way, is the liberty of each limited only by the like liberties of all. This we do by saying: Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

§ 273. A possible misapprehension must be guarded against. There are acts of aggression which the formula is presumably intended to exclude, which apparently it does not exclude. It may be said that if A strikes B, then, so long as B is not debarred from striking A in return, no greater freedom is claimed by the one than by the other; or it may be said that if A has trespassed on B's property, the requirement of the formula has not been broken so long as B can trespass on A's property. Such interpretations, however, mistake the essential meaning of the formula, which we at once see if we refer back to its origin.

For the truth to be expressed is that each in carrying on the actions which constitute his life for the time being, and conduce to the subsequent maintenance of his life, shall not be impeded further than by the carrying on of those kindred actions which maintain the lives of others. It does not countenance a superfluous interference with another's life, committed on the ground that an equal interference may balance it. Such a rendering of the formula is one which implies greater deductions from the lives of each and all than the associated state necessarily entails; and this is obviously a perversion of its meaning.

If we bear in mind that though not the immediate end, the greatest sum of happiness is the remote end, we see clearly that the sphere within which each may pursue happiness has a limit, on the other side of which lie the similarly limited spheres of action of his neighbors; and that he may not intrude on his neighbor's spheres on condition that they may intrude on his. Instead of justifying aggression and counteraggression, the intention of the formula is to fix a bound which may not be exceeded on either side.

§ 274. And here, on this misapprehension and this rectification, an instructive comment is yielded by the facts of social progress. For they show that, in so far as justice is concerned, there has been an advance from the incorrect interpretation to the correct interpretation.

In early stages we see habitual aggression and counter-aggression: now between societies and now between individuals. Neighboring tribes fight about the limits to their territories, trespassing first on one side and then on the other; and further fights are entailed by the requirement that mortality suffered shall be followed by mortality inflicted. In such acts of revenge and re-revenge there is displayed a vague recognition of equality of claims. This tends towards recognition of definite limits, alike in respect of territory and in respect of bloodshed; so that in some cases a balance is maintained between the numbers of deaths on either side.

Along with this growing conception of intertribal justice goes a growing conception of justice among members of each tribe. At first it is the fear of retaliation which causes such respect for one another's persons and possessions as exists. The idea of justice is that of a balancing of injuries–"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This remains the idea during early stages of civilization. After justice, as so conceived, ceases to be enforced by the aggrieved person himself, it is this which he asks to have enforced by the constituted authority. The cry to the ruler for justice is the cry for punishment–for the infliction of an injury at least as great as the injury suffered, or, otherwise, for a compensation equivalent to the loss. Thus the equality of claims is but tacitly asserted in the demand to have rectified, as far as may be, the breaches of equality.

How there tends gradually to emerge from this crude conception of justice the finished conception of justice, it seems scarcely needful to explain. The true idea is generated by experience of the evils which accompany the false idea. Naturally, the perception of the right restraints on conduct becomes clearer as respect for these restraints is forced on men, and so rendered more habitual and more general. Men's incursions into one another's spheres constitute a kind of oscillation, which, violent at the outset, becomes gradually less with the progress towards a relatively peaceful state of society. As the oscillations decrease there is an approach to equilibrium; and along with this approach to equilibrium comes approach to a definite theory of equilibrium.

Thus that primitive idea of justice in which aggression is to be balanced by counteraggression, fades from thought as fast as it disappears from practice; and there comes the idea of justice here formulated, in which are recognized such limitations of conduct as exclude aggressions altogether.

NOTE. For the views of Kant concerning the ultimate principle of right, see Appendix A.

[II-49]

CHAPTER VII.

THE AUTHORITY OF THIS FORMULA.↩

§ 275. Before going further we must contemplate this formula under all its aspects, for the purpose of seeing what may be said against it as well as what may be said in its favor.

By those who have been brought up in the reigning school of politics and morals, nothing less than scorn is shown for every doctrine which implies restraint on the doings of immediate expediency or what appears to be such. Along with avowed contempt for "abstract principles" and generalizations, there goes unlimited faith in a motley assemblage of nominees of caucuses, ruled by ignorant and fanatical wire pullers; and it is thought intolerable that its judgments should be in any way subordinated by deductions from ethical truths.

Strangely enough we find in the world of science, too, this approval of political empiricism and disbelief in any other guidance. Though it is a trait of the scientific mind to recognize causation as universal, and though this involves a tacit admission that causation holds throughout the actions of incorporated men, this admission remains a dead letter. Notwithstanding the obvious fact that if there is no causation in public affairs one course must be as good as another; and notwithstanding the obvious fact that to repudiate this implication is to say that some cause determines the goodness or badness of this or that policy; no effort is made to identify the causation. Contrariwise, there is ridicule of those who attempt to find a definite expression for the fundamental principle of harmonious social order. The differences among their views are emphasized, rather than the traits which their views have in common; just as, by adherents of the current creed, the differences among men of science are emphasized, instead of their essential agreements.

Manifestly, then, before proceeding we must deal with the more important objections urged against the formula reached in the last chapter.

§ 276. Every kind of evolution is from the indefinite to the definite; and one of the implications is that a distinct conception of justice can have arisen but gradually. Already the advance towards a practical recognition of justice has been shown to imply a corresponding advance towards theoretical recognition of it. It will be desirable here to observe more closely this growth of the consciousness that the activities carried on for self-conservation by each, are to be restrained by the like activities of all.

And first let us note a fact which might have been fitly included at the close of the last chapter–the fact that where men are subject to the discipline of a peaceful social life only, uninterfered with by the discipline which intersocial antagonisms entail, they quickly develop this consciousness. Entirely pacific tribes, uncivilized in the common sense of the words as some of them are, show a perception of that which constitutes equity, far clearer than the perception displayed by civilized peoples, among whom the habits of industrial life are qualified more or less largely by the habits of militant life. The amiable and conscientious Lepcha, who, while he does not desire to be killed himself, refuses absolutely to assist in killing others; the Hos, full of social virtues, who may be driven almost to suicide by the suspicion that he has committed a theft; the lowly Wood-Veddah, who can scarcely conceive it possible that one man should willingly hurt another, or take that which does not belong to him; these and sundry others show that though there is not intelligence enough to frame a conception of the fundamental social law, there is yet a strong sentiment responding to this law, and an understanding of its special applications. Where the conditions are such as do not require that respect for the claims of fellow tribesmen shall go along with frequent tramplings on the claims of men outside the tribe, there grow up simultaneously in each individual a regard for his own claims and a regard for the claims of other individuals.

It is only where the ethics of amity are entangled with the ethics of enmity, that thoughts about conduct are confused by the necessities of compromise. The habit of aggression outside the society is at variance with the habit of nonaggression inside the society, and at variance with recognition of the law implied by nonaggression. A people which gives to its soldiers the euphemistic title "defenders of their country," and then exclusively uses them as invaders of other countries–a people which so far appreciates the value of life that within its bounds it forbids prizefights, but beyond its bounds frequently takes scores of lives to avenge one life–a people which at home cannot tolerate the thought that inferiority shall bear the self-inflicted evils of inferiority, but abroad has no compunction in using bullet and bayonet to whatever extent is needful for conquest of the uncivilized, arguing that the inferior should be replaced by the superior; such a people must think crookedly about the ultimate principles of right and wrong. Now enunciating the code appropriate to its internal policy and now the code appropriate to its external policy, it cannot entertain a consistent set of ethical ideas. All through the course of that conflict of races which, by peopling the earth with the strongest, has been a preliminary to high civilization, there have gone on these incongruous activities necessitating incongruous sets of beliefs, and making a congruous set of beliefs inadmissible.

Nevertheless, where the conditions have allowed, the conception of justice has slowly evolved to some extent, and found for itself approximately true expressions. In the Hebrew commandments we see interdicts which, while they do not overtly recognize the positive element in justice, affirm in detail its negative element–specify limits to actions, and, by prescribing these limits for all Hebrews, tacitly assert that life, property, good name, &c., must be respected in one as in another. In a form which makes no distinction between generosity and justice, the Christian maxim "Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" vaguely implies the equality of men's claims–implies it, indeed, in too sweeping a manner, since it recognizes no reason for inequality in the shares of good respectively appropriate to men: there is in it no direct recognition of any claim which each has to the results of his own activities, but only an implied recognition of such claims in the persons of others, and by implication a prescribing of limits. Taking no note of intermediate forms of the conception, we may instance among modern forms the one which it took in the mind of Kant. His rule, "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law," is, indeed, an allotropic form of the Christian rule. The suggestion that every other man must be imagined to act after a manner similar to the manner proposed, joined with the tacit implication that if suffering would be caused, the act should not be performed (Kant is classed as an antiutilitarian!), indirectly assumes that the welfares of other men are to be considered as severally of like values with the welfare of the actor–an assumption which, while it covers the requirements of justice, covers much more.

But now leaving these indications of the beliefs of those who have approached the question from the religious side and from the ethical side, let us consider the beliefs of those who have approached it from the legal side.

§ 277. Of course, when jurists set forth first principles, or appeal to them, they have in mind the bases of justice, whether they use the word justice or not; since systems of justice, considered in general or in detail, form the subject matters of their works. This premised, let us observe the doctrines from time to time enunciated.

Sir Henry Maine, speaking of certain dangers which threatened the development of Roman law, says:

But at any rate they had adequate protection in their theory of Natural Law. For the Natural Law of the jurisconsults was distinctly conceived by them as a system which ought gradually to absorb civil laws, without superseding them so long as they remained unrepealed. . . . The value and serviceableness of the conception arose from its keeping before the mental vision a type of perfect law, and from its inspiring the hope of an indefinite approximation to it. [Ancient Law, pp. 76—77, 3d ed.]

In the spirit of these Roman lawyers, one of our early judges of high repute, Chief Justice Hobart, uttered the emphatic assertion–"Even an Act of Parliament made against natural equity. as to make a man Judge in his own case, is void in itself, for jura nature sunt immutabilia, and they are leges legum" (Hobart's Reports, London, 1641, p. 120). So said a great authority of later date. Dominated by a creed which taught that natural things are supernaturally ordained, Blackstone wrote:

This law of nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. . . . no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original. [Chitty's Blackstone, vol. I., pp. 37—38.]

Of like character is another verdict, given by one who treated of legislation from a philosophical point of view. Sir James Mackintosh defines a law of nature as being

a supreme, invariable, and uncontrollable rule of conduct to all men. . . It is "the law of nature," because its general precepts are essentially adapted to promote the happiness of man . . . because it is discoverable by natural reason, and suitable to our natural constitution; and because its fitness and wisdom are founded on the general nature of human beings, and not on any of those temporary and accidental situations in which they may be placed. [Mackintosh's Miscellaneous Works, vol. I., p. 346.]

Even the despotically minded Austin, idolized by the lawyers of our days as having elaborated a theory of unlimited legislative authority, is obliged to confess that the ultimate justification for the governmental absolutism he defends, is ethical. Behind the authority, monarchical, oligarchic, or parliamentary, which enacts laws represented as supreme, there is at length recognized an authority to which it is subordinate–an authority. therefore, which is not derived from human law, but is above human law–an authority which is by implication ascribed, if not to divine enactment, then to the nature of things.

Paying some respect to these dicta (to which I may add that of the German jurists with their Naturrecht) does not imply unreasoning credulity. We may reasonably suspect that, however much they may be in form open to criticism, they are true in essence.

§ 278. "But these are a priori beliefs," will be the contemptuous comment of many. "They all exemplify that vicious mode of philosophizing which consists in evolving truths out of the depths of one's own consciousness," will be said by those who hold that general truths can be reached only by conscious induction. Curiously illustrating the law that all movement is rhythmical, the absolute faith of past times in a priori reasoning, has given place to absolute disbelief; and now nothing is to be accepted unless it is reached a posteriori. Any one who contemplates the average sweep of human progress, may feel tolerably certain that this violent reaction will be followed by a re-reaction; and he may infer that both of these antithetical modes of reasoning, while they have their abuses, have also their uses.

Whence come a priori beliefs–how happen they to arise? I do not of course refer to beliefs peculiar to particular persons, which may be results of intellectual perversions. I refer to those which are general, if not universal–beliefs which all, or nearly all, do not profess to base on evidence, and yet which they hold to be certain. The origin of such beliefs is either natural or supernatural. If supernatural, then unless, by believers in a devil, they are regarded as diabolically insinuated into men to mislead them, they must be regarded as divinely implanted for purposes of guidance, and therefore to be trusted. If, not satisfied with an alleged supernatural derivation, we ask for a natural derivation, then our conclusion must be that these modes of thought are determined by converse with the relations of things. One who adheres to the current creed with its good and evil agents, is not without a feasible reason for denying the value of a priori beliefs; but one who accepts the doctrine of evolution is obliged, if he is consistent, to admit that a priori beliefs entertained by men at large, must have arisen, if not from the experiences of each individual, then from the experiences of the race. When, to take a geometrical illustration, it is affirmed that two straight lines cannot inclose a space; and when it is admitted, as it must be, that this truth cannot be established a posteriori, since not in one case, still less in many cases, can lines be pursued out into infinity for the purpose of observing what happens to the space between them; then the inevitable admission must be that men's experiences of straight lines (or rather, having regard to primitive times, let us say objects approximately straight) have been such as to make impossible the conception of space as inclosed by two straight lines–have been such as to make it imperative to think of the lines as bending before the space can be inclosed. Unquestionably, on the evolution hypothesis, this fixed intuition must have been established by that intercourse with things which, throughout an enormous past, has, directly or indirectly, determined the organization of the nervous system and certain resulting necessities of thought; and the a priori beliefs determined by these necessities differ from a posteriori beliefs simply in this, that they are products of the experiences of innumerable successive individuals instead of the experiences of a single individual.

If, then, from the evolution point of view, this is undoubtedly so with those simple cognitions which concern space, time, and number, must we not infer that it is so, in large measure, with those more complex cognitions which concern human relations? I say "in large measure"; partly because the experiences are in this case far more involved and superficially varied, and cannot have produced anything like such definite effects on the nervous organization; and partly because, instead of reaching back through an immeasurable series of ancestral beings, they reach back through a part of the human race only. For these experiences, hardly traceable during early stages, become marked and coherent only where amicable social cooperation, forms a considerable factor in social life. Hence these cognitions must be comparatively indefinite.

The qualification to be therefore made is that these ethical intuitions, far more than the mathematical intuitions, have to be subjected to methodic criticism. Even the judgments of immediate perception respecting straight lines, curves, angles, and so forth, have to be tested in ways devised by conscious reason: one line is perceived to be perpendicular to another with approximate truth, but complete perpendicularity can be ascertained only by the aid of a geometrical theorem. Evidently, then, the relatively vague internal perceptions which men have of right human relations, are not to be accepted without deliberate comparisons, rigorous cross-examinations, and careful testings of all kinds: a conclusion made obvious by the numerous minor disagreements which accompany the major agreement.

Thus even had the foregoing dicta, and along with them the law of equal freedom as recently formulated, no other than a priori derivations (and this is far from being the fact) it would still be rational to regard them as adumbrations of a truth, if not literally true.

§ 279. But now mark that those who, in this case, urge against a system of thought the reproach that it sets out with an a priori intuition, may have the reproach hurled back upon them with more than equal force.

Alike in philosophy, in politics, and in science, we may see that the inductive school has been carried by its violent reaction against the deductive school to the extreme of assuming that conscious induction suffices for all purposes, and that there is no need to take anything for granted. Though giving proof of an alleged truth consists in showing that it is included in some wider established truth, and though, if this wider truth be questioned, the process is repeated by demonstrating that a still wider truth includes it; yet it is tacitly assumed that this process may go on forever without reaching a widest truth, which cannot be included in any other, and therefore cannot be proved. And the result of making this unthinking assumption is the building up of theories which, if they have not a priori beliefs as their bases, have no bases at all. This we shall find to be the case with the utilitarian systems of ethics and politics.[5]

For what is the ultimate meaning of expediency? When it is proposed to guide ourselves empirically, towards what are we to guide ourselves? If our course must always be determined by the merits of the case, by what are the merits to be judged? "By conduciveness to the welfare of society, or the good of the community," will be the answer. It will not be replied that the merit to be estimated means increase of misery; it will not be replied that it means increase of a state of indifference, sensational and emotional; and it must therefore be replied that it means increase of happiness. By implication, if not avowedly. greatest happiness is the thing to be achieved by public action, or private action, or both. But now whence comes this postulate? Is it an inductive truth? Then where and by whom has the induction been drawn? Is it a truth of experience derived from careful observations? Then what are the observations, and when was there generalized that vast mass of them on which all politics and morals should be built? Not only are there no such experiences, no such observations, no such induction, but it is impossible that any should be assigned. Even were the intuition universal, which it is not (for it has been denied by ascetics in all ages and places, and is demurred to by an existing school of moralists), it would still have no better warrant than that of being an immediate dictum of consciousness.

More than this is true. There is involved a further belief no less a priori. Already l have referred to Bentham's rule, "Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one," joined with Mr. Mill's comment that the greatest-happiness principle is meaningless unless "one person's happiness. . . is counted for exactly as much as another's." Hence the Benthamite theory of morals and politics posits this as a fundamental, self-evident truth. And this tacit assumption that one man's claim to happiness is as good as another's has been recently put into more concrete shape by Mr. Bellamy. who says: "The world, and everything that is in it, will ere long be recognized as the common property of all, and undertaken and administered for the equal benefit of all." That is to say. whether formulated by Bentham himself, or by Mill as his expositor, or by a communistic disciple, the assumption is that all men have equal rights to happiness. For this assumption no warrant is given, or can be given, other than alleged intuitive perception. It is an a priori cognition.

"But it is not a cognition properly so-called," will probably be asserted by those who wish to repudiate the communistic implication, at the same time that they wish to repudiate the a priori reasoning. "It is merely the product of perverted fancy. Happiness itself cannot be divided out either equally or unequally, and the greatest happiness is not to be obtained by equal division of the means to happiness, or the benefits, as they are above called. It is to be obtained rather by giving a larger share of means to those who are most capable of happiness." Raising no question about the practicability of such an adjustment, let us simply ask the warrant for this assertion. Is it an inductive warrant? Has anyone made a number of comparisons between societies in which the one method of apportioning happiness has been pursued, and societies in which the other has been pursued? Hardly so, considering that neither the one method nor the other has been pursued in any society. This alternative assumption has no more facts to stand upon than the assumption repudiated. If it does not claim for itself an a priori warrant, then it has no warrant.

See then the predicament. While reprobating assumptions said to be warranted only by direct intuition, this empirical system makes more such assumptions than the system to which it is opposed! One of them is implied in the assertion that happiness should be the end sought, and another of them is implied in either of the two assertions that men have equal rights to happiness or that they have not equal rights to happiness. Mark, too, that no one of these intuitions is justified by so wide a consensus as the intuition rejected as untrustworthy. Sir Henry Maine remarks that

The happiness of mankind is, no doubt, sometimes assigned, both in the popular and in the legal literature of the Romans, as the proper object of remedial legislation, but it is very remarkable how few and faint are the testimonies to this principle compared with the tributes which are constantly offered to the overshadowing claims of the Law of Nature. [Ancient Law, p. 79, 3d ed.]

And it is scarcely needful to say that since Roman times, there has continued to be this contrast between the narrow recognition of happiness as an end, and the wide recognition of natural equity as an end.

§ 280. But now let it be remembered that this principle of natural equity. expressed in the last chapter as the freedom of each limited only by the like freedom of all, is not an exclusively a priori belief. Though, under one aspect, it is an immediate dictum of the human consciousness after it has been subject to the discipline of prolonged social life, it is, under another aspect, a belief deducible from the conditions to be fulfilled, firstly for the maintenance of life at large, and secondly for the maintenance of social life.

Examination of the facts has shown it to be a fundamental law, by conformity to which life has evolved from its lowest up to its highest forms, that each adult individual shall take the consequences of its own nature and actions: survival of the fittest being the result. And the necessary implication is an assertion of that full liberty to act which forms the positive element in the formula of justice; since, without full liberty to act, the relation between conduct and consequence cannot be maintained. Various examples have made clear the conclusion, manifest in theory, that among gregarious creatures this freedom of each to act, has to be restricted; since if it is unrestricted there must arise such clashing of actions as prevents the gregariousness. And the fact that, relatively unintelligent though they are, inferior gregarious creatures inflict penalties for breaches of the needful restrictions, shows how regard for them has come to be unconsciously established as a condition to persistent social life.

These two laws, holding, the one of all creatures and the other of social creatures, and the display of which is clearer in proportion as the evolution is higher, find their last and fullest sphere of manifestation in human societies. We have recently seen that along with the growth of peaceful cooperation there has been an increasing conformity to this compound law under both its positive and negative aspects; and we have also seen that there has gone on simultaneously an increase of emotional regard for it and intellectual apprehension of it.

So that we have not only the reasons above given for concluding that this a priori belief has its origin in the experiences of the race, but we are enabled to affiliate it on the experiences of living creatures at large, and to perceive that it is but a conscious response to certain necessary relations in the order of nature.

No higher warrant can be imagined; and now, accepting the law of equal freedom as an ultimate ethical principle, having an authority transcending every other, we may proceed with our inquiry.

[II-62]

CHAPTER VIII.

ITS COROLLARIES.↩

§ 281. Men's activities are many in their kinds and the consequent social relations are complex. Hence, that the general formula of justice may serve for guidance, deductions must be drawn severally applicable to special classes of cases. The statement that the liberty of each is bounded only by the like liberties of all, remains a dead letter until it is shown what are the restraints which arise under the various sets of circumstances he is exposed to.

Whoever admits that each man must have a certain restricted freedom, asserts that it is right he should have this restricted freedom. If it be shown to follow, now in this case and now in that, that he is free to act up to a certain limit but not beyond it, then the implied admission is that it is right he should have the particular freedom so defined. And hence the several particular freedoms deducible may fitly be called, as they commonly are called, his rights.

§ 282. Words are sometimes profoundly discredited by misuse. The true ideas they connote become so intimately associated with false ideas, that they in large measure lose their characters. This is conspicuously the case with the word "rights."

In past times rivers of blood were shed in maintaining the "right" of this or that person to a throne. In the days of the old Poor Law the claims of the pauper were habitually urged on the ground that he had a "right" to a maintenance out of the soil. Not many years since we were made familiar with the idea, then current among French workingmen, that they had a "right" to labor; that is, a right to have labor provided for them. At the present time communists use the word "rights" in ways which entirely invert the meaning given to it by past usages. And so lax is the application of the word that those who pander to the public appetite for gossip about notable personages, defend themselves by saying that "the public has a `right' to know."

The consequence has been that, in many of the cultivated, there has been produced a confirmed, and indeed contemptuous, denial of rights. There are no such things, say they. except such as are conferred by law. Following Bentham, they affirm that the state is the originator of rights, and that apart from it there are no rights.

But if lack of discrimination is shown in such misuse of words as includes under them more than should be included, lack of discrimination is also shown in not perceiving those true meanings which are disguised by the false meanings.

§ 283. As is implied above, rights, truly so-called, are corollaries from the law of equal freedom, and what are falsely called rights are not deducible from it.

In treating of these corollaries, as we now proceed to do, we shall find that, in the first place, they one and all coincide with ordinary ethical conceptions, and that, in the second place, they one and all correspond with legal enactments. Further, it will become apparent that so far is it from being true that the warrant for what are properly called rights is derived from law, it is, conversely. true that law derives its warrant from them.

[II-64]

CHAPTER IX.

THE RIGHT TO PHYSICAL INTEGRITY.↩

§ 284. For using a title that is so apparently pedantic, my defense must be that no other adequately expresses everything to be included in the chapter. The physical integrity which has to be claimed for each, may at the one extreme be destroyed by violence, and at the other extreme interfered with by the nausea which a neighboring nuisance causes.

It is a self-evident corollary from the law of equal freedom that, leaving other restraints out of consideration, each man's actions must be so restrained as not directly to inflict bodily injury, great or small, on any other. In the first place, actions carried beyond this limit imply the exercise on one side of greater freedom than is exercised on the other, unless it be by retaliation; and we have seen that, as rightly understood, the law does not countenance aggression and counteraggression. In the second place, considered as the statement of a condition by conforming to which the greatest sum of happiness is to be obtained, the law forbids any act which inflicts physical pain or derangement.

§ 285. Only for form's sake is it needful to specify under this general head, the right to life and the consequent interdict on murder. This, which in civilized communities is regarded as the blackest of crimes, may be considered as unconsciously, if not consciously, thus regarded because it is the greatest possible breach of the law of equal freedom; for by murder another's power to act is not merely interfered with but destroyed. While, however, it is not needful to insist on this first deduction from the law of equal freedom, that life is sacred, it will be instructive to observe the successive steps towards recognition of its sacredness.

Noting as an extreme case that of the Fijians, among whom murder is, or was, thought honorable, we may pass to the many cases furnished by savage tribes who kill their old, diseased, and useless members. Various of the early European peoples, too, did the like. Grimm tells us that among the Wends "the children killed their aged parents, blood and other relatives, also those who no longer were fit for war or work, and then cooked and ate them, or buried them alive." "The Herulians, also, killed their aged and sick. . . . Later traces of the custom of killing the aged and sick are found in North Germany."

Apart from this deliberate destruction of incapable members of the tribe, which very generally had the excuse that it was needful for preservation of the capable, there has habitually existed, in primitive social groups, no public recognition of murder as a crime. Of the Homeric Greeks Grote writes that the murderer had to dread only "the personal vengeance of the kinsmen and friends." These might compound for the offense by a stipulated payment. All that the chiefs did in such cases was to see that the bargains were fulfilled. In later times throughout Europe, the same ideas, sentiments, and practices prevailed. It was not so much the loss of his life by the man slain which constituted the evil, as the injury done to his family or clan: this was the wrong which had to be avenged or compounded for. Hence it was a matter of comparative indifference whether the actual murderer was killed in return, or whether some guiltless member of the murderer's kindred. And this, too, was probably a part cause for the gradation in the compensations to be made for murders according to the rank of the murdered–compensations which, after being in earlier stages matters of private agreement, came presently to be established by law. And to how small an extent the conception of the sacredness of life had grown up, is seen in the fact that the slave had no wergeld or bot: his lord could slay him if he pleased, and if slain by some one else his value as a chattel only could be demanded.

An unobtrusive step towards recognition of murder as something more than a private offense, took place when part of the money paid in compensation went to the king: the idea being, in considerable measure, still the same; since destruction of a subject was destruction of a portion of the king's power over subjects, and did, in effect, diminish the strength of his society for fighting purposes. But the continuance of the different fines adjusted to different ranks, shows how little the intrinsic criminality of murder was recognized; and this is further shown by the distinction which benefit of clergy made. Up to the time of the Plantagenets a murderer "who knew how to read escaped from nearly all punishment."

Merely noting that a great step was made under the Commonwealth, when "benefit of clergy was to be abolished absolutely"; when, "by a separate Act, wager of battle was abolished"; and when "the same Act punished dueling with extraordinary severity" (legislation which recognized the intrinsic guilt of murder) we may come at once to modern times. No class distinction can now be pleaded in mitigation, and no condonation under any form is possible.

The course of this progress presents three significant facts. Maintenance of life is in the earliest stages an entirely private affair, as among brutes; and to the taking of it there is attached scarcely more idea of wrong than among brutes. With growing social aggregation and organization, the taking of life comes to be more and more regarded as a wrong done, first to the family or the clan, and then to the society; and it is punished rather as a sin against society than as a sin against the individual. But eventually, while there is retained the conception of its criminality as a breach of the law needful for social order, there becomes predominant the conception of its criminality as an immeasurable and irremediable wrong done to the murdered man. This consciousness of the intrinsic guilt of the act, implies a consciousness of the intrinsic claim of the individual to life: the right to life has acquired the leading place in thought.

§ 286. The connection between such degree of bodily injury as causes death, and such degree of bodily injury as causes more or less incapacity for carrying on life, has all along been too obvious to escape recognition. Hence, with that tacit assertion of the right to physical integrity which is implied by the punishment of murder, there has gone such further tacit assertion of it as is implied by punishments for inflicting mutilations, wounds, &c. Naturally. too, there has been a certain parallelism between the successive stages in the two cases; beginning with that between life for life and "an eye for an eye.

When, after the early stage in which retaliation was entirely a private affair, there was reached the stage in which it came to be an affair concerning the family or clan, we see that as the clan avenged itself by taking from an offending clan a life to balance the life it had lost, so by insisting on a substituted, if not an actual, equivalent, it sought to avenge an injury which was not fatal. This is shown by the fact that after the system of money damages had grown up, the price, not only for a life but for a limb, was to be paid by the family or house of the wrongdoer to the family or house of the wronged. A further fact implies this same conception. With the Germanic tribes and the early English, along with compensations for homicide, varying according to rank, there went "as large a scheme of compensations for minor injuries," also according to rank. The implication in both cases is that the damage to the family or clan was dominant in thought, rather than the damage to the individual. The like held in ancient Russia.

As fast as the social life of smaller groups or clans, merged into the social life of larger groups or nations, the idea of injury to the nation began to replace that of injury to the clan; and at first part, and eventually the whole, of the fine or amercement payable by one who had committed an assault, went to the state; and this usage still survives. Though in cases of personal violence the current consciousness is now mainly occupied by sympathy with the injured man, and reprobation of the offender for having inflicted pain and accompanying mischief, yet the state appropriates the condonation money. and leaves the sufferer to bear the evil as best he may.

But in modern days we see growth of a higher conception, in the awarding of compensations for injuries which have resulted from negligence. The claim of the citizen against a fellow citizen, not only for bodily damage voluntarily inflicted on him but for bodily damage caused by careless actions or inactions, dates back some centuries at least. Much more extensive applications of the principle have of late years been made; such as those which render a railway company liable for injuries caused by imperfection of its appliances or inattention of its officials, and private employers for those entailed on workmen by defective apparatus, by lack of safeguards, or by operations involving risk. These developments of law imply higher appreciations of the claims of the individual to physical integrity; and the fact that the person or company responsible for the mischief done, is called upon to pay damages to the sufferer and not to the state, is one of the proofs that the claim of the individual to physical integrity, now occupies in the general consciousness a greater space than the thought of social detriment done by disregard of such claim.

Nor must we omit to note, in proof of the same thing, that what we may call the sacredness of the person, has in our days been further insisted on by laws which regard as assaults, not only such acts of violence as cause slight injuries, but such as are constituted by intentional pushes or other forcible interferences with another's body, or even by threatening uses of the hands without actual contact; and laws which also make a kiss, taken without consent, a punishable offense.

§ 287. One more trespass against physical integrity, not in early times thought of as such, but held to be such in our times, is that which consists in the communication of disease.

This is a kind of trespass which, though grave, and though partly recognized in law, occupies neither in law nor in the general conscience so distinct a place as it should do: probably because of the indefiniteness and uncertainty of the mischievous results. Here is a father who fetches home his boy suffering from an epidemic disease, regardless of the fact that the railway carriage in which they travel may not improbably infect others; and here is a mother who asks the doctor whether her children have sufficiently recovered from scarlet fever to go to school, and proposes to send them notwithstanding the intimation that they may very possibly convey the disease to their school fellows. Such acts are indeed, punishable; but they so commonly pass without detection, and the evils likely to be inflicted are so faintly conceived, that they are scarcely thought of as offenses; though they really ought to be regarded as something like crimes–if not actual crimes, then potential crimes.

For let us remember that there is now recognized by law and by public conscience, the truth that not only actual physical mischiefs to others but also potential physical mischiefs to others, are flagitious. We have reached a stage in which the body of each person is so far regarded as a territory inviolable by any other person, that we rank as offenses all acts which are likely to bring about violation of it.

§ 288. Thus it is undeniable that what we see to be the primary corollary from the formula of justice, has been, in the course of social evolution and the accompanying evolution of man's mental nature, gradually establishing itself. Prolonged converse with the conditions under which alone social life can be harmoniously carried on, has slowly molded sentiments, ideas, and laws, into conformity with this primary ethical truth deducible from those conditions.[6]

That which it here concerns us specially to note, is that murder, manslaughter, mutilation, assault, and all trespasses against physical integrity down to the most trivial, have not become transgressions in virtue of laws forbidding them, nor in virtue of interdicts having a supposed supernatural origin; but they have become transgressions as being breaches of certain naturally originated restraints.

It remains only to say that while, in a system of absolute ethics, the corollary here drawn from the formula of justice is unqualified, in a system of relative ethics it has to be qualified by the necessities of social self-preservation. Already we have seen that the primary law that each individual shall receive and suffer the benefits and evils of his own nature, following from conduct carried on with due regard to socially imposed limits, must, where the group is endangered by external enemies, be modified by the secondary law, which requires that there shall be such sacrifice of individuals as is required to preserve, for the aggregate of individuals, the ability thus to act and to receive the results of actions. Hence, for purposes of defensive war, there is justified such contingent loss of physical integrity as effectual defense of the society requires: supposing, always, that effectual defense is possible. For it would seem to be an implication that where the invading force is overwhelming, such sacrifice of individuals is not justified.

We see here, indeed, as we shall see throughout all subsequent chapters, that the requirements of absolute ethics can be wholly conformed to only in a state of permanent peace; and that so long as the world continues to be occupied by peoples given to political burglary, the requirements of relative ethics only, can be fulfilled.

[II-72]

CHAPTER X.

THE RIGHTS TO FREE MOTION AND LOCOMOTION.↩

§ 289. As direct deductions from the formula of justice, the right of each man to the use of unshackled limbs, and the right to move from place to place without hindrance, are almost too obvious to need specifying. Indeed these rights, more perhaps than any others, are immediately recognized in thought as corollaries. Clearly, one who binds another's limbs, chains him to a post, or confines him in a dungeon, has used greater liberty of action than his captive; and no less clear is it that if, by threatened punishment or otherwise, he debars him from changing his locality, he commits a kindred breach of the law of equal freedom.

Further, it is manifest that if, in either of these ways, a man's liberty of action is destroyed or diminished, not by some one other man but by a number of other men acting jointly–if each member of a lower class thus has his power of motion and locomotion partially cut off by the regulations which a higher class has established, each member of that higher class has transgressed the ultimate principle of equity in like manner if in a smaller degree.

§ 290. We have already seen that the instinct prompting flight, as well as the desire to escape when captured, shows us in subhuman beings, as well as in human beings, the presence of that impulse which finally emerges as a conscious claim to free motion and locomotion. But while this positive element in the sentiment corresponding to the right, deep-rooted as it is, early manifests itself, the negative element in it, corresponding to the imposed limits, has to await the discipline of sociality before it can reach any considerable development.

We have instances showing that where governmental control does not exist, or is very feeble, the tacit claim to unhindered movement is strongly pronounced; whether the nature be of a savage kind or of a gentle kind. Of the one class may be named the Abors, who are 50 self-asserting that they cannot live together, and the Nagas to whom the notion of restraint is so foreign that they ridicule the idea of a ruler. Of the other class I may instance the before-named Lepchas, who, mild as they are, fly to the woods and live on roots rather than submit to coercion; and the Jakuns, who are greatly valued as servants because of their virtues, but who disappear at once if authority is injudiciously exercised over them. Having in common a strong sense of personal liberty, these types of men differ in the respect that while, in the warlike type, this sense is egoistic only, it is, in the peaceful type, altruistic also–is joined with respect for the personal liberties of others.

Out of primitive unorganized groups, or groups of which the organization is very slight, the progress to large and organized groups is effected by war. While this implies little regard for life, it also implies little regard for liberty; and hence, in the course of the process by which nations are formed, recognition of the claim to liberty, as well as of that to life, is subordinated: the sentiment is continually repressed and the idea is rendered vague. Only after social consolidation has made great progress, and social organization has become in large measure industrial–only when militancy has ceased to be constant and the militant type of structure has relaxed, do the sentiment and the idea become more marked.

Here we have to glance at some of the steps through which the claim to freedom of motion and locomotion is gradually established, ethically and legally.

§ 291. It has been remarked with truth that the rise of slavery was practically a limitation of cannibalism, and in so far a progress. When the prisoner of war was allowed to live and work instead of being cooked and eaten, the fundamental principle of equity was no longer absolutely negatived in his person; for the continuance of his life, even under the imposed conditions, made possible some maintenance of the relation between conduct and consequence. Where the enslaved prisoners and their descendants, fed and sheltered to the extent required for making use of them as working cattle, are also liable at any time to be made into food, as until lately among the Fijians, this mitigation of cannibalism is relatively small; but where, as among many of the uncivilized, the slave is treated in large measure as a member of the family. the restraints on his freedom are practically not much greater than those to which the children are subject.

To specify the different forms and qualifications of bondage which have existed among various peoples at different times and under changing social conditions, would be needless for our purpose here, even were it practicable. Such facts only must be named as indicate how the conception of individual liberty grew up, alike in law and in ethics. We may note that among the Hebrews, while persons of foreign blood might be bought and, with their children, inherited as possessions, those of Hebrew blood who sold themselves, either to men of their own race or to strangers sojourning among them, were subject to a slavery qualified alike in respect of length and rigor: the reason given being that, as servants of God, they could not be permanently alienated. But there was neither recognition of any wrong inflicted by enslavement, nor of any correlative right to freedom. This lack of the sentiments and ideas which, in modern times, have become so pronounced, continued to the time when Christianity arose, and was not changed by Christianity. Neither Christ nor his apostles denounced slavery; and when, in reference to freedom, there was given the advice to "use it rather" than slavery, there was manifestly implied no thought of any inherent claim of each individual to unhindered exercise of free motion and locomotion. So was it among the Greeks; as, indeed, it has been among most peoples during early stages. In Homeric times, captives taken in war were enslaved and might be sold or ransomed; and throughout Greek civilization, accompanying warfare that was practically chronic, slavery was assumed to be a normal part of the social order. Lapse into bondage by capture, debt, or otherwise, was regarded as a misfortune; and no reprobation attached to the slave-owner. That is to say, the conception of freedom as an inalienable right of each man, had little or no place in either ethics or law. Inevitably. indeed, it was suppressed in relation to slaves, literally so-called, when even those who were nominally free were in reality slaves of the state–when each citizen belonged not to himself but to his city. And it is noteworthy that in the most warlike Greek state, Sparta, not only was the condition of the helot more abject than elsewhere, but the Spartan master himself was deprived in a greater degree than elsewhere of the power to order his own movements as he pleased.

Indeed we may recognize, generally, the fact that in states which have grown considerably in size and structure, it has naturally happened that since they have thus grown by external aggression and conquest, implying, as it always does, internal coercion, individuality has been so greatly repressed as to leave little trace in law and usage.

§ 292. To illustrate the growth in morals and legislation of that conception of human freedom which has now become established among the leading civilized races, it will suffice if we glance at some of the chief steps traceable in our own history.

Militant as were the successive swarms of invaders who, now subjugating and now expelling the previous possessors of the soil, peopled the country in old English days, it of course happened that slaves existed among them–a class of the unfree, originally captives, the size of which was from time to time augmented by the addition of debtors and criminals. Along with the growth of population and accompanying advance of political organization, those who, under the original Mark system, had formed a class of free men, gradually lost much of their liberty: occasionally by conflicts within groups, in the course of which some members gained predominance, but mostly in the course of external conflicts, leading to subjugations and establishments of lordships. Peasants became subject to thegns and thegns to higher nobles; so that "by Alfred's day it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord": implying deprivation of freedom not only in members of the lowest rank (the slaves who were bought and sold) but in members of all higher ranks. Amid the changes which followed the Conquest, this limitation of liberty implied by sworn fealty continued; or rather, indeed, was increased, save in the partial abolition of trade in slaves. With the growth of towns during the 11th century, the accompanying development of industrial institutions, the implied replacing of relations of status by relations of contract, and the development of a "new moral sense of man's right to equal justice," came a "transition from pure serfage to an imperfect freedom." A century later the Great Charter put restraints on arbitrary rule, and the consequent losses of freedom by citizens. The growing influence of the trading classes was shown by the concession of liberty of journeying to foreign merchants. And then when, after another hundred years, the attachment of the serf to the soil, gradually weakened, had been broken, the fully free laborer acquired the right of unhindered locomotion. Though he partially lost this right when the Black Death caused so large a decrease of population, and consequent great rise in wages, that there was prompted a statute fixing the price of labor, and tying the laborer to his parish; yet these restraints, by the violent resistance they caused, led to a violent assertion of equality, not only in respect to right of locomotion but in respect to other things. But how little the claim to freedom was then recognized by the ruling classes, was shown when, after the subjugation of the revolting peasants, the king suggested enfranchisement; and when the landowners, asserting that their serfs were their goods, said that consent to emancipation "we have never given and never will give, were we all to die in one day." As increase of industrial activity and organization had produced increase of liberty, so, conversely. the twenty years of militant activity known as the Wars of the Roses, destroyed much of the liberty which had been obtained: not, however, the detachment of the peasant from the soil, and consequent ability to wander about, which, in the disturbed social state left by the collapse of feudalism, entailed an industrial disorganization that was remedied by again putting the laboring class under partial coercion, and partially attaching them to their localities, without otherwise restraining their movements. The freedom thus obtained had, however, still to be safeguarded; and the provisions against arbitrary imprisonment, dating from the Great Charter but often broken through, were strengthened, towards the end of the 17th century, by the Habeas Corpus Act. Save slight interferences caused by temporary panics, personal liberty in England thereafter continued intact; while such minor restraints on freedom of movement as were involved in the laws forbidding artisans to travel in search of work, were formally abolished in 1824.

And now let us not omit to note that, along with the slow legal establishment of personal liberty there has gone a growth of the responsive sentiment; and that with the egoistic assertion of liberty has been eventually joined the altruistic assertion of it. Those changes which, in the course of many centuries, have advanced social arrangements from a condition of complete slavery of the lowest, and qualified slavery of those above them, to a state of absolute freedom for all, have, towards their close, produced both sentiment and law asserting this freedom, not in English citizens only but in aliens under English rule–beginning with the emancipation of slaves who set foot on English soil, and ending with the emancipation of all who inhabited English colonies: since which time abolition of slavery elsewhere has been a constant aim.

§ 293. Unless by those who think that civilization is a backward movement, it must, then, be admitted that induction justifies this deduction from the fundamental principle of equity. Those who think that ancient societies were of higher types than our own, and human welfare better achieved by them–those who think that feudal organization with its grades of vassalage superposed on villenage, produced a greater total of happiness than we experience now–those who, with Mr. Carlyle, yearn for a time like that of Abbot Sampson, and applaud the obedience of the Russians to their Czar; may consistently deny that growth of the sentiment of liberty, and establishment of individual freedom by law afford any support for the abstract inference drawn in this chapter. But those who think that our days are better than those in which nobles lived in castles and wore shirts of mail–those who think that oubliettes and torture chambers were accompaniments of a social state less desirable than that in which princes as well as paupers are subject to the administration of justice–those who think that the regime which brought about peasant revolts was inferior to that which is characterized by multitudinous societies for furthering popular welfare, must admit that the generalization drawn from human experiences at large, is at one with the corollary above drawn from the formula of justice.

But this dictum of absolute ethics has to be qualified by the requirements of relative ethics. From the principle laid down at the outset, that the preservation of the species, or that variety of it constituting a society. is an end which must take precedence of the preservation of the individual, it follows that the right to individual liberty, like the right to individual life, must be asserted subject to qualifications, entailed by the measures needful for national safety. Such trespass on liberty as is required to preserve liberty. has a quasi-ethical warrant. Subject only to the condition that all capable members of the community shall be equally liable to it, that restraint on the rights of free motion and locomotion necessitated by military organization and discipline, is legitimate; provided always that the end in view is defensive war and not offensive war.

[II-80]

CHAPTER XI.

THE RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.↩

§ 294. A man may be entirely uninjured in body by the actions of fellow men, and he may be entirely unimpeded in his movements by them, and he may yet be prevented from carrying on the activities needful for maintenance of life, by traversing his relations to the physical environment on which his life depends. It is, indeed, alleged that certain of these natural agencies cannot be removed from the state of common possession. Thus we read:

Some things are by nature itself incapable of appropriation, so that they cannot be brought under the power of anyone. These got the name of res communes by the Roman law; and were defined, things the property of which belongs to no person, but the use to all. Thus, the light, the air, running water, &c. are so adapted to the common use of mankind, that no individual can acquire a property in them, or deprive others of their use. [An Institute of the Law of Scotland by John Erskine (ed. Macallan), i, 196.]

But though light and air cannot be monopolized, the distribution of them may be interfered with by one man to the partial deprivation of another man–may be so interfered with as to inflict serious injury upon him.

No interference of this kind is possible without a breach of the law of equal freedom. The habitual interception of light by one person in such way that another person is habitually deprived of an equal share, implies disregard of the principle that the liberty of each is limited by the like liberties of all; and the like is true if free access to air is prevented.

Under the same general head there must, however, by an unusual extension of meaning, be here included something which admits of appropriation–the surface of the earth. This, as forming part of the physical environment, seems necessarily to be included among the media of which the use may be claimed under the law of equal freedom. The earth's surface cannot be denied to any one absolutely, without rendering life-sustaining activities impracticable. In the absence of standing-ground he can do nothing; and hence it appears to be a corollary from the law of equal freedom, interpreted with strictness, that the earth's surface may not be appropriated absolutely by individuals, but may be occupied by them only in such manner as recognizes ultimate ownership by other men; that is–by society at large.

Concerning the ethical and legal recognitions of these claims to the uses of media, not very much has to be said: only the last demands much attention. We will look at each of them in succession.

§ 295. In the earliest stages, while yet urban life had not commenced, no serious obstruction of one man's light by another man could well take place. In encampments of savages and in the villages of agricultural tribes, no one was led, in pursuit of his ends, to overshadow the habitation of his neighbor. Indeed, the structures and relative positions of habitations made such aggressions almost impracticable.

In later times, when towns had grown up, it was unlikely that much respect would forthwith be paid by men to the claims of their neighbors in respect of light. During stages of social evolution in which the rights to life and liberty were little regarded, such comparatively trivial trespasses as were committed by those who built houses close in front of others' houses, were not likely to attract much notice, considered either as moral transgressions or legal wrongs. The narrow, dark streets of ancient Continental cities, in common with the courts and alleys characterizing the older part of our own towns, imply that in the days when they were built the shutting out by one man of another man's share of sun and sky, was not thought an offense. And, indeed, it may reasonably be held that recognition of such an offense was in those days impracticable; since, in walled towns, the crowding of houses became a necessity.

In modern times, however, there has arisen the perception that the natural distribution of light may not be interfered with. Though the law which forbids the building of walls, houses, or other edifices of certain heights, within prescribed distances from existing houses, does not absolutely negative the intercepting of light; yet it negatives the intercepting of it to serious degrees, and seeks to compromise the claims of adjacent owners as fairly as seems practicable.

That is to say, this corollary from the law of equal freedom, if it has not come to be overtly asserted, has come to be tacitly recognized.

§ 296. To some extent interference with the supply of light involves interference with the supply of air; and, by interdicting the one, some interdict is, by implication, placed on the other. But the claim to use of the air, though it has been recognized by English law in the case of windmills, is less definitely established: probably because only small evils have been caused by obstructions.

There has, however, risen into definite recognition the claim to unpolluted air. Though acts of one man which may diminish the supply of air to another man, have not come to be distinctly classed as wrong; yet acts which vitiate the quality of his air are in modern times regarded as offenses–offenses for which there are in some cases moral reprobations only. and in other cases legal penalties. In some measure all are severally obliged, by their own respiration, to vitiate the air respired by others, where they are in proximity. It needs but to walk a little distance behind one who is smoking, to perceive how widely diffused are the exhalations from each person's lungs; and to what an extent, therefore, those who are adjacent, especially indoors, are compelled to breathe the air that has already been taken in and sent out time after time. But since this vitiation of air is mutual, it cannot constitute aggression. Aggression occurs only when vitiation by one, or some, has to be borne by others who do not take like shares in the vitiation; as often happens in railway carriages, where men who think themselves gentlemen smoke in other places than those provided for smokers: perhaps getting from fellow passengers a nominal, though not a real, consent, and careless of the permanent nuisance entailed on those who afterward travel in compartments reeking with stale tobacco smoke. Beyond the recognition of this by right-thinking persons as morally improper, it is forbidden as improper by railway regulations; and, in virtue of by laws, may bring punishment by fine.

Passing from instances of this kind to instances of a graver kind, we have to note the interdicts against various nuisances–stenches resulting from certain businesses carried on near at hand, injurious fumes such as those from chemical works, and smoke proceeding from large chimneys. Legislation which forbids the acts causing such nuisances, implies the right of each citizen to unpolluted air.

Under this same head we may conveniently include another kind of trespass to which the surrounding medium is instrumental. I refer to the production of sounds of a disturbing kind. There are small and large trespasses of this class. For one who, at a table d'hote, speaks so loudly as to interfere with the conversation of others, and for those who, during the performance at a theater or concert, persist in distracting the attention of auditors around by talking, there is reprobation, if nothing more: their acts are condemned as contrary to good manners, that is, good morals, for the one is a part of the other. And then when inflictions of this kind are public, or continuous, or both–as in the case of street music and especially bad street music, or as in the case of loud noises proceeding from factories, or as in the case of church bells rung at early hours, the aggression has come to be legally recognized as such and forbidden under penalty: not as yet sufficiently recognized, however, as is shown in the case of railway whistles at central stations, which are allowed superfluously to disturb tens of thousands of people all through the night, and often to do serious injury to invalids.

Thus in respect of the uses of the atmosphere, the liberty of each limited only by the like liberties of all, though not overtly asserted, has come to be tacitly asserted; in large measure ethically. and in a considerable degree legally.

§ 297. The state of things brought about by civilization does not hinder ready acceptance of the corollaries thus far drawn; but rather clears the way for acceptance of them. Though in the days when cannibalism was common and victims were frequently sacrificed to the gods, assertion of the right to life might have been received with demur, yet the ideas and practices of those days have left no such results as stand in the way of unbiased judgments. Though during times when slavery and serfdom were deeply organized in the social fabric, an assertion of the right to liberty would have roused violent opposition, yet at the present time, among ourselves at least, there exists no idea, sentiment, or usage, at variance with the conclusion that each man is free to use his limbs and move about where he pleases. And similarly with respect to the environment. Such small interferences with others' supplies of light and air as have been bequeathed in the structures of old towns and such others as smoking fires entail, do not appreciably hinder acceptance of the proposition that men have equal claims to uses of the media in which all are immersed. But the proposition that men have equal claims to the use of that remaining portion of the environment–hardly to be called a medium–on which all stand and by the products of which all live, is antagonized by ideas and arrangements descending to us from the past. These ideas and arrangements arose when considerations of equity did not affect land tenure any more than they affected the tenure of men as slaves or serfs; and they now make acceptance of the proposition difficult. If, while possessing those ethical sentiments which social discipline has now produced, men stood in possession of a territory not yet individually portioned out, they would no more hesitate to assert equality of their claims to the land than they would hesitate to assert equality of their claims to light and air. But now that long-standing appropriation, continued culture, as well as sales and purchases, have complicated matters, the dictum of absolute ethics, incongruous with the state of things produced, is apt to be denied altogether. Before asking how, under these circumstances, we must decide, let us glance at some past phases of land tenure.

Partly because in early stages of agriculture, land, soon exhausted, soon ceases to be worth occupying, it has been the custom with little-civilized and semicivilized peoples, for individuals to abandon after a time the tracts they have cleared, and to clear others. Causes aside, however, the fact is that in early stages private ownership of land is unknown: only the usufruct belongs to the cultivator, while the land itself is tacitly regarded as the property of the tribe. It is thus now with the Sumatrans and others, and it was thus with our own ancestors: the members of the Mark, while they severally owned the products of the areas they respectively cultivated, did not own the areas themselves. Though it may be said that at first they were members of the same family, gens, or clan, and that the ownership of each tract was private ownership in so far as the tract belonged to a cluster of relations; yet since the same kind of tenure continued after the population of the Mark had come to include men who were unrelated to the rest, ownership of the tract by the community and not by individuals became an established arrangement. This primitive condition will be clearly understood after contemplating the case of the Russians, among whom it has but partially passed away.

The village lands were held in common by all the members of the association [mir]; the individual only possessed his harvest, and the dvor or enclosure immediately surrounding his house. This primitive condition of property existing in Russia up to the present day was once common to all European peoples. [The History of Russia, A. Rambaud, trans. Lang, vol. i., p. 45.]

With this let me join a number of extracts from Wallace's Russia, telling us of the original state of things and of the subsequent states. After noting the fact that while the Don Cossacks were purely nomadic, "agriculture was prohibited on pain of death"–apparently because it interfered with hunting and cattle breeding–he says:

Each Cossack who wished to raise a crop ploughed and sowed wherever he thought fit, and retained as long as he chose the land thus appropriated; and when the soil began to show signs of exhaustion, he abandoned his plot and ploughed elsewhere. As the number of agriculturists increased, quarrels frequently arose. Still worse evils appeared when markets were created in the vicinity In some stanitzas [Cossack villages] the richer families appropriated enormous quantities of the common land by using several teams of oxen, or by hiring peasants in the nearest villages to come and plough for them; and instead of abandoning the land after raising two or three crops they retained possession of it. Thus the whole of the arable land, or at least the best parts of it, became actually if not legally, the private property of a few families. [Ibid. , ii, 86.]

Then he explains that as a consequence of something like a revolution:

In accordance with their [the landless members of the community's] demands the appropriated land was confiscated by the Commune and the system of periodical distributions... was introduced. By this system each adult male possesses a share of the land." [Ibid., ii, 87.]

On the Steppes a plot of land is commonly cultivated for only three or four years in succession. It is then abandoned for at least double that period, and the cultivators remove to some other portion of the communal territory . . . Under such circumstances the principle of private property in the land is not likely to strike root; each family insists on possessing a certain quantity rather than a certain plot of land, and contents itself with a right of usufruct, whilst the right of property remains in the hands of the Commune. [Ibid. , ii, 91.]

But in the central and more advanced districts this early practice has become modified, though without destroying the essential character of the tenure.

According to this system [the three-field system] the cultivators do not migrate periodically from one part of the communal territory to another, but till always the same fields, and are obliged to manure the plots which they occupy.. . . Though the three-field system has been in use for many generations in the central provinces, the communal principle, with its periodical reallotment of the land, still remains intact. [Ibid., ii, 92.]

Such facts, and numerous other such facts, put beyond question the conclusion that before the progress of social organization changed the relations of individuals to the soil, that relation was one of joint ownership and not one of individual ownership.

How was this relation changed? How only could it be changed? Certainly not by unforced consent. It cannot be supposed that all, or some, of the members of the community willingly surrendered their respective claims. Crime now and again caused loss of an individual's share in the joint ownership; but this must have left the relations of the rest to the soil unchanged. A kindred result might have been entailed by debt, were it not that debt implies a creditor; and while it is scarcely supposable that the creditor could be the community as a whole, indebtedness to any individual of it would not empower the debtor to transfer in payment something of which he was not individually possessed, and which could not be individually received. Probably elsewhere there came into play the cause described as having operated in Russia, where some, cultivating larger areas than others, accumulated wealth and consequent power, and extra possessions; but, as is implied by the fact that in Russia this led to a revolution and reinstitution of the original state, the process was evidently there, and probably elsewhere, regarded as aggressive. Obviously the chief cause must have been the exercise of direct or indirect force: sometimes internal but chiefly external. Disputes and fights within the community, leading to predominance (achieved in some cases by possession of fortified houses) prepared the way for partial usurpations. When, as among the Suanetians, we have a still-extant case in which every family in a village has its tower of defense, we may well understand how the intestine feuds in early communities commonly brought about individual supremacies, and how these ended in the establishment of special claims upon the land subordinating the general claims.

But conquest from without has everywhere been chiefly instrumental in superseding communal proprietorship by individual proprietorship. It is not to be supposed that in times when captive men were made slaves and women appropriated as spoils of war, much respect was paid to preexisting ownership of the soil. The old English buccaneers who, in their descents on the coast, slew priests at the altars, set fire to churches, and massacred the people who had taken refuge in them, would have been very incomprehensible beings had they recognized the landownership of such as survived. When the pirate Danes, who in later days ascended the rivers, had burnt the homesteads they came upon, slaughtered the men, violated the women, tossed children on pikes or sold them in the marketplace, they must have undergone a miraculous transformation had they thereafter inquired to whom the Marks belonged, and admitted the titles of their victims to them. And similarly when, two centuries later, after constant internal wars had already produced military rulers maintaining quasi-feudal claims over occupiers of lands, there came the invading Normans, the right of conquest once more overrode such kinds of possession as had grown up, and still further merged communal proprietorship in that kind of individual proprietorship which characterized feudalism. victory, which gives unqualified power over the defeated and their belongings, is followed, according to the nature of the race, by the assertion of universal ownership, more or less qualified according to the dictates of policy. While in some cases, as in Dahomey, there results absolute monopoly by the king, not only of the land but of everything else, there results in other cases, as there resulted in England, supreme ownership by the king with recognized subownerships and subsubownerships of nobles and their vassals holding the land one under another, on condition of military service: supreme ownership being, by implication, vested in the crown.

Both the original state and the subsequent states have left their traces in existing land laws. There are many local rights which date from a time when "private property in land, as we now understand it, was a struggling novelty."[7]

The people who exercise rights of common exercise them by a title which, if we could only trace it all the way back, is far more ancient than the lord's. Their rights are those which belonged to the members of the village community long before manors and lords of the manor were heard of.[8]

And anyone who observes what small tenderness for the rights of commoners is shown in the obtainment of Inclosure-Acts, even in our own day, will be credulous indeed if he thinks that in ruder times the lapse of communal rights into private rights was equitably effected. The private ownership, however, was habitually incomplete; since it was subject to the claims of the overlord, and through him, again, to those of the over-overlord: the implication being that the ownership was subordinate to that of the head of the community. "No absolute ownership of land is recognized by our law books except in the Crown. All lands are supposed to be held, immediately. or mediately, of the Crown, though no rent or services may be payable, and no grant from the Crown on record."[9] And that this conception of landownership survives, alike in theory and in practice, to the present time, is illustrated by the fact that year by year state authority is given for appropriating land for public purposes, after making due compensation to existing holders. Though it may be replied that this claim of the state to supreme landownership is but a part of its claim to supreme ownership in general, since it assumes the right to take anything on giving compensation; yet the first is an habitually enforced claim, while the other is but a nominal claim not enforced; as we see in the purchase of pictures for the nation, to effect which the state enters into competition with private buyers, and may or may not succeed.

It remains only to point out that the political changes which have slowly replaced the supreme power of the monarch by the supreme power of the people, have, by implication, replaced the monarch's supreme ownership of the land by the people's supreme ownership of the land. If the representative body has practically inherited the governmental powers which in past times vested in the king, it has at the same time inherited that ultimate proprietorship of the soil which in past times vested in him. And since the representative body is but the agent of the community. this ultimate proprietorship now vests in the community. Nor is this denied by landowners themselves. The report issued in December 1889 by the council of "The Liberty and Property Defense League," on which sit several peers and two judges, yields proof. After saying that the essential principle of their organization, "based upon recorded experience," is a distrust of "officialism, imperial or municipal," the council go on to say that "this principle applied to the case of land clearly points to individual ownership, qualified by State-suzerainty. . . . The land can of course be `resumed' on payment of full compensation, and managed by the `people' if they so will it."

And the badness of the required system of administration is the only reason urged for maintaining the existing system of landholding: the supreme ownership of the community being avowedly recognized. So that whereas, in early stages, along with the freedom of each man, there went joint ownership of the soil by the body of men; and whereas, during the long periods of that militant activity by which small communities were consolidated into great ones, there simultaneously resulted loss of individual freedom and loss of participation in landownership; there has, with the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism, been a reacquirement of individual freedom and a reacquirement of such participation in landownership as is implied by a share in appointing the body by which the land is now held. And the implication is that the members of the community. habitually exercising as they do, through their representatives, the power of alienating and using as they think well, any portion of the land, may equitably appropriate and use, if they think fit, all portions of the land. But since equity and daily custom alike imply that existing holders of particular portions of land, may not be dispossessed without giving them in return its fairly estimated value, it is also implied that the wholesale resumption of the land by the community can be justly effected only by wholesale purchase of it. Were the direct exercise of ownership to be resumed by the community without purchase, the community would take, along with something which is its own, an immensely greater amount of something which is not its own. Even if we ignore those multitudinous complications which, in the course of century after century. have inextricably entangled men's claims, theoretically considered–even if we reduce the case to its simplest theoretical form; we must admit that all which can be claimed for the community is the surface of the country in its original unsubdued state. To all that value given to it by clearing, breaking-up, prolonged culture, fencing, draining, making roads, farm buildings, &c., constituting nearly all its value, the community has no claim. This value has been given either by personal labor, or by labor paid for, or by ancestral labor; or else the value given to it in such ways has been purchased by legitimately earned money. All this value artificially given vests in existing owners, and cannot without a gigantic robbery be taken from them. If, during the many transactions which have brought about existing landownership, there have been much violence and much fraud, these have been small compared with the violence and the fraud which the community would be guilty of did it take possession, without paying for it, of that artificial value which the labor of nearly two thousand years has given to the land.

§ 298. Reverting to the general topic of the chapter–the rights to the uses of natural media–it chiefly concerns us here to note the way in which these rights have gradually acquired legislative sanctions as societies have advanced to higher types.

At the beginning of the chapter we saw that in modern times there have arisen legal assertions of men's equal rights to the uses of light and air: no forms of social organization or class interests having appreciably hindered recognition of these corollaries from the law of equal freedom. And we have just seen that by implication, if not in any overt or conscious way, there has in our days been recognized the equal rights of all electors to supreme ownership of the inhabited area–rights which, though latent, are asserted by every act of Parliament which alienates land. Though this right to the use of the earth possessed by each citizen, is traversed by established arrangements to so great an extent as to be practically suspended; yet its existence as an equitable claim cannot be denied without affirming that expropriation by state decree is inequitable. The right of an existing holder of land can be equitably superseded, only if there exists a prior right of the community at large; and this prior right of the community at large consists of the sum of the individual rights of its members.

NOTE. Various considerations touching this vexed question of landownership, which would occupy too much space if included here, I have included in Appendix B.

[II-94]

CHAPTER XII.

THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.↩

§ 299. Since all material objects capable of being owned, are in one way or other obtained from the earth, it results that the right of property is originally dependent on the right to the use of the earth. While there were yet no artificial products, and natural products were therefore the only things which could be appropriated, this was an obviously necessary connection. And though, in our developed form of society, there are multitudinous possessions, ranging from houses, furniture, clothes, works of art, to banknotes, railway shares, mortgages, government bonds, &c., the origins of which have no manifest relation to use of the earth; yet it needs but to remember that they either are, or represent, products of labor, that labor is made possible by food, and that food is obtained from the soil, to see that the connection, though remote and entangled, still continues. Whence it follows that a complete ethical justification for the right of property, is involved in the same difficulties as the ethical justification for the right to the use of the earth.

The justification attempted by Locke is unsatisfactory. Saying that "though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person," and inferring that "the labor of his body and the work of his hands," are therefore his, he continues: "Whatever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." But one might reply that as, according to the premises, "the earth and all inferior creatures" are "common to all men," the consent of all men must be obtained before any article can be equitably "removed from the common state nature hath placed it in." The question at issue is, whether by labor expended in removing it, a man has made his right to the thing greater than the preexisting rights of all other men put to- gether. The difficulty thus arising may be avoided however. There are three ways in which, under savage, semicivilized, and civilized conditions, men's several rights of property may be established with due regard to the equal rights of all other men.

Among the occupiers of a tract who gather or catch the wild products around, it may be tacitly, if not overtly, agreed that having equal opportunities of utilizing such products, appropriation achieved by any one shall be passively assented to by the others. This is the general understanding acted upon by the members of hunting tribes. It is instructive to observe, however, that among some of them there is practically. if not theoretically, asserted the qualification indicated above; for usage countenances a partial claim by other tribesmen to game which one of the tribe has killed: apparently implying the belief that this prey was in part theirs before it was killed. Schoolcraft tells us concerning the Comanches that

They recognize no distinct rights of meum and tuum, except to personal property; holding the territory they occupy, and the game that depastures upon it, as common to all the tribe: the latter is appropriated only by capture. . . . He who kills the game retains the skin, and the meat is divided according to the necessity of the party always without contention, as each individual shares his food with every member of the tribe.

Kindred usages and ideas are found among the Chippewayans. Schoolcraft writes:

In the former instance [when game is taken in inclosures by a hunting party], the game is divided among those who have been engaged in pursuit of it. In the latter [when taken in private traps] it is considered as private property: nevertheless, any unsuccessful hunter passing by may take a deer so caught, leaving the head, skin, and saddle for the owner.

The quasi-equitable nature of these several arrangements, vaguely. if not definitely. regarded as right, will be fully appreciated by one who is joint tenant of a fishing, or is privileged along with other guests to utilize one, and who is conscious of annoyance if a cotenant, or companion guest, makes undue use of it: a feeling which would be still stronger were an unfair share of food appropriated as well as an unfair share of sport.

Passing from the hunting stage to the semisettled stage, we meet with usages having the same general implications. The occupied area, instead of being equally available by all for gathering and catching the food it spontaneously yields, becomes equally available by all for growing food; and the products of labor in the last case, like the achievements of labor in the first, are owned by those who expend the labor. It is perceived that the assent of the clan to ownership of food grown on an appropriated portion by any one, is implied in the assumptions of kindred ownerships, similarly established, by all others. As shown by the Russian tenures described in the last chapter, the indefinite understanding thus arising, passes eventually into a definite understanding: there is a partition of the land into equal portions; a farming of each portion by its appointed owner; and a recognition of the produce as his property. A kindred understanding existed among the Irish in the time of Henry II and later. "The land belonging to the tribe was shared among its members, but redivided among them at certain intervals of years": the implication being that, by general agreement, whatever the individual obtained from the land by his labor under these conditions was exclusively his. In this case then, as in the first, the right of property arises in conformity with the law of equal freedom.

Though we cannot say that ownership of property, thus arising, results from actual contract between each member of the community and the community as a whole, yet there is something like a potential contract; and such potential contract might grow into an actual contract if one part of the community devoted itself to other occupations, while the rest continued to farm: a share of the produce being in such case payable by agreement to those who had ceased to be farmers, for the use of their shares of the land. We have no evidence that such a relation between occupiers and the community, with consequent authorized rights of property in the produce which remained after payment of a portion equivalent to rent, has ever arisen; for, as we have seen, the original ownership by the community has habitually been usurped by internal or external aggressors, and the rent, taking the shape, if not of produce, then of labor or military service, has been habitually paid to the usurper, a state of things under which equitable rights of property, in common with equitable rights of all kinds, are submerged. But out of such usurpations there has grown up, as we have seen, ownership by the state and tenancy under it; from which there may again arise a theoretically equitable right of property. In China, where "the land is all held directly from the Crown" "on payment of an annual tax," with "composition for personal service to the government," the legitimate proprietorship of such produce as remains after payment of rent to the community, can be asserted only on the assumption that the emperor stands for the community. In India, where the government is supreme landowner, and where, until the zemindar system was established, it was the direct receiver of rents, the derivation of a right of property by contract between the individual and the community can be still less asserted without a strained interpretation. Nor at home, where the theory that each landowner is a tenant of the crown is little more than a theory, is there any better fulfillment of the ethical requirement. Only here and there, where state ownership is not potential but actual, and ordinary rents are paid by occupiers to the crown (which has now in such cases come to be identified with the community), has there been consequently established that kind of use of the earth which gives a theoretically valid basis to the right of private property.

But admitting that the establishment of an ethically complete right of property is beset with difficulties like those which beset the establishment of an ethically complete right to the use of the earth, we are nevertheless shown by a survey of the facts which existing primitive societies present, and the facts traceable in the early histories of civilized societies, that the right of property is originally deducible from the law of equal freedom; and that it ceases to be so deducible only when the other corollaries from the law of equal freedom have been disregarded.

§ 300. This deduction, early recognized in custom and afterwards formulated by legislators, has come to be elaborated and enforced more and more fully as society has developed.

That the right of property was originally conceived as a claim established by labor which was carried on without aggressing on others, is seen in the fact that among the rudest peoples, who have developed the conception to the smallest extent, there is property in weapons, implements, dress and decorations–things in which the value given by labor bears a specially large ratio to the value of the raw material. When with such articles we join huts, which, however, being commonly made by the help of fellow men who receive reciprocal aid, are thus less distinctly products of an individual's labor, we have named about all the things in which, at first, the worth given by effort is great in comparison with the inherent worth; for the inherent worth of the wild food gathered or caught is more obvious than the worth of the effort spent in obtaining it. And this is doubtless the reason why. in the rudest societies, the right of property is more definite in respect of personal belongings than in respect of other things.

That recognition of the right of property is originally recognition of the relation between effort and benefit, is, at a later stage, shown in the regime of the patriarchal group and the house community; for though, as Sir Henry Maine points out, the head of the group was at first nominally owner of all its possessions, yet, in fact, he held its possessions in trust, and each of its members, while he did his share in the carrying on of the joint labors, had his share in the proceeds. Though this arrangement–quasi-socialistic within the group, but competitive outside the group–does not give definite expression to the right of individual property, it tacitly asserts that labor must bring to the laborer something like its equivalent in produce. And the tacit assertion passes into an overt assertion in those cases where members of the group acquire property in virtue of labor expended by them apart from the labors of the rest.

To trace the development of the right of property as established by rulers and administered by their agents, setting out with the interdict on theft in the Hebrew commandments, and continuing down to modern days, in which proprietorships of all kinds have been legally formulated in multitudinous detail and with great precision, would be no less out of place than it would be superfluous. It suffices for present purposes to note that this implication of the principle of justice, perceived from the first perhaps more clearly than any other, has gained in the course of social progress increased definiteness of recognition as well as increased extension and increased peremptoriness; so that now, breach of the right of property by unauthorized appropriation of a turnip or a few sticks, has become a punishable offense; and there is ownership of a son, of a pattern, of a trademark.

§ 301. Supposing themselves to be justified, and indeed enjoined by moral principle, many in our days are seeking to override this right. They think it wrong that each man should receive benefits proportionate to his efforts–deny that he may properly keep possession of all which his labor has produced, leaving the less capable in possession of all which their labors have produced. Expressed in its briefest form, their doctrine is–Let unlike kinds and amounts of work bring like shares of produce–let there be "equal division of unequal earnings."

That communism implies violation of justice as defined in foregoing chapters, is manifest. When we assert the liberty of each bounded only by the like liberties of all, we assert that each is free to keep for himself all those gratifications and sources of gratification which he procures without trespassing on the spheres of action of his neighbors. If, therefore, one obtains by his greater strength, greater ingenuity. or greater application, more gratifications or sources of gratification, than others, and does this without in any way trenching on the spheres of action of others, the law of equal freedom assigns him exclusive possession of all such extra gratifications and sources of gratification; nor can others take them from him without claiming for themselves greater liberty of action than he claims, and thereby violating the law.

In past times the arrangements made were such that the few superior profited at the expense of the many inferior. It is now proposed to make arrangements such that the many inferior shall profit at the expense of the few superior. And just as the old social system was assumed by those who maintained it to be equitable, so is this new social system assumed to be equitable by those who propose it. Being, as they think, undoubtedly right, this distribution may properly be established by force; for the employment of force, if not avowedly contemplated, is contemplated by implication. With a human nature such as has been known throughout the past and is known at present, one who, by higher power, bodily or mental, or greater endurance of work, gains more than others gain, will not voluntarily surrender the excess to such others: here and there may be found a man who would do this, but he is far from being the average man. And if the average superior man will not voluntarily surrender to others the excess of benefit gained by his superiority. the implication is that he must be obliged to do this, and that the use of force to oblige him is justifiable. That the many inferior are physically able thus to coerce the few superior is agreed on both sides; but the assumption of the communists is that the required coercion of the minority who are best by the majority who are worst would be equitable.

After what was said in the early chapters of this Part, it scarcely needs pointing out that a system established in pursuance of this doctrine would entail degeneration of citizens and decay of the community formed by them. Suspension of that natural discipline by which every kind of creature is kept fit for the activities demanded by the conditions of life, would inevitably bring about unfitness for life and either prompt or slow disappearance.

§ 302. While absolute ethics thus asserts the right of property, and while no such breach of it as is implied by the schemes of communists is warranted by that relative ethics which takes account of transitional needs, relative ethics dictates such limitation of it as is necessitated for defraying the costs of protection, national and individual.

The truth recognized at the outset, that the preservation of the species, or that variety of it constituting a nation, is an end which must take precedence of individual preservation, has already been cited as justifying that subordination of the right to life which is implied by exposure to possible death in defensive war, and as also justifying that subordination of the right to liberty which military service and subjection necessitate. Here it must be again cited as affording a legitimate reason for appropriating such portions of the possessions and the earnings of individuals, as may be required for adequately resisting enemies. But while there is thus a quasi-ethical justification for whatever encroachment on the right of property is necessitated for the purposes of defensive war, there is no justification for any such encroachment for the purposes of offensive war.

No less manifest is it that the right of property is legitimately subject to one further restriction. Property must be trenched upon for supporting those public administrations by which the right of property, and all other rights, are enforced. In a society wholly composed of men who duly respected one another's claims, no such partial invasion of the right of property would be called for; but in existing societies and in such societies as are likely to exist for a long time to come, the nearest approach to fulfillment of the law of equal freedom is made when the various deduced rights are sacrificed to the extent needful for preservation of the remainders. Relative ethics, therefore, warrants such equitably distributed taxation as is required for maintaining order and safety.

[II-103]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE RIGHT OF INCORPOREAL PROPERTY.↩

§ 303. Even the dog, which not only fights to retain a bone he has found but fights also to preserve the coat or other object left in his charge by his master, can recognize ownership of a visible, tangible object; and hence it is clear that only a small reach of intelligence is needed for framing in thought the right of material property. But a much greater reach of intelligence is called for when the property is neither visible nor tangible. Constructive imagination is requisite for conceiving the existence of a mental product; and a higher constructive imagination is requisite for conceiving that a product of mental labor may as truly be considered property as a product of manual labor.

That the two stand on the same footing is demonstrable, whether we contemplate the positive or the negative element of the right. Remembering that justice under its positive aspect consists in the reception by each individual of the benefits and evils of his own nature and consequent conduct, it is manifest that if any individual by mental labor achieves some result, he ought to have whatever benefit naturally flows from this result. Justice, as we have defined it, requires that the connection between conduct and consequence in this case shall not be traversed any more than in any other case: the claim to the anticipated good is a valid claim.

No less obvious is it that the negative element of justice, which, among associated creatures, restrains the activities of each within the limits imposed by the like activities of all, forbids appropriation of another's mental product; or rather, forbids use of it without the assent of the producer, if it is of a kind from the use of which by others the producer sought advantage. Supposing a mental product elaborated by A, is, without his assent, used to their own advantage by B, C, and D, they commit breaches of the law of equal freedom; since they have severally benefited by utilizing the product of A's mental labor without affording A an opportunity of benefiting by utilizing any equivalent products, material or mental, of their own labor. Should it be replied that A's mental product is not taken away from him by others but only used by them; then the rejoinder is that with mental products, as with material products, the use by others may be the contemplated source of profit. One who builds a house and lets it, or makes a carriage which travelers hire, is held to be defrauded by those who occupy the house or hire the carriage without payment. He did not provide for his own use but for others' use and he does not receive that return the expectation of which prompted the building or the making. Even if no express contract has been made to pay the rent or hire, the owner is admittedly injured. Similarly, then, though one who has elaborated a mental product is not deprived of it by those who use it, yet even in the absence of any definite understanding with them, he is defrauded if others use it without giving him the benefit for which he worked.

There are two classes of mental products from others' use, or reception, of which, the producers expect advantage: those embodied in books, musical compositions, works of plastic art, &c., and those embodied in inventions, mechanical or other. We will consider these separately.

§ 304. A man may read, listen and observe to any extent without diminishing the liberty of others to do the like. The knowledge thus obtained may be digested, reorganized and new knowledge educed from it by its possessor, without trespassing against his fellows. If he keeps to himself these derived conclusions valuable for guidance, or elaborated thoughts valuable for beauty, no one can say that he exceeds the limits of individual freedom; and if, instead of keeping them to himself, he decides to publish them, he may without aggressing upon any one impose his own terms. Others remain free to accept or refuse, and if they refuse, remain as they were before. But if others disregard his terms–if, having sold to them copies of his book, either himself or through an agent, on the tacit understanding that for so much money he gives, along with the printed paper, the right of reading and of lending to read, but not the right of reproduction; then any one who reproduces breaks the tacitly imposed conditions and commits an aggression. In return for the money paid, he takes a benefit far greater than that which was intended to be given for the money.

Strangely enough, there are intelligent men who contend that when a book has been issued it becomes public property, and that it is a corollary from the principles of free trade that any one who pleases may reprint it and sell copies for his own advantage. They assert that a copyright is a monopoly–ought not to be considered a form of private property. But if nobody's property is taken by one who infringes copyright, how can the thing taken be of value? And if the thing taken be of no value, then the man who takes it would be no worse off if prevented from taking it. If he would be worse off, then clearly he has got something of value. And since this something of value is not a natural product, the obtainment of it must be at the expense of some one who artificially produced it. As I some years since argued:

Those who, as members of the Copyright Commission, or as witnesses before it, have aimed, if not to abolish copyright, yet to restrict it in ways which would go far towards its abolition, have done so in the alleged interests of free trade, and have sought to discredit the author's claim, as now recognized, by calling it a monopoly In the politicoeconomic sense a monopoly is an arrangement under which a person or body of persons is given by law the exclusive use of certain natural products, or agencies, or facilities, which, in the absence of such law, would be open to all; and the opponent of a monopoly is one who, asking nothing from the monopolist in the way of direct or indirect assistance, asks only that he also may use these same natural products, or agencies, or facilities. He wishes to carry on a business which in not the remotest way makes him dependent on the monopolist, but which he can carry on as well or better in the absence of the monopolist, and in the absence of everything done by him. Turn now to the commerce of literature, and ask how stands the so-called free trader and the so-called monopolist? Does the so-called monopolist (the author) forbid the so-called free trader (the reprinter) to use any of those appliances or processes, intellectual or mechanical, by which books are produced? No. These remain open to all. Does the so-called free trader wish simply to use these open facilities independently, just as he might do if the so-called monopolist and his works were absent? No. He wishes to be dependent–he wishes to get advantages which he could not have were the so-called monopolist and his works absent. Instead of complaining, as the true free trader does, that the monopolist is an obstacle put in his way, this pseudo free trader complains that he may not utilize certain aids which have arisen from the labor of the man whom he calls a monopolist. The true free trader wishes only to use natural facilities, and complains of an artificial impediment. The pseudo free trader, not content with the natural facilities, complains that he may not use, without buying it, an artificial aid. Certain opponents of copyright expressed astonishment before the Commission that authors should be so blinded by self-interest as not to see that in defending their claims, as now recognized, they were defending a monopoly These authors might fitly express their astonishment that professed exponents of politicoeconomical principles should confound the case of a man who wishes to trade just as he might do had a certain other man never existed, with the case of a man who wishes to trade in a way that would be impossible had a certain other man never existed. The entire anticopyright argument rests on the confusion of two things radically opposed, and with the establishment of the proper distinction the argument disappears. [Edinburgh Review, October 1878, pp. 32—30.]

Considered, then, as a deduction from the fundamental principle of justice, copyright cannot, I think, be questioned with any show of reason.

§ 305. First customs, and then laws, have recognized the claims of mental producers. Originally, authors "were rewarded by the contributions of the audience or by the patronage of those illustrious persons in whose houses they recited their works": disregard of the obligation to remunerate being regarded as mean, if not dishonest. In later Roman times, this proprietory right had become so far established as to have a mercantile value. Mr. Copinger points out that several ancient authors sold their productions; viz. Terence his Eunuchus and Hecyra, and Statius his Agave: the implication being that the copyists had acquired practically, if not by law, exclusive use of the MSS. In our own country, the equitable claim of the author has for these two centuries been enforced. An act of Charles II forbade the printing of a work without the writer's assent; and under this act, copyrights were so far established as to be bought and sold. In 1774 it was decided that common law gives the author and his assigns sole right of publication in perpetuity; but that the period had been abridged by a previous statute to a term of years. The principle was subsequently extended to other forms of mental products, as specified in the essay by Mr. Robertson–to certain works of art by 8 Geo. II, c. 13, 7 Geo. III, c. 38, and 38 Geo. III, c. 71 (models and casts); to dramatic productions by 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 15; to lectures by 5 & 6 Will. IV, c. 65; to musical productions by 5 & 6 Vict., c. 45; to lithographs by 15 & 16 Vict., c. 12, and to paintings in 1862.

By those who have legislated, as well as by those who have considered the question from an ethical point of view, the proper duration of copyright has been a problem not easily solved: should it be for the author and his descendants without limit, or for his life and a term of years after, or for his life only? There is no obvious reason why property of this kind should not be subject to the same laws of possession and bequest as other property. If it be said that the language, knowledge, and other products of past culture used by the author or artist, belong to society at large; the reply is that these mental products of civilization are open to all, and that an author or artist has not by using them diminished the ability of others to use them. Without abstracting anything from the common stock, he has simply combined with certain components of it something exclusively his own–his thoughts, his conclusions, his sentiments, his technical skill: things which more truly belong to him than do any visible and tangible things to their owners; since all of these contain raw material which has been removed from the potential use of others. So that in fact a production of mental labor may be regarded as property in a fuller sense than may a product of bodily labor; since that which constitutes its value is exclusively created by the worker. And if so, there seems no reason why the duration of possession in this case should not be at least as great as the duration of possession in other cases.

Leaving this question, however, it is enough to note here that the right of property in this species of mental product, above deduced from the formula of justice, has, in later civilized times, come to be embodied in law, and that the embodiment of it in law has become more extensive and more specific as social development has become higher.

§ 306. What has been said above in relation to books and works of art, applies, by simple change of terms, to inventions. In imagining and bringing to bear any new or partially new, mechanical appliance, or in devising some process different from, or better than, those before known, the inventor is making no greater use of preexisting ideas, tools, materials, processes, than every other person may make. He abridges no one's liberty of action. Hence, without overstepping the prescribed limits, he may claim the exclusive benefit of his invention; and, if he discloses the secret, may. without aggressing upon any one, dictate the terms for utilization. While, contrariwise, another person who does not accede to his terms, cannot utilize his invention without breach of the law of equal freedom; since he appropriates a product of the inventor's labor without allowing the inventor to appropriate an equivalent product of his labor or an equivalent possession of some other kind.

That one who has spent years in thinking and experimenting, often joining expenditure of money with his brain work and handwork, should not be admitted to have an equitable claim to the resulting advantage, is a fact discreditable to the average conscience; and it is the more discreditable when taken in connection with the fact that various claims implying no labor or sacrifice are not only allowed but insisted upon. A speculator who makes money by a rise in the share market, a sinecurist who has long received a large salary for doing nothing, and even a descendant of a king's mistress who is in receipt of a pension that was granted in perpetuity, has his conventionally established rights tenderly considered; while the mechanic who, working early and late, perhaps to the destruction of his health and the frittering away of all his means, has at length perfected a machine of marvelous efficiency, is not supposed to have acquired any "vested interest" in this outcome of the vital energies he has irrecoverably spent upon it. Most of his fellow men are quite willing that he should sacrifice time and money and labor, meanwhile jeering at him as a visionary schemer; but when to their astonishment he succeeds, and the beneficial results flowing from his achievement become manifest, there arises the exclamation, "Oh! this is a monopoly and ought not to be tolerated." Even should those in power take measures to protect him and others such, so that if he can pay in fees the sum demanded he may take out a patent,[10] the measures are taken not on the score of equity but on the score of policy. "A patent is not a thing which can be claimed as a right," the lawyers say; but it is intended to "act as a stimulus to industry and talent." So that though the taking of the smallest material product–as a penny filched from the till by a shop boy–is a punishable offense, this mental product, great as its worth and immense as the labor it has cost, may, in the absence of certain legal formalities, be turned by a capitalist to immense profit, without punishment and without disgrace.

Even were an invention of no benefit to society unless thrown open to unbought use, there would still be no just ground for disregarding the inventor's claim; any more than for disregarding the claim of one who labors on his farm for his own benefit and not for public benefit. But as it is, society unavoidably gains immensely more than the inventor gains. Before he can receive any advantage from his new process or apparatus, he must confer advantages on his fellow men–must either supply them with a better article at the price usually charged, or the same article at a lower price. If he fails to do this, his invention is a dead letter; if he does it, he makes over to the world at large nearly all the new mine of wealth he has opened. By the side of the profits which came to Watt from his patents, place the profits which his improvements in the steam engine have since brought to his own nation and to all nations, and it becomes manifest that the inventor's share is infinitesimal compared with the share mankind takes. And yet there are not a few who would appropriate even his infinitesimal share!

But insecurity of this kind of mental property, like insecurity of material property, brings disastrous results. As in a society so governed that one who accumulates wealth cannot keep it, an unprosperous state results from lack of capital; so, among a people who ignore the inventor's claims, improvements are inevitably checked and industry suffers. For, on the average, ingenious men will decline to tax their brains without any prospect of returns for their labors.

Here, however, we are chiefly concerned to observe that, if not from motives of equity, then from motives of policy. the inventor's claim has slowly been established by law. Though, in our own country. patents were originally granted as matters of favor; and though, for a long period, they were confounded with monopolies rightly so-called; yet when, in 1623, monopolies rightly so-called were made illegal, there was recognized a distinction between them and the exclusive rights granted to inventors. Besides the belief that it was expedient to encourage inventors, there was perhaps a dim perception that while, in the case of a monopoly rightly so called, other people are in no way indebted to the monopolist for ability to carry on their activities, but would have done as well or much better had he never existed; in the case of the so-called monopoly of an inventor, other people who use his invention are indebted to him, and had he never existed would have been unable to do that which they now do with his help. Whether with or without any vague consciousness of this, the inventor's claim, for several centuries legislatively enforced, has of late come to be more carefully regarded; and by great reduction of fees, the impediments in the way of obtaining legal protection have been reduced. To which add that there has been a like growing recognition in the laws of other countries, and a much greater one in America; with a resulting superiority in labor-saving appliances.

A restriction of the right thus set forth and justified, must be named. It is a truth, made familiar by modern experience, that discoveries and inventions, while in part results of individual genius, are in part results of preexisting ideas and appliances. One of the implications, also made familiar by modern experience, is that about the period, when one man makes a discovery or invents a machine, some other man, possessed of similar knowledge and prompted by a like imagination, is on the way to the same discovery or invention; and that within a moderate period this discovery or invention is tolerably certain to be made elsewhere–possibly by more than one. A long-continued exclusive use of his invention would therefore be inconsistent with other equitable claims likely to arise; and hence there is need for a limitation of the period during which he may rightly receive protection. Over how many years the protection should extend, is a question which cannot be answered here; and, indeed, cannot be answered at all in any but an empirical manner. To estimate the proper period account should be taken of the observed intervals of time commonly elapsing between similar or identical inventions made by different men. There might fitly be some recognition of the prolonged thought and persevering efforts bestowed in bringing the invention to bear; and there should also enter into the calculation an estimate, based on evidence, of the probable interval during which exclusive use of the invention should be insured to make possible an adequate return for labor and risk. Obviously the case is one in which the relations of the individual to other individuals and to society, are so involved and so vague, that nothing beyond an approximately equitable decision can be reached.

§ 307. Yet another kind of that which we may class as incorporeal property has to be here dealt with–a kind distinguishable from the kinds dealt with above, in the respect that it does not finally issue in physical benefit, but issues in mental benefit–in the agreeable emotion caused by other men's approval.

This form of incorporeal property is, indeed, an accompaniment of the forms arising from mental achievements. The reputation obtained by a poem, a history. a scientific treatise, a work of plastic art, or a musical composition, is regarded by the producer as part of the reward for his labor–often, indeed, the chief part. And at the same time that he is held entitled to the resulting credit, the endeavor made by another to obtain by plagiarism the whole or part of this credit, is regarded as a disgrace. Though there is no legal penalty for this kind of theft, yet there is a social penalty. Similarly with a discovery or an invention. Not the pecuniary profit only is recognized as rightly belonging to the originator, but also the applause appropriate to his ingenuity or insight; and reprobation is vented on one who tries to intercept this applause by pretending to be the inventor to the discoverer. Tacitly, if not overtly, the acquired share in the good opinion of fellow men is considered a thing to be enjoyed; while the usurpation of it is condemned as dishonest. The reputation gained is treated as incorporeal property.

But another and far more important kind of incorporeal property is that which arises, not from intellectual achievement, but from moral conduct. If the reputation brought by mental actions which take the form of production, may fitly be regarded as incorporeal property, still more may the reputation brought by mental actions issuing in rectitude, truthfulness, sobriety. and good behavior at large, which we call character; and if deprivation of the one is flagitious still more is deprivation of the other. Earned like other property by care, self-denial, perseverance, and similarly giving its owner facilities for gaining his ends and satisfying divers desires, the esteem of others is a possession, having analogies with possessions of a palpable nature. Indeed it has, like palpable possessions, a money value; since to be accounted honest is to be preferred as one with whom dealings may be safely carried on, and to lose character is to lose business. But apart from this effect, an estate in the general goodwill appears to many of more worth than one in land. By some great action to have won golden opinions, may be a richer source of gratification than to have obtained bank stock or railway shares. Hence, men who have invested their labor in noble deeds, and receive by way of interest the best wishes and cordial greetings of society, may be considered as having claims to these rewards of virtue, resembling the claims of others to the rewards of industry. Of course this is true not only of those who are distinguished by unusual worth; it is true of all. To the degree in which each has legitimately gained a good repute, we must hold him entitled to it as a possession–a possession which, without quoting the hackneyed saying of Iago, may be held of more value than any other.

The chief way in which this product of good conduct differs from other mental products, is that though, like them, it may be taken away, it cannot be appropriated by the person who takes it away. This may perhaps, be considered a reason for classing the interdict against injuring another's character as an interdict of negative beneficence rather than an interdict of justice: an illustration of the truth that the division of ethics into separate sections cannot, in all cases, be clearly maintained. Still, since a good reputation is acquired by actions carried on within the prescribed limits to actions, and is, indeed, partly a result of respect for those limits; and since one who destroys any or all of the good reputation so acquired, interferes with another's life in a way in which the other does not interfere with his life; it may be argued that the right to character is a corollary from the law of equal freedom. If it be said that whoever is thus injured may (in some cases at least) retaliate on the injurer, as we see in recrimination, or, as among the vulgar, in the mutual calling of names; the reply is that, as shown in chapter 6, the law of equal freedom, rightly interpreted, does not permit exchange of injuries; and as it does not countenance physical retaliation neither does it countenance moral retaliation. So that though another's good character, when taken away, cannot be appropriated by the traducer, the taking of it away is still a breach of the law of equal freedom, in the same way that destroying another's clothes, or setting fire to his house, is a breach.

This reasoning concerns only those cases in which the good reputation enjoyed has been rightly obtained, and does not touch those cases in which it has been obtained by deception or survives through others' ignorance. Consequently, it cannot be held that one who injures another's good reputation by stating facts at variance with it which are not generally known, breaks the law: he simply takes away that which ought not to have been possessed. Whatever judgment may be passed on his act, it cannot be assimilated to acts in which the character taken away is one that is legitimately owned. Indeed, in many cases, his act is one which conduces to the welfare of others, and, in some cases, is prompted by the desire to prevent trespasses upon them. Hence, though it may be held punishable, in common with acts which take away character rightly possessed, there does not seem to be any ethical warrant for the punishment.

There remains to be noticed the blameworthiness of those who aid and abet the taking away of character by repeating injurious statements without taking any trouble to ascertain their truth. At present those who circulate a calumny without inquiring into the evidence, or estimating the probability. are supposed by most people to have committed no offense; but, hereafter, it will perhaps be seen that they cannot be exoneraated, but are liable to penalty. Indeed in law they are not exonerated

As in the preceding cases, the ethical requirements have, as just implied, grown into legal recognition. The forbidding of false witness against a neighbor is of ancient date. Libel, even when directed against the dead, was punishable under the Roman law. In lower stages of civilization, however, protection of character by punishment of slanderers, was established chiefly in the interests of the superior. The Buddhist code prescribed a severe punishment for insulting speech against a man of the highest caste. During early times in Europe, men of position were supposed to preserve their characters, as well as their possessions, by force of arms. Later there came legal protection of the higher from libels uttered by the lower, against whom the remedy by duel was not available. In the reign of Edward I; this remedy was initiated; and it was more fully enacted, with this avowed purpose, by Richard II. Instead of being a law for the advantage of a privileged class, the law of libel eventually became a law for the advantage of all classes; and has, in our own days, come to be constantly invoked with effect: indeed with too much effect, considering that that which may be regarded as fair criticism is sometimes held to be libelous.

Here then, as before, a conclusion which may be deduced from the fundamental principle of equity. has, with the advance of society acquired a legal embodiment.

[II-118]

CHAPTER XIV.

THE RIGHTS OF GIFT AND BEQUEST.↩

§ 308. Complete ownership of anything implies power to make over the ownership to another; since a partial or entire interdict implies partial or entire ownership by the authority issuing the interdict, and therefore limits or overrides the ownership. Hence, if the right of property is admitted, the right of gift is admitted.

The last has, indeed, as deep a root as the first. If we refer back to those conditions of sustentation of the individual and of the species, from which the fundamental principles of ethics are deducible, we see that while individual preservation depends on the habitual maintenance of the natural relation between efforts and the products of efforts, the preservation of the species depends on the transfer of parts of such products, in either prepared or crude forms, from parents to offspring. The ability to give away that which has been acquired, consequently underlies the life of every species, including the human species.

Of course there cannot be assigned the same warrant for the right of gift to others than offspring. Of this, while we say. in the first place, that it is a corollary from the right of property, we may say, in the second place, that it is also a corollary from the primary principle of justice. The joint transaction of giving

and receiving, directly concerns only the donor and the recipient; and leaves all other persons unaffected in so far as their liberties to act are concerned. Though the handing over something possessed, by A to B, may affect C, D, E, &c., by negativing certain activities which they proposed to pursue; such activities, contingent on events that might or might not happen, cannot be included among those activities which may not be hindered without aggressing upon them. Their spheres of action remain intact.

If the right of gift to others than offspring had to be decided upon from an expediency point of view, strong reasons might be assigned for concluding that unrestrained giving should not be allowed. One who duly weighs the evidence furnished by the Charity Organization Society, as well as by individuals who have investigated the results of careless squandering of pence, will be inclined to think that more misery is caused by charity (wrongly so-called) than by all the crimes which are committed; and will perhaps infer that benefit would result if almsgiving were forbidden. But in this case, universal belief in the right is so strong that no one dreams of denying it for reasons of apparent expediency.

Legislation clearly acknowledges this corollary from the law of equal freedom. Without going back in search of a law asserting the right of gift, which probably does not exist, it suffices to name the implied recognition among ourselves by an act of Elizabeth, which, while it asserts that a deed of gift is good against the grantor, makes it invalid if put in bar of the claims of creditors: implying, in fact, that while a man may give that which is his own, he may not give that which, in equity, belongs to others.

§ 309. The right of gift implies the right of bequest; for a bequest is a postponed gift. If a man may legitimately transfer what he possesses to another, he may legitimately fix the time at which it shall be transferred. When he does this by a will, he partially makes the transfer, but provides that the transfer shall take effect only when his own power of possession ceases. And his right to make a gift subject to this condition, is included in his right of ownership; since, otherwise, his ownership is incomplete.

One of the implications is that a testator cannot equitably be restrained in the distribution he makes of his property, in so far as the choice of recipients is concerned, or the amounts assigned to such recipients. If other men in their corporate capacity direct that he shall give to A or shall not give to B, or shall give to A, B, and others in such and such proportions, then other men make themselves part owners of his property: it shall be turned to purposes which they will and not to purposes which he wills. And to the extent that his power of bequest is thus interfered with, property is taken out of his possession while he still lives.

One of the illustrations of the general truth that the civilized man has greater freedom of action than the partially civilized man and the uncivilized man, is the fact that the right of bequest, scarcely recognized at first, has gradually established itself. Before law exists, custom, no less peremptory than law, habitually prescribes the modes in which property descends. Among sundry Polynesians there is primogeniture, and in Sumatra equal division among male children. Hottentots and Damaras enforce primogeniture in the male line. On the Gold Coast, and in some parts of Congo, relatives in the female line inherit. Among the Eghas and neighboring peoples, inheritance by the eldest son includes even his father's wives, except his mother. In Timbuctoo, the prescribed share of a son is double that of a daughter; while sometimes among the Ashantis, and habitually among the Fulahs, slaves and adopted children succeed: some freedom of bequest being thus possessed by these higher of the African races. In Asia, the custom of Arabs, Todas, Ghonds, and Bodo and Dhimáls requires equal division among the male sons. Sisters' sons inherit the property of a Kasia; and only accounts of Karens and Mishmis mention a father's ability to dispose of his goods as he pleases. Similarly was it with the European races in early times. Tacitus writes of the primitive Germans that "there are no wills"; Belloguet concludes that "Celtic, like German, customs did not admit a right of testament"; and Koenigswarter says the like of the Saxons and Frisians. The original ownership by the village community passed into family ownership; so that estates could not be alienated from children and other relatives. In the Merovingian period personality could be bequeathed, but land only if heirs were lacking. Feudalism, inheriting these usages, and requiring that each fief should furnish its contingent of men-at-arms properly led, regulated the mode of descent of land for this purpose; and, in so far, negatived the power of bequest. But the growth of industrialism, with its freer forms of social relations, has brought increased freedom in the disposition of property; and it has brought this in the greatest degree where industrialism has most subordinated militancy namely, among ourselves and the Americans. In France, the state decides for the testator how part of his property shall be distributed among relatives; and there exists a like limitation of his power in other European states. But here, freedom of bequest, in respect of personality, is uninterfered with in so far as distribution goes; and though, in respect of such realty as is entailed, the power of the proprietor is suspended, and becomes operative only under certain conditions, yet there is a manifest tendency towards removal of this last restriction.

§ 310. But while, along with the right of gift, the right of bequest is implied by the right of property–while a man's ownership may justly be held to include the right of leaving defined portions of what he owns to specified recipients; it does not follow that he is ethically warranted in directing what shall be done by the recipients with the property he leaves to them.

Presented in its naked form, the proposition that a man can own a thing when he is dead, is absurd; and yet, in a disguised form, ownership after death has been largely in past times, and is to a considerable extent at present, recognized and enforced by the carrying out of a testator's orders respecting the uses to be made of his bequests. For any prescribing of such uses, implying continuance of some power over the property, implies continuance of some possession; and wholly or partially takes away the possession from those to whom the property is bequeathed. Few will deny that the earth's surface, and the things on it, should be owned in full by the generation at any time existing. Hence the right of property may not equitably be so interpreted as to allow any generation to tell subsequent generations for what purposes, or under what restrictions, they are to use the earth's surface or the things on it.

This conclusion is no less forced on us if we refer back to the derivation of the right of property from the laws of life. For if, as we have seen, a prerequisite to maintenance of the species is that each individual shall receive the benefits and suffer the evils of his own conduct–if the prerequisite to continued sustentation is that when effort has been expended the product of that effort shall not be intercepted or taken away–if the right of property has this biological requirement for its ultimate justification; then, the implication is that, being a condition to the maintenance of life, it ceases with the cessation of life.

Strictly interpreted, therefore, the right of gift, when it takes the form of bequest, extends only to the distribution of the bequeathed property, and does not include specification of the uses to which it shall be put.

§ 311. Here, however, we come upon certain qualifications arising from the fact that among human beings there are other relations than those between adult citizens–the relations of parents to offspring. We have seen that the ethics of the state and the ethics of the family are opposed in nature; and hence when, as happens at the death of a parent, the ethics of both enter into the question, a compromise has to be effected.

It may, indeed, be held that were human life normal, instead of having the abnormalities due to its transitional state, difficulties would rarely arise; since the deaths of parents would not occur until children were adults, and property bequeathed to them might pass at once into their possession without restrictions. But as, under existing conditions, the deaths of parents often occur at times when children are unable to take care of themselves and their property, it results that, to fulfill parental obligations as far as possible, parents must so specify the uses of bequeathed property as to further their children's welfare during immaturity. Inasmuch as the products acquired by efforts are possessed, not for self-sustentation only, but for sustentation of offspring, it follows that when self-sustentation is prematurely ended, the acquired products may rightly be bequeathed for the sustentation of offspring; and the use of them for this purpose, being no longer possible to the parent, may be given in trust to some other person: such continued possession by the parent as is thus implied, lapsing when the offspring become adult. This bequest of property in trust for the benefit of children, necessitates a fixing of the age at which they may be judged capable of taking care of themselves and their possessions; and in fixing this age ethical considerations give us no help. All we may infer from them is that such continued ownership of property by a dead parent as is implied by prescribing the uses to be made of it for the benefit of children, may rightly last up to that age at which ordinary experiences lead men to think that the immaturity of children has ended-an age necessarily indefinite; since it varies with each type of mankind, is differently estimated by peoples of the same type, and is unlike in different individuals.

§ 312. A more perplexing question here arises. Derived though the ultimate law, alike of subhuman justice and human justice, is from the necessary conditions to self-preservation and the preservation of the species; and derived from this as are both the right of possession during life and that right of qualified possession after death implied by bequests in trust for immature children; a kindred derivation of any further right to prescribe the uses of bequeathed property appears impracticable. Nothing beyond a quite empirical compromise seems possible. On the one hand, ownership of property after death is unwarranted by the ultimate principle of justice save in the case just named. On the other hand, when property has been acquired, perhaps by unusual industry. perhaps by great skill in business (implying benefit to others as well as to self) or perhaps by an invention permanently valuable to mankind, it is hard that the owner should be wholly deprived of power to direct the uses to be made of it after his death: especially where he has no children and must leave it unbequeathed or bequeath it to strangers.

Evidently a distinction is to be made. One who holds land subject to that supreme ownership of the community which both ethics and law assert, cannot rightly have such power of willing the application of it as involves permanent alienation from the community. In respect of what is classed as personality, however, the case is different. Property which is the product of efforts, and which has resulted either from the expenditure of such efforts upon raw materials for which equivalents (representing so much labor) have been given or from the savings out of wages or salaries, and is thus possessed in virtue of that relation between actions and their consequences on the maintenance of which justice insists, stands in another category. Such property being a portion of that which society has paid the individual for work done, but which he has not consumed, he may reasonably contend that in giving it back to society, either as represented by certain of its members or by some incorporated body, he should be allowed to specify the conditions under which the bequest is to be accepted. In this case, it cannot be said that anything is alienated which belongs to others. Contrariwise, others receive that to which they have no claim; and are benefited, even when they use it for prescribed purposes: refusal of it being the alternative if the purposes are not regarded as beneficial. Still, as bequeathed personal property is habitually invested, power to prescribe its uses without any limit of time, may result in its being permanently turned to ends which, good though they were when it was bequeathed, have been rendered otherwise by social changes. Hence an empirical compromise appears needful. We seem called upon to say that a testator should have some power of directing the application of property not bequeathed to children, but that his power should be limited; and that the limits must be settled by experience of results.

§ 313. Since social self-preservation takes precedence of individual self-preservation, it follows that there exists a warrant for such qualification of the right of bequest as arises from the need for meeting the cost of protecting the society against other societies, and protecting individuals against other individuals. Granting that under existing conditions it is relatively right that the community, through its governmental agency, should appropriate the property of each citizen to the extent requisite for maintaining national defense and social order; it becomes a question of policy in what way the needful appropriations shall be made; and if it appears convenient that part of the required revenues should be raised by percentages on bequeathed property, no ethical objection can be urged.

Subject to this qualification, we see that the foregoing deductions from the law of equal freedom are justified by their correspondence with legislative provisions; and that there has been a progressive increase in the correspondence between the ethical and the legal dicta. The right of gift, not everywhere admitted in old times, has been in later times tacitly recognized by acts which limit it to property that is equitably a man’s own. The right of bequest, scarcely existing in early social stages, has been established more and more in proportion as the freedom of the individual has become greater; and has reached the fullest legislative assertion under our own free institutions and the American ones derived from them. Directions for the uses of property left to immature children, which we have seen to be ethically warranted, have become authorized by law. And such restrictions on the power of ordering what shall be done with property otherwise bequeathed, as are embodied in laws of mortmain and the like, harmonize with ethical inferences.

[II-127]

CHAPTER XV.

THE RIGHTS OF FEEE EXCHANGE AND FREE CONTRACT.↩

§ 314. What was said at the outset of the last chapter concerning the right of gift, may be said here, with change of terms, concerning the right of exchange; for exchange may not unfitly be regarded as a mutual canceling of gifts. Probably most readers will think this a fanciful interpretation of it; but, contrariwise, it is an interpretation forced on us by inspection of the facts. For whereas barter is not universally understood among the lowest tribes, the making of presents is universally understood; and where the making of presents becomes habitual, there grows up the conception that equivalent presents should be made in return. Numerous books of travel exemplify this conception. Evidently, then, from the exchange of equivalent presents, there may readily grow up a constant practice of exchange from which the idea of presents has dropped out.

But without making the right of exchange a corollary from the right of gift, it is clear that the one like the other is included in the right of property; since ownership of a thing is incomplete if it may not be transferred in place of another thing received.

Further, the right of exchange may be asserted as a direct deduction from the law of equal freedom. For of the two who voluntarily make an exchange, neither assumes greater liberty of action than the other, and fellow men are uninterfered with–remain possessed of just as much liberty of action as before. Though completion of the exchange may shut out sundry of them from advantageous transactions, yet as their abilities to enter into such transactions depended wholly on the assent of another man, they cannot be included in their normal spheres of action. These continue what they would have been had the two persons who have bargained never existed.

Obvious as is the right of exchange, recognition of it in law has arisen but slowly; and, in most parts of the world, is still far from complete. Among the Polynesian races, exchange is variously interfered with by the chiefs: here, foreign trade being monopolized by them; there, prices fixed by them; and in other places the length of a day's work. Similarly in Africa. The right of preemption in trade is possessed by chiefs among Bechuanas and Inland Negroes; and there is no business without royal assent. In Ashanti only the king and great men can trade; and in Shoa certain choice goods can be bought only by the king. The Congo people, Dahomans, and Fulahs have commercial chiefs who regulate buying and selling. Kindred limitations existed among the Hebrews and Phoenicians, as also among the Ancient Mexicans and Central Americans. At the present time the men of some South American tribes, as the Patagonians and Mundrucus, have to obtain authority from chiefs before they can trade. Like facts, presented by the European nations, down from the time when Diocletian fixed prices and wages, need not be detailed. All it concerns us to note is that interferences with exchange have diminished as civilization has advanced. They have decreased, and in some cases have disappeared from the transactions between members of the same society; and have partially disappeared later from the transactions between members of different societies. Moreover with this, as with other rights, the interferences have become smallest where the development of the industrial type with its concomitant free institutions, has become greatest, namely. among ourselves.

It is worthy of note, however, that the changes which established almost entire freedom of trade in England, were chiefly urged on grounds of policy and not on grounds of equity. Throughout the anti-Corn Law agitation little was said about the "right" of free exchange; and at the present time such reprobation as we hear of protectionists, at home and abroad, is vented exclusively against the folly of their policy and not against its inequity. Nor need we feel any surprise at this if we remember that even still the majority of men do not admit that there should be freedom of exchange in respect of work and wages. Blinded by what appear to be their interests, artisans and others tacitly deny the rights of employer and employed to decide how much money shall be given for so much labor. In this instance the law is in advance of the average opinion: it insists that each citizen shall be at liberty to make whatever bargains he pleases for his services; while the great mass of citizens insist that each shall not be at liberty to do this.

§ 315. Of course with the right of free exchange goes the right of free contract: a postponement, now understood, now specified, in the completion of an exchange, serving to turn the one into the other.

It is needless to do more than name contracts for services on certain terms; contracts for the uses of houses and lands; contracts for the completion of specified works; contracts for the loan of capital. These are samples of contracts which men voluntarily enter into without aggressing on any others–contracts, therefore, which they have a right to make.

In earlier times interferences with the right of exchange were of course accompanied by interferences with the right of contract. The multitudinous regulations of wages and prices, which century after century encumbered the statute books of civilized peoples, were examples. Decreasing with the decrease of coercive rule, these have, in our days, mostly disappeared. One such gradual change may be instanced as typifying all others–that which usury laws furnish. In sundry cases where but small progress towards free institutions had been made, the taking of interest for money lent was forbidden altogether; as among the Hebrews, as among ourselves in the remote past, and as among the French at the time of the greatest monarchical power. Then, as a qualification, we have the fixing of maximum rates; as in early ages by Cicero for his Roman province; as in England by Henry VIII at 10 percent, by James I at 8 percent, by Charles II at 6 percent, by Anne at 5 percent; and as in France by Louis XV at 4 percent. Finally we have removal of all restrictions, and the leaving of lenders and borrowers to make their own bargains.

While we observe that law has in this case gradually come into correspondence with equity. we may also fitly observe one exceptional case in which the two agree in forbidding a contract. I refer to the moral interdict and the legal interdict against a man's sale of himself into slavery. If we go back to the biological origin of justice, as being the maintenance of that relation between efforts and the products of efforts which is needful for the continuance of life, we see that this relation is suspended by bondage; and that, therefore, the man who agrees to enslave himself on condition of receiving some immediate benefit, traverses that ultimate principle from which social morality grows. Or if we contemplate the case from an immediately ethical point of view, it becomes manifest that since a contract, as framed in conformity with the law of equal freedom, implies that the contracting parties shall severally give what are approximately equivalents, there can be no contract, properly so-called, in which the terms are incommensurable; as they are when, for some present enhancement of his life, a man bargains away the rest of his life. So that when, instead of recognizing the sale of self as valid, law eventually interdicted it, the exception it thus made to the right of contract was an exception which equity also makes. Here, too, law harmonized itself with ethics.

§ 316. These rights of exchange and contract have, of course, in common with other rights, to be asserted subject to the restrictions which social self-preservation in presence of external enemies necessitates. Where there is good evidence that freedom of exchange would endanger national defense, it may rightly be hindered.

This is a limitation of the right which, in stages characterized by permanent militancy. is obviously needful. Societies in chronic antagonism with other societies must be self-sufficing in their industrial arrangements. During the early feudal period in France, "on rural estates the most diverse trades were often exercised simultaneously"; and "the castles made almost all the articles used in them." The difficulties of communication, the risk of loss of goods in transit, and the dangers arising from perpetual feuds, made it requisite that the essential commodities should be produced at home. That which held of these small social groups has held of larger social groups; and international freedom of exchange has therefore been greatly restricted. The outcry against being "dependent on foreigners," which was common during the anti-Corn Law agitation, was not without some justification; since it is only during well-assured peace that a nation may, without risk, buy a large part of its food abroad, instead of growing it.

Beyond this qualification of the rights of exchange and contract, there remains no other having an ethical warrant. Interference with the liberty to buy and sell for other reasons than that just recognized as valid, is a trespass, by whatever agency effected. Those who have been allowed to call themselves "protectionists" should be called aggressionists; since forbidding A to buy of B, and forcing him to buy of C (usually on worse terms), is clearly a trespass on that right of free exchange which we have seen to be a corollary from the law of equal freedom.

The chief fact to be here noted, however, is that among ourselves, if not among other peoples, the ethical deduction, after being justified inductively, has gained a recognition in law; if not on moral grounds, yet on grounds of policy.

[II-133]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE RIGHT TO FREE INDUSTRY.↩

§ 317. Though, under one of its aspects, industrial freedom is implied by the rights to free motion and locomotion; and though, under another of its aspects, it is implied by the rights to free exchange and free contract; yet it has a further aspect, not clearly included in these, which must be specifically stated. Though demonstration of it is scarcely called for, yet it is needful to indicate it for the purpose of showing how little it was once recognized and how fully it is recognized now.

By the right to free industry is here meant the right of each man to carry on his occupation, whatever it may be, after whatever manner he prefers or thinks best, so long as he does not trespass against his neighbors: taking the benefits or the evils of his way, as the case may be. Self-evident as this right now seems, it seemed by no means self-evident to people in past times. Naturally, indeed, it could not well be self-evident while more obvious rights were unrecognized.

Just noting that, in the far past, industry was under regulations having a religious authority, as among the Hebrews, who, in Deuteronomy XXII. 8 &c., were directed concerning methods of building and agriculture, it will suffice to observe how great and persistent were the restraints on industrial liberty among European peoples during the supremacy of that militant organization which in all ways subordinates individual wills. In Old English days, the lord of the manor in Court-leet inspected industrial products; and, after the establishment of kingship, there came directions for cropping of lands, times of shearing, mode of ploughing. After the Conquest regulations for dyeing were enacted. From Edward III onwards to the time of James 1, official searchers had to see that various wares were properly made. Certain traders were told how many assistants they should have; the growing of particular plants was made compulsory; tanners had to keep their hides in the pits for specified periods; and there were officers for the assize of bread and ale. With the development of institutions characterizing the industrial type, these restrictions on industrial freedom diminished; and, at the time George III began to reign, five-sixths of them had disappeared. Increasing though they did during the war period brought on by the French revolution, they again diminished subsequently; until there had been abolished nearly all state interferences with modes of production. Significantly enough, however, the recent revival of militancy here, consequent on the immense redevelopment of it on the Continent (set going, for the second time, by that greatest of all modern curses, the Bonaparte family), has been accompanied by a reaction towards industrial regulations; so that during the last thirty years there have been numerous acts saying how businesses shall be carried on: ranging from the interdict on taking meals in match factories except in certain parts, to directions for the building and cleaning of artisans' dwellings–from orders for the painting of bakehouses to acts punishing farmers if they employ uneducated children.

Meanwhile it is to be observed that in France, where the militant activities entailed by surroundings have developed more highly the militant type of structure, industrial regulations have been more elaborate and more rigorous: having been carried, during the latter days of the monarchy, to a scarcely credible extent. "Swarms of public functionaries" enforced rules continually complicated by new ones to remedy the insufficiency of the old: directing, for example, "the lengths pieces of cloth are to be woven, the pattern to be chosen, the method to be followed, and the defects to be avoided." Even after the revolution, when greater industrial freedom was temporarily achieved, interferences again multiplied; so that in 1806, according to Levasseur, public administrations fixed the length of the day's labor, the hours of meals, and the beginning and end of the day at the various seasons. Indeed, it is instructive to observe how, in France, where the idea of equality has always subordinated the idea of liberty; and where, under the guise of a free form of government, citizens have all along submitted without protest to a bureaucracy which has been as despotic under the republican form of government as under the monarchical; and where reversions to the completely militant type of structure have more than once occurred, and have more than once almost occurred; the industrial freedom of the individual, in common with other freedoms, has never been established so fully as here; where la gloire has not been so predominant an aim and militant organization has never been so pronounced.

But details apart, a general survey of the facts proves that during the advance from those early stages in which small respect was paid to life, liberty. and property, to those later stages in which these are held sacred, there has been an advance from a regime under which modes of production were authoritatively prescribed, to a regime under which they are left to the will of the producer; and in places where legislation most recognizes individual freedom in other respects, it most recognizes individual freedom in this respect.

[II-136]

CHAPTER XVII.

THE RIGHTS OF FREE BELIEF AND WORSHIP.↩

§ 318. If we interpret the meanings of words literally, to assert freedom of belief as a right is absurd; since by no external power can this be taken away. Indeed an assertion of it involves a double absurdity; for while belief cannot really be destroyed or changed by coercion from without, it cannot really be destroyed or changed by coercion from within. It is determined by causes which lie beyond external control, and in large measure beyond internal control. What is meant is, of course, the right freely to profess belief.

That this is a corollary from the law of equal freedom scarcely needs saying. The profession of a belief by any one, does not of itself interfere with the professions of other beliefs by others; and others, if they impose on any one their professions of belief, manifestly assume more liberty of action than he assumes.

In respect of those miscellaneous beliefs which do not concern in any obvious way the maintenance of established institutions, freedom of belief is not called in question. Ignoring exceptions presented by some uncivilized societies, we may say that it is only those beliefs, the profession of which seems at variance with the existing social order, which are interdicted. To be known as one who holds that the political system, or the social organization, is not what it ought to be, entails penalties in times and places where the militant type of organization in unqualified. But, naturally, where fundamental rights are habitually disregarded, no regard for a right less conspicuously important is to be expected. The fact that the right of political dissent is denied where rights in general are denied, affords no reason for doubting that it is a direct deduction from the law of equal freedom.

The right to profess beliefs of the religious class, has for its concomitant the right to manifest such beliefs in acts of worship. For these, too, may be performed without diminishing the like rights of fellow men, and without otherwise trespassing against them in the carrying on of their lives. So long as they do not inflict nuisances on neighboring people, as does the untimely and persistent jangling of bells in some Catholic countries, or as does the uproar of Salvation Army processions in our own (permitted with contemptible weakness by our authorities) they cannot be equitably interfered with. Those who profess other religious beliefs, in common with those who profess no religious beliefs, remain as free as before to worship in their own ways or not to worship at all.

The enunciation of these rights, needful for the symmetry of the argument, is in our day and country almost superfluous. But England is not the world; and even in England there still survive certain practical denials of these rights.

§ 319. The savage, far from possessing that freedom which sentimental speculators about society used to imagine, has his beliefs dictated by custom, in common with those usages which peremptorily regulate his life. When we read that in Guinea, a man who does not fulfill the prophecy of the fetish by getting well, is strangled because he has made the fetish lie, we may readily understand that the expression of skepticism is practically unknown. The Fijians, who, being worshippers of cannibal gods, expressed horror at the Samoans because they had no worship like their own, and whose feeling towards Jackson for disregarding one of their religious interdicts was shown by angrily calling him "the white infidel," are not likely to have tolerated any religious skepticism among their own common people, any more than they are likely to have tolerated any political skepticism respecting the divine authority of their chiefs: a conclusion we are compelled to draw on reading, in Williams, that a Fijian who had been in America endangered his life by saying that America was larger than Fiji.

Turning to ancient civilizations, we meet with various denials of the right of free belief. There is Plato's prescription of punishments for those who dissented from the Greek religion; there is the death of Socrates for attacking the current views concerning the gods; and there is the prosecution of Anaxagoras for implying that the sun was not the chariot of Apollo. Passing to the time when the profession of the Christian belief was penal, and then to the subsequent time when the profession of any other belief was penal, the only thing we have to note in connection with the doings of inquisitors and the martyrdoms, now of Protestants by Catholics and then of Catholics by Protestants, is that the thing insisted on was external conformity. It sufficed if there was nominal acceptance of the prescribed belief, without any evidence of real acceptance. Leaving the period of these earlier religious persecutions, during which there was a tacit denial of the right of free belief, it suffices to note that since the Toleration Act of 1688, which, while insisting on acknowledgment of certain fundamental dogmas, remitted the penalties on dissent from others, there have been successive relaxations. The disqualifications of dissenters for public posts were removed; by and by those of Catholics and eventually those of Jews; and still more recently the substitution of affirmation for oath has made it no longer legally imperative to assert or imply belief in a God, before being permitted to fulfill certain civil functions. Practically, every one is now free to entertain any creed or no creed, without incurring legal penalty, and with little or no social penalty.

By a kindred series of changes there has been gradually established freedom of political belief. Punishment or illusage for rejecting such a political dogma as the divine right of kings, or for calling in question the right of some particular man to reign, has ceased. The upholders of despotism and the avowed anarchists are equally at liberty to think as they please.

§ 320. Is freedom of belief, or rather the right freely to profess belief, subject to no qualification? Or from the postulate that the needs for social self-preservation must override the claims of individuals, are we to infer that under certain conditions the right may properly be limited?

The only cases in which limitation can be urged with manifest force, are those in which the beliefs openly entertained are such as tend directly to diminish the power of the society to defend itself against hostile societies. Effectual use of the combined forces of the community, presupposes subordination to the government and to the agencies appointed for carrying on war; and it may rationally be held that the open avowal of convictions which, if general, would paralyze the executive agency, ought not to be allowed. And here, indeed, we see once more how that militant regime which in various other ways suppresses or suspends the rights of individuals, interferes even with the right of free belief.

Only, indeed, as we pass gradually from that system of status which chronic hostilities produce, to that system of contract which replaces it as fast as industrial life becomes predominant, does the assertion of rights in general become more and more practicable and appropriate; and only in the course of this change does the change from the alleged duty of accepting beliefs prescribed by authority, to the asserted right of individually choosing beliefs, naturally go on.

Subject to this interpretation, we see that the right of free belief has had a history parallel to the histories of other rights. This corollary from the law of equal freedom, at first ignored and then gradually more and more recognized, has finally come to be fully established in law.

[II-141]

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RIGHTS OF FEEE SPEECH AND PUBLICATION.↩

§ 321. The subject matter of this chapter is scarcely separable from that of the last. As belief, considered in itself, does not admit of being controlled by external power–as it is only the profession of belief which can be taken cognizance of by authority and permitted or prevented, it follows that the assertion of the right to freedom of belief implies the right to freedom of speech. Further, it implies the right to use speech for the propagation of belief; seeing that each of the propositions constituting an argument or arguments, used to support or enforce a belief, being itself a belief, the right to express it is included with the right to express the belief to be justified.

Of course the one right like the other is an immediate corollary from the law of equal freedom. By using speech, either for the expression of a belief or for the maintenance of a belief, no one prevents any other person from doing the like: unless, indeed, by vociferation or persistence he prevents another from being heard, in which case he is habitually recognized as unfair, that is, as breaking the law of equal freedom.

Evidently with change of terms, the same things may be said concerning the right of publication–"the liberty of unlicensed printing." In respect of their ethical relations, there exists no essential difference between the act of speaking and the act of symbolizing speech by writing, or the act of multiplying copies of that which has been written.

One qualification, implied by preceding chapters, has to be named. Freedom of speech, spoken, written, or printed, does not include freedom to use speech for the utterance of calumny or the propagation of it; nor does it include freedom to use speech for prompting the commission of injuries to others. Both these employments of it are obviously excluded by those limits to individual liberty which have been set forth.

§ 322. Though in our time and country defense of these rights seems needless, it may be well to deal with such arguments against them as were urged among ourselves in comparatively recent times and are still urged in other countries.

It is said that a government ought to guarantee its subjects "security and a sense of security"; whence it is inferred that magistrates ought to keep ears open to the declamations of popular orators, and stop such as are calculated to create alarm. This inference, however, is met by the difficulty that since every considerable change, political or religious, is, when first urged, dreaded by the majority, and thus diminishes their sense of security, the advocacy of it should be prevented. There were multitudes of people who suffered chronic alarm during the Reform Bill agitation; and had the prevention of that alarm been imperative, the implication is that the agitation ought to have been suppressed. So, too, great numbers who were moved by the terrible forecasts of The Standard and the melancholy wailings of The Herald, would fain have put down the free-trade propaganda; and had it been requisite to maintain their sense of security, they should have had their way. And similarly with removal of Catholic disabilities. Prophecies were rife of the return of papal persecutions with all their horrors. Hence the speaking and writing which brought about the change ought to have been forbidden, had the maintenance of a sense of security been held imperative.

Evidently such proposals to limit the right of free speech, political or religious, can be defended only by making the tacit assumption that whatever political or religious beliefs are at the time established, are wholly true; and since this tacit assumption has throughout the past proved to be habitually erroneous, regard for experience may reasonably prevent us from assuming that the current beliefs are wholly true. We must recognize free speech as still being the agency by which error is to be dissipated, and cannot without papal assumption interdict it.

Beyond the need, in past times unquestioned, for restraints on the public utterance of political and religious beliefs at variance with those established, there is the need, still by most people thought unquestionable, for restraining utterances which pass the limits of what is thought decency. or are calculated to encourage sexual immorality. The question is a difficult one–appears, indeed, to admit of no satisfactory solution. On the one hand, it seems beyond doubt that unlimited license of speech on these matters, may have the effect of undermining ideas, sentiments, and institutions which are socially beneficial; for, whatever are the defects in the existing domestic regime, we have strong reasons for believing that it is in most respects good. If this be so, it may be argued that publication of doctrines, which tend to discredit this regime, is undoubtedly injurious and should be prevented. Yet, on the other hand, we must remember that in like manner it was, in the past, thought absolutely certain that the propagators of heretical opinions ought to be punished, lest they should mislead and eternally damn those who heard them; and this fact suggests that there may be danger in assuming too confidently that our opinions concerning the relations of the sexes are just what they should be. In all times and places people have been positive that their ideas and feelings on these matters, as well as on religious matters, have been right; and yet, assuming that we are right, they must have been wrong. Though here in England we think it clear that the child marriages in India are vicious, yet most Hindus do not think so; and though among ourselves the majority do not see anything wrong in mercantile marriages, yet there are many who do. In parts of Africa not only is polygamy regarded as proper but monogamy is condemned, even by women; while in Tibet polyandry is not only held right by the inhabitants but is thought by travelers to be the best arrangement practicable in their poverty-stricken country. In presence of the multitudinous differences of opinion found even among civilized peoples, it seems scarcely reasonable to take for granted that we alone are above criticism in our conceptions and practices; and unless we do this, restraints on free speech concerning the relations of the sexes may possibly be hindrances to something better and higher.

Doubtless there must be evils attendant on free speech in this sphere as in the political and religious spheres; but the conclusion above implied is that the evils must be tolerated in consideration of the possible benefits. Further, it should be borne in mind that such evils will always be kept in check by public opinion. The dread of saying or writing that which will bring social ostracism, proves in many cases far more effectual than does legal restriction.

§ 323. Though it is superfluous to point out that, in common with other rights, the rights of free speech and publication, in early times and most places either denied or not overtly recognized, have gradually established themselves; yet some evidence may fitly be cited with a view to emphasizing this truth.

Various of the facts instanced in the last chapter might be instanced afresh here; since suppression of beliefs has, by implication, been suppression of free speech. That the anger of the Jewish priests against Jesus Christ for teaching things at variance with their creed led to his crucifixion; that Paul, at first a persecutor of Christians, was himself presently persecuted for persuading men to be Christians; and that by sundry Roman emperors preachers of Christianity were martyred; are familiar examples of the denial of free speech in early times. So, too, after the Christian creed became established, the punishment of some who taught the nondivinity of Christ, of others who publicly asserted predestination, and of others who spread the doctrine of two supreme principles of good and evil, as well as the persecutions of Huss and Luther, exemplify in ways almost equally familiar the denial of the right to utter opinions contrary to those which are authorized. And so, in our country. has it been from the time when Henry IV enacted severe penalties on teachers of heresy, down to the 17th century when the nonconforming clergy were punished for teaching any other than the church doctrine and Bunyan was imprisoned for open-air preaching–down, further, to the last trial for propagating atheism, which is within our own recollection. But gradually, during recent centuries, the right of free speech on religious matters, more and more asserted, has been more and more admitted; until now there is no restraint on the public utterance of any religious opinion, unless the utterance is gratuitously insulting in manner or form.

By a parallel progress there has been established that right of free speech on political questions, which in early days was denied. Among the Athenians in Solon's time, death was inflicted for opposition to a certain established policy; and among the Romans the utterance of proscribed opinions was punished as treason. So, too, in England centuries ago, political criticism, even of a moderate kind, brought severe penalties. Later times have witnessed, now greater liberty of speech and now greater control: the noticeable fact being that during the war period brought on by the French revolution, there was a retrograde movement in respect of this right as in respect of other rights. A judge, in 1808, declared that "it was not to be permitted to any man to make the people dissatisfied with the government under which he lives." But with the commencement of the long peace there began a decrease of the restraints on political speech, as of other restraints on freedom. Though Sir F. Burdett was imprisoned for condemning the inhuman acts of the troops, and Leigh Hunt for commenting on excessive flogging in the army, since that time there have practically disappeared all impediments to the public expression of political ideas. So long as he does not suggest the commission of crimes, each citizen is free to say what he pleases about any or all of our institutions: even to the advocacy of a form of government utterly different from that which exists, or the condemnation of all government.

Of course, with increasing recognition of the right of free speech there has gone increasing recognition of the right of free publication. Plato taught that censors were needful to prevent the diffusion of unauthorized doctrines. With the growth of ecclesiastical power there came the suppression of writings considered heretical. In our own country under Queen Elizabeth, books had to be officially authorized; and even the Long Parliament reenforced that system of licensing against which Milton made his celebrated protest. But for these two centuries there has been no official censorship, save of public plays. And though many arrangements for shackling the press have since been made, yet these have gradually fallen into disuse or been repealed.

§ 324. But in this case, as in cases already noticed, it follows from the precedence which the preservation of the society has over the claims of the individual, that such restraints may rightly be put on free speech and free publication as are needful during war to prevent the giving of advantage to the enemy. If, as we have seen, there is ethical justification for subordinating the more important rights of the citizen to the extent requisite for successfully carrying on national defense, it of course follows that these less important rights may also be subordinated.

And here, indeed, we see again how direct is the connection between international hostilities and the repression of individual freedom. For it is manifest that throughout civilization the repression of freedom of speech and freedom of publication, has been rigorous in proportion as militancy has been predominant; and that at the present time, in such contrasts as that between Russia and England, we still observe the relation.

After recognizing the justifiable limitations of these rights, that which it concerns us to note is that they, in common with the others severally deduced from the law of equal freedom, have come to be recognized in law as fast as society has assumed a higher form.

[II-148]

CHAPTER XIX.

A RETROSPECT WITH AN ADDITION.↩

§ 325. Where men's natures and their institutions are incongruous, there exists a force tending to produce change. Either the institutions will remold the nature or the nature will remold the institutions, or partly the one and partly the other; and eventually a more stable state will establish itself.

In our own case the action and reaction between our social arrangements and our characters, has produced a curious result. Compromise being an essential trait of the one has become agreeable to the other; so that it is not only tolerated but preferred. There has grown up a distrust of definite conclusions, and a positive aversion to system. Naturally. statesmen and citizens who, on the one hand, unite in declaring the sovereignty of the people, and who, on the other hand, dutifully write and complacently read royal speeches which address Lords and Commons as servants, and speak of the people as "my subjects," must be impatient of any demand for consistency in their political ideas. If, while they assert the right of private judgment in religious matters, they tacitly authorize Parliament to maintain a creed for them, they must be restive when asked how they reconcile their theory with their practice. Hence, in presence of the many instances in which they have to accept contradictory doctrines, they become averse to exact thinking, resent all attempts to tie them down to precise propositions, and shrink from an abstract principle with as much alarm as a servant girl shrinks from something she takes for a ghost.

An ingrained way of thinking and feeling thus generated by social conditions, is not to be changed by any amount of reasoning. Beliefs at variance with it cannot gain much acceptance. Readers in whom the separate arguments contained in foregoing chapters have failed to produce changes of opinions, will not have their opinions changed by bringing together these arguments and showing that they converge to the same conclusion. Still, before proceeding, it will be as well to show how strong are the united proofs of the propositions from which inferences are presently to be drawn.

§ 326. We have no ethics of nebular condensation, or, of side real movement, or of planetary evolution; the conception is not relevant to inorganic actions. Nor, when we turn to organized things, do we find that it has any relation to the phenomena of plant life: though we ascribe to plants superiorities and inferiorities, leading to successes and failures in the struggle for existence, we do not associate with them praise and blame. It is only with the rise of sentiency in the animal world, that the subject matter of ethics originates. Hence ethics, presupposing animal life, and gaining an appreciable meaning as animal life assumes complex forms, must, in its ultimate nature, be expressible in terms of animal life. It is concerned with certain traits in the conduct of life, considered as good or bad respectively; and it cannot pass judgments on these traits in the conduct of life while ignoring the essential phenomena of life.

In the chapter "Animal Ethics" this connection was shown under its concrete form. We saw that, limiting our attention to any one species, the continuance of which is held to be desirable, then, relatively to that species, the acts which subserve the maintenance of the individual and the preservation of the race, are classed by us as right and regarded with a certain approbation; while we have reprobation for acts having contrary tendencies. In the next chapter, "Subhuman Justice," we saw that, for achievement of the assumed desirable end, a condition precedent is that each individual shall receive or suffer the good or evil results of its own nature and consequent actions. We saw, also, that throughout the lower animal world, where there exists no power by which this condition precedent can be traversed, it eventuates in survival of the fittest. And we further saw that, since this connection between conduct and consequence is held to be just, it follows that throughout the animal kingdom what we call justice, is the ethical aspect of this biological law in virtue of which life in general has been maintained and has evolved into higher forms; and which therefore possesses the highest possible authority.

Along with the establishment of gregarious habits there arises a secondary law. When a number of individuals live in such proximity that they are severally apt to impede one another's actions, and so to prevent one another from achieving desired results; then, to avoid antagonism and consequent dispersion, their actions have to be mutually restrained: each must carry on its actions subject to the limitation that it shall not interfere with the like actions of others more than its own actions are interfered with. And we saw that among various gregarious creatures considerable observance of such restraints is displayed.

Finally, in the chapter "Human Justice" it was shown that among men, the highest gregarious creatures, this secondary law, prefigured in a vague way among lower gregarious creatures, comes to have more pronounced, more definite, and more complex applications. Under the conditions imposed by social life, the primary principle of justice, when asserted for each individual, itself originates the secondary or limiting principle by asserting it for all other individuals; and thus the mutual restrictions which simultaneous carrying on of their actions necessitates form a necessary element of justice in the associated state.

§ 327. Adaptation, either by the direct or by the indirect process, or by both, holds of cerebral structures as of the structures composing the rest of the body; and mental functions, like bodily functions, tend ever to become adjusted to the requirements. A feeling which prompts the maintenance of freedom of action is shown by all creatures, and is marked in creatures of high organization; and these last also show some amount of the feeling which responds to the requirement that each shall act within the limits imposed by the actions of others.

Along with greater power of "looking before and after," there exist in mankind higher manifestations of both of these traits–clear where the society has long been peaceful and obscured where it has been habitually warlike. Where the habits of life have not entailed a chronic conflict between the ethics of amity and the ethics of enmity. a distinct consciousness of justice is shown; alike in respect of personal claims and the correlative claims of others. But where men's rights to life, liberty. and property. are constantly subordinated by forcibly organizing them into armies for more effectual fighting, and where by implication they are accustomed to trample on the rights of men who do not inhabit the same territory, the emotions and ideas corresponding to the principles of justice, egoistic and altruistic, are habitually repressed.

But subject to this qualification, associated life, which in a predominant degree fosters the sympathies, and while it gives play to the sentiment of egoistic justice exercises also the sentiment of altruistic justice, generates correlative ideas; so that in course of time, along with a moral consciousness of the claims of self and others, there comes an intellectual perception of them. There finally arise intuitions corresponding to those requirements which must be fulfilled before social activities can be harmoniously carried on; and these intuitions receive their most abstract expression in the assertion that the liberty of each is limited only by the like liberties of all.

Hence we get a double deductive origin for this fundamental principle. It is primarily deducible from the conditions precedent to complete life in the associated state; and it is secondarily deducible from those forms of consciousness created by the molding of human nature into conformity with these conditions.

§ 328. The conclusions thus reached by deduction agree with the conclusions which induction has led us to. Accumulated experiences have prompted men to establish laws harmonizing with the various corollaries which follow from the principle of equal freedom.

Though disregarded during war, life during peace has acquired sacredness; and all interferences with physical integrity, however trivial, have come to be regarded as offenses. The slavery which in early stages almost everywhere existed, has, with the advance of civilization, been gradually mitigated; and, in the most advanced societies, restraints on motion and locomotion have disappeared. Men's equal claims to unimpeded use of light and air, originally ignored, are now legally enforced; and, though during great predominance of militant activity the ownership of land by the community lapsed into ownership by chiefs and kings, yet now, with the development of industrialism, the truth that the private ownership of land is subject to the supreme ownership of the community, and that therefore each citizen has a latent claim to participate in the use of the earth, has come to be recognized. The right of property, invaded with small scruple in early times, when the rights to life and liberty were little regarded, has been better and better maintained as societies have advanced; and while law has with increasing efficiency maintained the right to material property, it has more and more in modern times recognized and maintained the rights to incorporeal property: patent laws, copyright laws, libel laws, have been progressively made more effectual.

Thus while, in uncivilized societies and in early stages of civilized societies, the individual is left to defend his own life, liberty, and property as best he may. in later stages the community, through its government, more and more undertakes to defend them for him. Consequently. unless it be asserted that primitive disorder was better than is the comparative order now maintained, it must be admitted that experience of results justifies the assertion of these chief rights, and endorses the arguments by which they are deduced.

§ 329. Of kindred nature and significance is an accompanying endorsement. While the community in its corporate capacity has gradually assumed the duty of guarding the rights of each man from aggressions by other men, it has gradually ceased from invading his rights itself as it once did.

Among uncivilized peoples, and among the civilized in early times, the right of bequest has been either denied (here by custom and there by law) or else greatly restricted; but with the growth of industrialism and its appropriate social forms, restrictions on the right of bequest have diminished, and in the most industrially organized nations have almost disappeared. In rude societies the ruler habitually interferes with the right of free exchange-monopolizing, restraining, interdicting; but in advanced societies internal exchanges are much less interfered with, and in our own society very little interference even with external exchanges remains. During many centuries throughout Europe, the state superintended industry, and men were told what processes they must adopt and what things they must produce; but now, save by regulations for the protection of employees, their rights to manufacture what they please and how they please are uninterfered with. Originally, creeds and observances were settled by authority; but the dictations have slowly diminished, and at present, in the most advanced societies, every one may believe or not believe, worship or not worship, as he likes. And so, too, is it with the rights of free speech and publication: originally denied and the assumption of them punished, they have gradually acquired legal recognition.

Simultaneously, governments have also ceased to interfere with other classes of private actions. Once upon a time they prescribed kinds and qualities of food and numbers of meals. To those below specified ranks they forbade certain colors for dresses, the wearing of furs, the use of embroideries and of lace; while the weapons they might wear or use were named. Those who might, and those who might not, have silver plate were specified; as also those who might wear long hair. Nor were amusements left uncontrolled. Games of sundry kinds were in some cases prohibited, and in other cases exercises were prescribed. But in modern times these interferences with individual freedom have ceased: men's rights to choose their own usages have come to be tacitly admitted.

Here again, then, unless it be maintained that sumptuary laws and the like should be reenacted, and that freedom of bequest, freedom of exchange, freedom of industry, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech, might with advantage be suppressed; it must be admitted that the inferences drawn from the formula of justice have been progressively justified by the discovery that disregard of them is mischievous.

§ 330. Yet another series of inductive verifications, not hitherto named, has to be set down–the verifications furnished by political economy.

This teaches that meddlings with commerce by prohibitions and bounties are detrimental; and the law of equal freedom excludes them as wrong. That speculators should be allowed to operate on the food markets as they see well is an inference drawn by political economy; and by the fundamental principle of equity they are justified in doing this. Penalties upon usury are proved by political economists to be injurious; and by the law of equal freedom they are negatived as involving infringements of rights. The reasonings of political economists show that machinery is beneficial to the people at large, instead of hurtful to them; and in union with their conclusions the law of equal freedom forbids attempts to restrict its use. While one of the settled conclusions of political economy is that wages and prices cannot be artificially regulated with advantage, it is also an obvious inference from the law of equal freedom that regulation of them is not morally permissible. On other questions, such as the hurtfulness of tamperings with banking, the futility of endeavors to benefit one occupation at the expense of others, political economy reaches conclusions which ethics independently deduces. What do these various instances unite in showing? Briefly, that not only harmony of cooperation in the social state, but also efficiency of cooperation, is best achieved by conformity to the law of equal freedom.

§ 331. Two deductive arguments and three inductive arguments thus converge to the same conclusion. By inference from the laws of life as carried on under social conditions, and by inference from the dicta of that moral consciousness generated by the continuous discipline of social life, we are led directly to recognize the law of equal freedom as the supreme moral law. And we are indirectly led to such recognition of it by generalizing the experiences of mankind as registered in progressive legislation; since by it we are shown that during civilization there has been a gradual increase in the governmental maintenance of the rights of individuals, and that simultaneously there has been a gradual decrease in the governmental trespasses on such rights. And then this agreement is reinforced by the proofs that what is theoretically equitable is economically expedient.

I am by no means certain that acceptance of this quintuply rooted truth will be rendered any the more likely by thus showing that the a posteriori supports of it furnished by history are joined with the a priori supports furnished by biology and psychology. If there are a priori thinkers who obstinately disregard experiences at variance with their judgments; there are also a posteriori thinkers who obstinately deny all value to intuitive beliefs. They have faith in the cognitions resulting from the accumulated experiences of the individual, but no faith in the cognitions resulting from the accumulated experiences of the race. Here, however, we avoid both kinds of bigotry. The agreement of deduction with induction yields the strongest proof; and where, as in this case, we have plurality of both deductions and inductions, there is reached as great a certainty as can be imagined.

[II-57]

CHAPTER XX.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.↩

§ 332. When in certain preceding chapters the fundamental principle of justice was discussed, a relevant question which might have been raised, I decided to postpone, because I thought discussion of it would appropriately introduce the subject matter of this chapter.

"Why," it might have been asked, "should not men have rights proportionate to their faculties? Why should not the sphere of action of the superior individual be greater than that of the inferior individual? Surely. as a big man occupies more space than a little man, so too does he need larger supplies of the necessaries of life; and so, too, does he need greater scope for the use of his powers. Hence it is unreasonable that the activities of great and small, strong and weak, high and low, should be severally restrained within limits too narrow for these and too wide for those."

The first reply is that the metaphors which we are obliged to use are misleading if interpreted literally. Though, as above, and as in previous chapters, men's equal liberties are figured as spaces surrounding each, which mutually limit one another, yet they cannot be truly represented in so simple a manner. The inferior man, who claims as great a right to bodily integrity as the superior man, does not by doing this trespass on the bodily integrity of the superior man. If he asserts like freedom with him to move about and to work, he does not thereby prevent him from moving about and working. And if he retains as his own whatever his activities have gained for him, he in no degree prevents the superior man from retaining the produce of his activities, which, by implication, are greater in amount.

The second reply is that denying to inferior faculty a sphere of action equal to that which superior faculty has, is to add an artificial hardship to a natural hardship. To be born with a dwarfed or deformed body, or imperfect senses, or a feeble constitution, or a low intelligence, or ill-balanced emotions, is in itself a pitiable fate. Could we charge nature with injustice, we might fitly say it is unjust that some should have natural endowments so much lower than others have, and that they should thus be in large measure incapacitated for the battle of life. And if so, what shall we say to the proposal that, being already disadvantaged by having smaller powers, they should be further disadvantaged by having narrower spheres for the exercise of those powers? Sympathy might contrariwise urge that, by way of compensation for inherited disabilities, they should have extended opportunities. But, evidently. the least that can be done is to allow them as much freedom as others to make the best of themselves.

A third reply is that, were it equitable to make men's liberties proportionate to their abilities, it would be impracticable; since we have no means by which either the one or the other can be measured. In the great mass of cases there is no difficulty in carrying out the principle of equality. If (previous aggression being supposed absent) A kills B, or knocks him down, or locks him up, it is clear that the liberties of action assumed by the two are unlike; or if C, having bought goods of D, does not pay the price agreed upon, it is clear that the contract having been fulfilled on one side and not on the other, the degrees of freedom used are not the same. But if liberties are to be proportioned to abilities, then the implication is that the relative amounts of each faculty, bodily and mental, must be ascertained; and the further implication is that the several kinds of freedom needed must be meted out. Neither of these things can be done; and therefore, apart from other reasons, the regard for practicability would require us to treat men's freedoms as equal, irrespective of their endowments.

§ 333. With change of terms these arguments are applicable to the relation between the rights of men and the rights of women. This is not the place for comparing in detail the capacities of men and women. It suffices for present purposes to recognize the unquestionable fact that some women are physically stronger than some men, and that some women have higher mental endowments than some men–higher, indeed, than the great majority of men. Hence it results, as above, that were liberties to be adjusted to abilities, the adjustment, even could we make it, would have to be made irrespective of sex.

The difficulty reappears under another form, if we set out with the proposition that just as, disregarding exceptions, the average physical powers of women are less than the average physical powers of men, so too are their average mental powers. For we could not conform our plans to this truth: it would be impossible to ascertain the ratio between the two averages; and it would be impossible rightly to proportion the spheres of activity to them.

But, as above argued, generosity prompting equalization would direct that were any difference to be made it ought to be that, by way of compensation, smaller faculties should have greater facilities. Generosity aside, however, justice demands the women, if they are not artificially advantaged must not, at any rate, be artificially disadvantaged.

Hence, if men and women are severally regarded as independent members of a society, each one of whom has to do the best for himself or herself, it results that no restraints can equitably be placed upon women in respect of the occupations, professions, or other careers which they may wish to adopt. They must have like freedom to prepare themselves, and like freedom to profit by such information and skill as they acquire.

But more involved questions arise when we take into account the relations of women to men in marriage, and the relations of women to men in the state.

§ 334. Of those equal liberties with men which women should have before marriage, we must say that in equity they retain after marriage all those which are not necessarily interfered with by the marital relation–the rights to physical integrity, the rights to ownership of property earned and property given or bequeathed, the rights to free belief and free speech, &c. Their claims can properly be qualified only in so far as they are traversed by the understood or expressed terms of the contract voluntarily entered into; and as these terms vary in different places and times, the resulting qualifications must vary. Here, in default of definite measures, we must be content with approximations.

In respect of property, for instance, it may be reasonably held that where the husband is exclusively responsible for maintenance of the family. property which would otherwise belong to the wife may equitably be assigned to him–the use, at least, if not the possession; since, if not, it becomes possible for the wife to use her property or its proceeds for her personal benefit only, and refuse to contribute towards the expenses of the joint household. Only if she is equally responsible with him for family maintenance, does it seem right that she should have equally unqualified ownership of property. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot say that the responsibilities must be entirely reciprocal. For though, rights of ownership being supposed equal, it would at first sight appear that the one is as much bound as the other to maintain the two and their children; yet this is negatived by the existence on the one side of onerous functions which do not exist on the other, and which largely incapacitate for active life. Nothing more than a compromise, varying according to the circumstances, seems here possible. The discharge of domestic and maternal duties by the wife may ordinarily be held a fair equivalent for the earning of an income by the husband.

Respecting powers of control over one another's actions and over the household, the conclusions to be drawn are still more indefinite. The relative positions of the two as contributors of monies and services have to be taken into account, as well as their respective natures; and these factors in the problem are variable. When there arise conflicting wills of which both cannot be fulfilled, but one of which must issue in action, the law of equal freedom cannot, in each particular case, be conformed to; but can be conformed to only in the average of cases. Whether it should be conformed to in the average of cases must depend on circumstances. We may, however, say that since, speaking generally, man is more judicially minded than woman, the balance of authority should incline to the side of the husband; especially as he usually provides the means which make possible the fulfillment of the will of either or the wills of both. But in respect of this relation reasoning goes for little: the characters of those concerned determine the form it takes. The only effect which ethical considerations are likely to have is that of moderating the use of such supremacy as eventually arises.

The remaining question, equally involved or more involved, concerns the possession and management of children. Decisions about management have to be made daily; and decisions about possession must be made in all cases of separation. What are the relative claims of husband and wife in such cases? On the one hand, it may be said of the direct physical claims, otherwise equal, that that of the mother is rendered far greater by the continued nutrition before and after birth, than that of the father. On the other hand, it may be urged on the part of the father, that in the normal order the food by which the mother has been supported and the nutrition of the infant made possible, has been provided by his labor. Whether this counterclaim be or be not equivalent, it must be admitted that the claim of the mother cannot well be less than that of the father. Of the compromise respecting management which justice thus appears to dictate, we may perhaps reasonably say that the power of the mother may fitly predominate during the earlier part of a child's life, and that of the father during the later part. The maternal nature is better adjusted to the needs of infancy and early childhood than the paternal nature; while for fitting children, and especially boys, for the battle of life, the father, who has had most experience of it, may be considered the best guide. But it seems alike inequitable and inexpedient that the power of either should at any time be exercised to the exclusion of the power of the other. Of the respective claims to possession where separation takes place, some guidance is again furnished by consideration of children's welfare; an equal division, where it is possible, being so made that the younger remain with the mother and the elder go with the father. Evidently, however, nothing is here possible but compromise based on consideration of the special circumstances.

Concerning the claims of women, as domestically associated with men, I may add that here in England, and still more in America, the need for urging them is not pressing. In some cases, indeed, there is a converse need. But there are other civilized societies in which their claims are very inadequately recognized: instance Germany.[11]

§ 335. As in other cases, let us look now at the stages through which usage and law have grown into conformity with ethics.

Save among the few primitive peoples who do not preach the virtues called Christian but merely practice them–save among those absolutely peaceful tribes here and there found who, while admirable in their general conduct, treat their women with equity as well as kindness, uncivilized tribes at large have no more conception of the rights of women than of the rights of brutes. Such regard for women's claims as enables mothers to survive and rear offspring, of course exists; since tribes in which it is less than this disappear. But, frequently. the regard is not greater than is needful to prevent extinction.

When we read of a Fijian that he might kill and eat his wife if he pleased; of the Fuegians and wilder Australians that they sacrificed their old women for food; and of the many peoples among whom women are killed to accompany their dead husbands to the other world; we see that they are commonly denied even the first of all rights. The facts that in these low stages women, leading the lives of slaves, are also sold as slaves, and, when married, are either stolen or bought, prove that no liberties are recognized as belonging to them. And on remembering that where wives are habitually considered as property, the implication is that independent ownership of property by them can scarcely exist, we are shown, that this further fundamental right is at the outset but very vaguely recognized. Though the matter is in many cases complicated and qualified by the system of descent in the female line, it is certain that, speaking generally, in rude societies where among men aggression is restrained only by fear of vengeance, the claims of women are habitually disregarded.

To trace up in this place the rising status of women is out of the question. Passing over those ancient societies in which descent in the female line gave to women a relatively high position, as it did among the Egyptians, it will suffice to note that in societies which have arisen by aggregation of patriarchal groups, the rights of women, at first scarcely more recognized than among savages, have, during these two thousand years, gradually established themselves. Limiting our attention to the Aryans who overspread Europe, we see that save where, as indicated by Tacitus, women, by sharing in the dangers of war, gained a better position (a connection of facts which we find among various peoples), they were absolutely subordinated. The primitive Germans bought their wives; and husbands might sell and even kill them. In the early Teutonic society, as in the early Roman society there was perpetual tutelage of women, and consequent incapacity for independent ownership of property. A like state of things existed here in the old English period. Brides were purchased: their wills counting for nothing in the bargains. Mitigations gradually came. Among the Romans the requirement that a bride should be transferred to the bridegroom by legal conveyance, ceased to be observed. The life and death power came to an end: though sometimes reappearing, as when the early Angevin ruler, Fulc the Black, burnt his wife. Generalizing the facts we see that as life became less exclusively militant, the subjection of women to men became less extreme. How that decline of the system of status and rise of the system of contract, which characterizes industrialism, ameliorated, in early days, the position of women, is curiously shown by the occurrence of their signatures in the documents of guilds, while yet their position outside of the guilds remained much as before. This connection has continued to be a general one. Both in England and in America, where the industrial type of organization is most developed, the legal status of women is higher than on the Continent, where militancy is more pronounced. Add to which that among ourselves, along with the modern growth of free institutions characterizing predominant industrialism, the positions of women have been with increasing rapidity approximated to those of men.

Here again, then, ethical deductions harmonize with historical inductions. As in preceding chapters we saw that each of those corollaries from the law of equal freedom which we call a right, has been better established as fast as a higher social life has been reached; so here, we see that the general body of such rights, originally denied entirely to women, has, in the course of this same progress, been acquired by them.

§ 336. There has still to be considered from the ethical point of view, the political position of women as compared with the political position of men; but until the last of these has been dealt with, we cannot in a complete way deal with the first. When, presently. we enter on the consideration of what are commonly called "political rights," we shall find need for changing, in essential ways, the current conceptions of them; and until this has been done the political rights of women cannot be adequately treated of. There is, however, one aspect of the matter which we may deal with now or less conveniently than hereafter.

Are the political rights of women the same as those of men? The assumption that they are the same is now widely made. Along with that identity of rights above set forth as arising from the human nature common to the two sexes, there is supposed to go an identity of rights in respect to the direction of public affairs. At first sight it seems that the two properly go together; but consideration shows that this is not so. Citizenship does not include only the giving of votes, joined now and again with the fulfillment of representative functions. It includes also certain serious responsibilities. But if so, there cannot be equality of citizenship unless along with the share of good there goes the share of evil. To call that equality of citizenship under which some have their powers gratis while others pay for their powers by undertaking risks, is absurd. Now men, whatever political powers they may in any case possess, are at the same time severally liable to the loss of liberty. to the privation, and occasionally to the death, consequent on having to defend the country; and if women, along with the same political powers, have not the same liabilities, their position is not one of equality but one of supremacy.

Unless, therefore, women furnish contingents to the army and navy such as men furnish, it is manifest that, ethically considered, the question of the equal "political rights," so-called, of women, cannot be entertained until there is reached a state of permanent peace. Then only will it be possible (whether desirable or not) to make the political positions of men and women the same.

It should be added that of course this reason does not negative the claims of women to equal shares in local governments and administrations. If it is contended that these should be withheld, it must be for reasons of other kinds.

[II-167]

CHAPTER XXI.

THE RIGHTS OF CHILDREN.↩

§ 337. The reader who remembers that at the outset we recognized a fundamental distinction between the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state, and saw that welfare of the species requires the maintenance of two antagonist principles in them respectively, will infer that the rights of children must have a nature quite different from that of the rights of adults. He will also infer that since children are gradually transformed into adults, there must be a continually changing relation between the two kinds of rights, and need for a varying compromise.

Preservation of the race implies both self-sustentation and sustentation of offspring. If, assuming preservation of the race to be a good end, we infer that it is right to achieve these two sustentations; and if, therefore, the conditions precedent, without which they cannot be achieved, become what we call rights; it results that children have rights (or rather, for distinction sake, let us say rightful claims) to those materials and aids needful for life and growth, which, by implication, it is the duty of parents to supply. Whereas during mature life, the rights are so many special forms of that general freedom of action which is requisite for the procuring of food, clothing, shelter, &c.; during immature life the rightful claims are to the food, clothing, shelter, &c., themselves, and not to those forms of freedom which make possible the obtainment of them. While yet its faculties are undeveloped the child cannot occupy various parts of the sphere of activity occupied by the adult. During this stage of inability, such needful benefits as are naturally to be gained only within these unusable regions of activity, must come to it gratis. And, deduced as its claims to them are from the same primary requirement (preservation of the species), they must be considered as equally valid with the claims which the adult derives from the law of equal freedom.

I use the foregoing verbal distinction between the rights of adults and the rightful claims of children, because, in the general consciousness, rights are to so large an extent associated with activities and the products of activities, that some confusion of thought arises if we ascribe them to infants and young children, who are incapable of carrying on such activities and obtaining such products.

§ 338. Still regarding preservation of the species as the ultimate end, we must infer that while in large measure children's rightful claims are to the products of activities, rather than to the spheres in which those activities are carried on, children have, at the same time, rightful claims to such parts of those spheres of activity as they can advantageously use. For if the desideratum is preservation of the species, then, to achieve it, the members of each generation have not only to be supplied by parents with such food, clothing and shelter as are requisite, but have also to receive from them such aids and opportunities as, by enabling them to exercise their faculties, shall produce in them fitness for adult life. By leading their young ones to use their limbs and senses, even inferior creatures, however unconsciously, fulfill this requirement to some extent. And if for the comparatively simple lives of birds and quadrupeds such needful preparation has to be made, still more has it to be made for the complex lives of mankind, and still more does there follow the responsibility of providing for it and furthering it.

How far the lives of parents must, in the due discharge of these responsibilities, be subordinated to the lives of children, is a question to which no definite answer can be given. In multitudinous kinds of inferior creatures, each generation is completely sacrificed to the next: eggs having been laid the parents forthwith die. But among higher creatures, which have to give much aid to their offspring while they grow, or which rear successive broods of offspring, or both, this of course is not the case. Here the welfare of the species demands that the parents shall continue to live in full vigor, that they may adequately nurture their offspring during their periods of immaturity. This is of course especially the case with mankind; since the period over which aid has to be given to offspring is very long. Hence, in estimating the relative claims of child and parent, it is inferable that parental sacrifices must not be such as will incapacitate for the full performance of parental duties. Undue sacrifices are eventually to the disadvantage of the offspring, and, by implication, to the disadvantage of the species. To which add that, since the well-being and happiness of parents is itself an end which forms part of the general end, there is a further ethical reason why the self-subordination of parents must be kept within moderate limits.

§ 339. From the rightful claims of children on parents, we pass now to the correlative duties of children to parents. As before we must be content with a compromise which changes gradually during the progress from infancy to maturity.

Though, as we have seen, the child has a rightful claim to food, clothing, shelter, and other aids to development, yet it has not a right to that self-direction which is the normal accompaniment of self-sustentation. There are two reasons for not admitting this right–the one that exercise of it would be mischievous to itself, and the other that it would imply an ignoring of the claim of parent on child which is the reciprocal of the claim of child on parent. The first is self-evident, and the second scarcely needs exposition. Though here there can be made no such measurement of relative claims as that which the law of equal freedom enables us to make between adults; yet, if we guide ourselves by that law as well as may be, it results that for sustentation and other aids received there should be given whatever equivalent is possible in the form of obedience and the rendering of small services.

Meanwhile, in view of the ultimate end–the welfare of the species–this reciprocal relation between mature and immature should be approximated to the relation between adults as fast as there are acquired the powers of self-sustentation and self-direction. To be fitted for independent or self-directed activities there must be practice in such activities; and to this end a gradually increased freedom. As a matter of equity, too, the same thing is implied. Where a child becomes in a considerable degree self-sustaining before the adult age is reached, there arises a just claim to a proportionate amount of freedom.

Of course, essentially at variance as are the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state, the transition from guidance by the one to guidance by the other, must ever continue to be full of perplexities. We can expect only that the compromise to be made in every case, while not forgetting the welfare of the race, shall balance fairly between the claims of the two who are immediately concerned: not sacrificing unduly either the one or the other.

§ 340. Still more in the case of children than in the case of women, do we see that progress from the lower to the higher types of society is accompanied by increasing recognition of rightful claims. Alike in respect of life, liberty. and property, the change is traceable.

In every quarter of the globe and among all varieties of men, infanticide exists, or has existed, as a customary or legalized usage–carried sometimes to the extent of one-half of those born. Especially where, the means of subsistence being small, much increase of the tribe is disastrous, the sacrifices of the newly born are frequent: the females being those oftenest killed because they do not promise to be of value in war. The practices of the Greeks, as well as those of the early Romans, among whom a father might kill his child at will, show that regard for the rights of the immature was no greater in law, though it may have been greater in usage. Of the early Teutons and Celts the like may be said: their habit of exposing infants, and in that way indirectly killing them, continued long after denunciation of it by the Christian church. Of course, with disregard for the lives of the young has everywhere gone disregard for their liberties. The practice of selling them, either for adoption or as slaves, has prevailed widely. Not only among the Fuegians, the people of New Guinea, the New Zealanders, the Dyaks, the Malagasy, and many other uncivilized peoples, is there barter of children, but children were similarly dealt with by the forefathers of the civilized. Hebrew custom allowed sale of them, and seizure for debt. The Romans continued to sell them down to the time of the emperors, and after the establishment of Christianity. By the Celts of Gaul the like traffic was carried on until edicts of the Roman emperors suppressed it; and the Germans persisted in it till the reign of Charlemagne. Of course, if the liberties of the young were disregarded in this extreme way, they were disregarded in minor ways. No matter what age a Roman had attained, he could not marry without his father's consent. Of course, too, along with nonrecognition of the rights of life and liberty went nonrecognition of the right of property. If a child could not possess himself, he clearly could not possess anything else. Hence the fact that by legal devices only did the son among the Romans acquire independent ownership of certain kinds of property, such as spoil taken in war and certain salaries for civil services.

Through what stages there has been eventually reached that large admission of children's rightful claims now seen in civilized societies, cannot here be described. Successive changes have gradually established for the young large liberties–liberties which are, indeed, in some cases, as in the United States, greater than is either just or politic. That which it concerns us here chiefly to note is that recognition of the rights of children has progressed fastest and farthest where the industrial type has most outgrown the militant type. In France, down to the time of the revolution, children continued to be treated as slaves. Sons who, even when adults, offended their fathers, could be, and sometimes were, put in prison by them; and girls were thrust into convents against their wills. Only after the revolution were the rights of sons "at last proclaimed," and "individual liberty was no longer at the mercy of lettres de cachet obtained by unjust or cruel fathers." But though among ourselves in past centuries the treatment of children was harsh, a father had not the power of imprisoning his son simply on his own motion. Though, up to recent generations, parental interdicts on the marriages of children, even when of age, were to a large extent voluntarily recognized, they were not legally enforced. And while at the present time, on the Continent, parental restraints on marriage to a great extent prevail, in England marriage contrary to parental wishes, quite practicable, does not even excite much reprobation: oftentimes, indeed, no probation.

Thus an extreme contrast exists between those early states in which a child, like a brute, could be killed with impunity. and modern states in which infanticide is classed as murder and artificial abortion as a crime, in which harsh treatment or inadequate sustentation by a parent is punishable, and in which, under trust, a child is capable of valid ownership.

§ 341. Yet once more, then, we meet with congruity between theory and practice–between ethical injunctions and political ameliorations–between deductions from fundamental principles and inductions from experience.

When we keep simultaneously in view the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state, and the necessity for a changing compromise between the two during the progress of children from infancy to maturity–when we pay regard at the same time to the welfare of the individual and the preservation of the race, we are led to approximately definite conclusions respecting the rightful claims of children. These conclusions, reached a priori, we find verified a posteriori by the facts of history; which show us that along with progress from lower to higher types of society there has gone increasing conformity of laws and usages to moral requirements.

[II-174]

CHAPTER XXII.

POLITICAL RIGHTS -SO-CALLED.↩

§ 342. Every day yields illustrations of the way in which men think only of the proximate and ignore the remote. The power of a locomotive is currently ascribed to steam. There is no adequate consciousness of the fact that the steam is simply an intermediator and not an initiator–that the initiator is the heat of the fire. It is not perceived that the steam engine is in truth a heat engine, differing from other heat engines (such as those in which gas is employed) only in the instrumentality employed to transform molecular motion into molar motion.

This limitation of consciousness to direct relations and ignoring of indirect relations, habitually vitiates thinking about social affairs. The primary effect produced by one who builds a house, or makes a road, or drains a field, is that he sets men to work; and the work, more prominent in thought than the sustenance obtained by it, comes to be regarded as itself a benefit. The imagined good is not increase in the stock of commodities or appliances which subserve human wants, but the expenditure of the labor which produces them. Hence various fallacies–hence the comment on destruction by fire that it is good for trade; hence the delusion that machinery is injurious to the people. If instead of the proximate thing, labor, there were contemplated the ultimate thing, produce, such errors would be avoided. Similarly is it with currency fallacies. Coins, which may be exchanged for all kinds of desired things, come themselves to be connected in men's minds with the idea of value, rather than the things they will purchase; which, as satisfying desires, are the truly valuable things. And then promises to pay, serving in place of coins, intrinsically valueless though they are, are, by daily experience of their purchasing power, so associated with the idea of value that abundance of them becomes identified in thought with wealth; and there results the belief that it only needs a profusion of banknotes to insure national prosperity: errors which would be avoided were the reasoning carried on in terms of commodities, instead of being carried on in terms of these symbols. This usurpation of consciousness by the proximate and expulsion from it of the remote–this forgetting of the ends and erecting the means into ends, is again shown us in education. The time was when knowledge anciently acquired having ceased to be current, the learning of Latin and Greek, in which that knowledge was recorded, became indispensable as a means to acquirement of it; and it was then regarded as a means. But now, long after this ancient knowledge has been rendered accessible in our language, and now, when a vastly larger mass of knowledge has been accumulated, this learning of Latin and Greek is persisted in; and, moreover, has come to be practically regarded as the end, to the exclusion of the end as originally conceived. Young men who are tolerably familiar with these ancient languages, are supposed to be educated; though they may have acquired but little of what knowledge there is embodied in them and next to nothing of the immensely greater amount of knowledge and immensely more valuable knowledge which centuries of research have established.

§ 343. With what view is here made this general remark, thus variously illustrated? With the view of preparing the way for a further illustration which now concerns us. Current political thought is profoundly vitiated by this mistaking of means for ends, and by this pursuit of the means to the neglect of the ends. Hence, among others, the illusions which prevail concerning "political rights."

There are no further rights, truly so-called, than such as have been set forth. If, as we have seen, rights are but so many separate parts of a man's general freedom to pursue the objects of life, with such limitations only as result from the presence of other men who have similarly to pursue such objects, then, if a man's freedom is not in any way further restricted, he possesses all his rights. If the integrity of his body is in no way or degree interfered with; if there is no impediment to his motion and locomotion; if his ownership of all that he has earned or otherwise acquired is fully respected; if he may give or bequeath as he pleases, occupy himself in what way he likes, make a contract or exchange with whomsoever he wills, hold any opinions and express them in speech or print, &c., &c., nothing remains for him to demand under the name of rights, as properly understood. Any other claims he may have must be of a different kind–cannot be classed as rights. Many times and in various ways we have seen that rights, truly so called, originate from the laws of life as carried on in the associated state. The social arrangements may be such as fully recognize them, or such as ignore them in greater or smaller degrees. The social arrangements cannot create them, but can simply conform to them or not conform to them. Such parts of the social arrangements as make up what we call government, are instrumental to the maintenance of rights, here in great measure and there in small measure; but in whatever measure, they are simply instrumental, and whatever they have in them which may be called right, must be so called only in virtue of their efficiency in maintaining rights.

But because of this tendency to occupation of the mind by the means and proportionate exclusion of the ends, it results that those governmental arrangements which conduce to maintenance of rights come to be regarded as themselves rights–nay, come to be thought of as occupying a foremost place in this category. Those shares of political power which in the more advanced nations citizens have come to possess, and which experience has shown to be good guarantees for the maintenance of life, liberty, and property, are spoken of as though the claims to them were of the same nature as the claims to life, liberty, and property themselves. Yet there is no kinship between the two. The giving of a vote, considered in itself, in no way furthers the voter's life, as does the exercise of those various liberties we properly call rights. All we can say is that the possession of the franchise by each citizen gives the citizens in general powers of checking trespasses upon their rights: powers which they may or may not use to good purpose.

The confusion between means and ends has in this case been almost inevitable. Contrasts between the states of different nations, and between the states of the same nation at different periods, have strongly impressed men with the general truth that if governmental power is in the hands of one, or in the hands of a few, it will be used to advantage the one or the few; and that the many will be correspondingly disadvantaged. That is to say. those who have not the power will be subject to greater restraints and burdens than those who have the power–will be defrauded of that liberty of each, limited only by the like liberties of all, which equity demands–will have their rights more or less seriously infringed. And as experience has shown that a wider distribution of political power is followed by decrease of these trespasses, maintenance of a popular form of government has come to be identified with the maintenance of rights, and the power of giving a vote, being instrumental to maintenance of rights, has come to be regarded as itself a right–nay, often usurps in the general apprehension the place of the rights properly so-called.

How true this is we shall learn on observing that where so-called political rights are possessed by all, rights properly so-called are often unscrupulously trampled upon. In France bureaucratic despotism under the Republic, is as great as it was under the Empire. Exactions and compulsions are no less numerous and peremptory; and, as was declared by English trade-union delegates to a congress in Paris, the invasion of citizens' liberties in France goes to an extent which "is a disgrace to, and an anomaly in, a Republican nation." Similarly in the United States. Universal suffrage does not prevent the corruptions of municipal governments, which impose heavy local taxes and do very inefficient work; does not prevent the growth of general and local organizations by which each individual is compelled to surrender his powers to wire-pullers and bosses; does not prevent citizens from being coerced in their private lives by dictating what they shall not drink; does not prevent an enormous majority of consumers from being heavily taxed by a protective tariff for the benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans; nay, does not even effectually preserve men from violent deaths, but, in sundry states, allows of frequent murders, checked only by law officers who are themselves liable to be shot in the performance of their duties. Nor, indeed, are the results altogether different here. Far from having effected better maintenance of men's rights properly so-called, the recent extensions of the franchise have been followed by increased trespasses on them–more numerous orders to do this and not to do that, and greater abstractions from their purses.

Thus both at home and abroad the disproof is clear. From the extreme case in which men use their so-called political rights to surrender their power of preserving their rights properly so called, as by the plebiscite which elected Napoleon III, to the cases in which men let themselves be coerced into sending their children to receive lessons in grammar and gossip about kings, often at the cost of underfeeding and weak bodies, we find none of the supposed identity. Though the so-called political rights may be used for the maintenance of liberties, they may fail to be so used, and may even be used for the establishment of tyrannies.

§ 344. Beyond that confusion of means with ends, which as we here see is a cause of this current misapprehension, there is a further cause. The conception of a right is composite, and there is a liability to mistake the presence of one of its factors for the presence of both.

As repeatedly shown, the positive element in the conception is liberty; while the negative element is the limitation implied by other's equal liberties. But the two rarely coexist in due proportion, and in some cases do not coexist at all. There may be liberty exercised without any restraint; resulting in perpetual aggressions and universal warfare. Conversely, there may be an equality in restraints which are carried so far as practically to destroy liberty. Citizens may be all equally coerced to the extent of enslaving them, by some power which they have setup–may, in pursuance of philanthropic or other ends, be severally deprived by it of large parts of that freedom which remains to each after duly regarding the liberties of others. Now the confusion of thought above pointed out, which leads to this classing of so-called political rights with rights properly so-called, arises in part from thinking of the secondary trait, equality, while not thinking of the primary trait, liberty. The growth of the one has so generally been associated with the growth of the other, that the two have come to be thought of as necessary concomitants, and it is assumed that if the equality is obtained the liberty is ensured.

But, as above shown, this is by no means the case. Men may use their equal freedom to put themselves in bondage; failing as they do to understand that the demand for equality taken by itself is fulfilled if the equality is in degrees of oppression borne and amounts of pain suffered. They overlook the truth that the acquirement of so-called political rights is by no means equivalent to the acquirement of rights properly so-called. The one is but an instrumentality for the obtainment and maintenance of the other; and it may or may not be used to achieve those ends. The essential question is–How are rights, properly so-called, to be preserved–defended against aggressors, foreign and domestic? This or that system of government is but a system of appliances. Government by representation is one of these systems of appliances; and the choosing of representatives by the votes of all citizens is one of various ways in which a representative government may be formed. Hence voting being simply a method of creating an appliance for the preservation of rights, the question is whether universal possession of votes conduces to creation of the best appliance for preservation of rights. We have seen above that it does not effectually secure this end; and we shall hereafter see that under existing conditions it is not likely to secure it.

But further discussion of this matter must be postponed. We must first deal with a more general topic–"the nature of the state."

[II-181]

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE NATURE OF THE STATE.↩

§ 345. The study of evolution at large makes familiar the truth that the nature of a thing is far from being fixed. Without change of identity, it may at one time have one nature and at a subsequent time quite a different nature. The contrast between a nebulous spheroid and the solid planet into which it eventually concentrates, is scarcely greater than the contrasts which everywhere present themselves.

Throughout the organic world this change of nature is practically universal. Here is a Polyp which, after a period of sedentary life, splits up into segments which severally detach themselves as free-swimming Medusae. There is a small larva of Annulose type which, moving about actively in the water for a time, fixes itself on a fish, loses its motor organs, and, feeding parasitically. grows into little more than stomach and egg bags; and there is another which ends the wanderings of its early life by settling down on a rock and, developing into what is popularly known as an acorn shell, gets its livelihood by sweeping into its gullet minute creatures from the surrounding water. Now the case is that of a wormlike form which, living and feeding for a long time in the water, finally, after a period of rest, bursts its pupa shell and files away as a gnat; and again it is that of the maggot and flesh fly, or grub and moth, which everyday experience makes so familiar. Strangest and most extreme of all, however, are those metamorphoses presented by some of the low aquatic Algae which, moving about actively for a brief period and displaying the characters of animals, presently fix themselves, sprout out, and become plants.

Contemplation of such facts, abundant beyond enumeration and wonderfully various, warns us against the error likely to arise everywhere from the tacit assumption that the nature of a thing has been, is, and always will be, the same. We shall be led by it, contrariwise, to expect change of nature–very possibly fundamental change.

§ 346. It is tacitly assumed by nearly all that there is but one right conception of the state; whereas if, recognizing the truth that societies evolve, we learn the lessons which evolution at large teaches, we shall infer that probably the state has, in different places and times, essentially different natures. The agreement between inference and fact will soon become manifest.

Not to dwell on the earliest types, mostly characterized by descent in the female line, we may consider first the kind of group intermediate in character between the family and the society–the patriarchal group. This, as illustrated in the nomadic horde, forms a society in which the relationships of the individuals to one another and to their common head, as well as to the common property, give to the structure and functions of the incorporated whole a nature quite unlike the natures of bodies politic such as we now know. Even when such a group develops into a village community. which, as shown in India, may have "a complete staff of functionaries, for internal government," the generality (though not universality) of relationships among the associated persons gives to it a corporate nature markedly different from that of a society in which ties of blood have ceased to be dominant factors.

When, ascending to a higher stage of composition, we look at communities like those of Greece, in which many clusters of relations are united, so that members of various families, gentes and phratries, are interfused without losing their identities, and in which the respective clusters have corporate interests independent of, and often antagonistic to, one another; it is undeniable that the nature of the community as a whole differs greatly from that of a modern community, in which complete amalgamation of component clusters has destroyed the primitive lines of division; and in which, at the same time, individuals, and not family clusters, have become the political units.

Once more, on remembering the contrast between the system of status and the system of contract, we cannot fail to see an essential unlikeness of nature between the two kinds of body politic formed. In sundry ancient societies "the religious and political sanction, sometimes combined and sometimes separate, determined for every one his mode of life, his creed, his duties, and his place in society. without leaving any scope for the will or reason of the individual himself." But among ourselves neither religious nor political sanction has any such power; nor has any individual his position or his career in life prescribed for him.

In presence of these facts we cannot rationally assume unity of nature in all bodies politic. So far from supposing that the general conception of the state framed by Aristotle, and derived from societies known to him, holds now and serves for present guidance, we may conclude that, in all likelihood, it is inapplicable now and would misguide us if accepted.

§ 347. Still more shall we be impressed with this truth if, instead of contrasting societies in their natures, we contrast them in their actions. Let us observe the several kinds of life they carry on.

As evolution implies gradual transition, it follows that extremely unlike as incorporated bodies of men may become, sharp divisions are impracticable. But bearing in mind this qualification, we may say that there are three distinct purposes for which men, originally dispersed as wandering families, may associate themselves more closely. The desire for companionship is one prompter: though not universal, sociality is a general trait of human beings which leads to aggregation. A second prompter is the need for combined action against enemies, animal or human, or both– cooperation, now to resist external aggression and now to carry on external aggression. The third end to be achieved is that of facilitating sustentation by mutual aid–cooperation for the better satisfying of bodily wants and eventually of mental wants. In most cases all three ends are subserved. Not only. however, are they theoretically distinguishable, but each one of them is separately exemplified.

Of social groups which satisfy the desire for companionship only, those formed by the Esquimaux may be named. The men composing one of them are severally independent. Having no need to combine for external offense or defense, they need no leaders in war and have no political rule: the only control exercised over each being the display of opinion by his fellows. Nor is there any division of labor. Industrial cooperation is limited to that between man and wife in each family. The society has no further incorporation than that which results from the juxtaposition of its parts: there is no mutual dependence.

The second class is multitudinous. Instances of its pure form are furnished by hunting tribes at large, the activities of which alternate between chasing animals and going to war with one another; and instances are furnished by piratical tribes and tribes which subsist by raids on their neighbors, like the Masai. In such communities division of labor, if present at all, is but rudimentary. Cooperation is for carrying on external defense and offense, and is to scarcely any extent for carrying on internal sustentation. Though when, by conquest, there are formed larger societies, some industrial cooperation begins, and increases as the societies increase, yet this, carried on by slaves and serfs, superintended by their owners, suffices in but small measure to qualify the essential character. This character is that of a body adapted for carrying on joint action against other such bodies. The lives of the units are subordinated to the extent needful for preserving (and in some cases extending) the life of the whole. Tribes and nations in which such subordination is not maintained must, other things equal, disappear before tribes and nations in which it is maintained; and hence such subordination must, by survival of the fittest, become an established trait. Along with the unquestioned assumption appropriate to this type, that war is the business of life, there goes the belief that each individual is a vassal of the community–that, as the Greeks held, the citizen does not belong to himself, or to his family, but to his city. And naturally, along with this merging of the individual's claims in the claims of the aggregate, there goes such coercion of him by the aggregate as makes him fit for its purposes. He is subject to such teaching and discipline and control as are deemed requisite for making him a good warrior or good servant of the state.

To exemplify societies of the third class in a satisfactory way, is impracticable; because fully developed forms of them do not yet exist. Such few perfectly peaceful tribes as are found in some Papuan islands, or occupying parts of India so malarious that the warlike races around cannot live in them, are prevented by their unfit environments from developing into large industrial societies. The Bodo, the Dhimál, the Kocch and other aboriginal peoples who, living by agriculture, cluster in villages of from ten to forty houses, and shift to new tracts when they exhaust the old, show us, beyond the division of labor between the sexes, no further cooperation than rendering mutual assistance in building their houses and clearing their plots. Speaking generally, it is only after conquest has consolidated small communities into larger ones, that there arise opportunities for the growth of mutual dependence among men who have devoted themselves to different industries. Hence throughout long periods the industrial organization, merely subservient to the militant organization, has had its essential nature disguised. Now, however, it has become manifest that the most developed modern nations are organized on a principle fundamentally unlike that on which the great mass of past nations have been organized. If, ignoring recent retrograde changes throughout Europe, we compare societies of ancient times and of the middle ages, with societies of our own times, and especially with those of England and America, we see fundamental differences. In the one case, speaking broadly, all free men are warriors and industry is left to slaves and serfs; in the other case but few free men are warriors, while the vast mass of them are occupied in production and distribution. In the one case the numerous warriors become such under compulsion; while in the other case the relatively few warriors become such under agreement. Evidently. then, the essential contrast is that in the one case the aggregate exercises great coercion over its units; while in the other case it exercises coercion which is small and tends to become less as militancy declines.

What is the meaning of this contrast reduced to its lowest terms? In either case the end to be achieved by the society in its corporate capacity that is, by the state, is the welfare of its units; for the society having as an aggregate no sentiency, its preservation is a desideratum only as subserving individual sentiencies. How does it subserve individual sentiencies? Primarily by preventing interferences with the carrying on of individual lives. In the first stage, death and injury of its members by external foes is that which the incorporated society has chiefly, though not wholly, to prevent; and it is ethically warranted in coercing its members to the extent required for this. In the last stage, death and injury of its members by internal trespasses is that which it has chiefly if not wholly to prevent; and the ethical warrant for coercion does not manifestly go beyond what is needful for preventing them.

§ 348. This is not the place to consider whether with this last function any further function may be joined. Limited as our subject matter is to the nature of the state, it concerns us only to observe the radical difference between these two social types. The truth to be emphasized is that a body politic which has to operate on other such bodies, and to that end must wield the combined forces of its component units, is fundamentally unlike a body politic which has to operate only on its component units. Whence it follows that political speculation which sets out with the assumption that the state has in all cases the same nature, must end in profoundly erroneous conclusions.

A further implication must be pointed out. During long past periods, as well as in our own day, and for an indefinite time to come, there have been, are, and will be, changes, progressive and retrograde, approximating societies now to one type and now to the other: these types must be both mixed and unsettled. Indefinite and variable beliefs respecting the nature of the state must therefore be expected to prevail.

[II-188]

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE.↩

§ 349. Difference of ends usually implies difference of means. lt is unlikely that a structure best fitted for one purpose will be best fitted for another purpose.

If to preserve the lives of its units, and to maintain that freedom to pursue the objects of life which is ordinarily possessed by unconquered peoples, a society has to use its corporate action chiefly for dealing with environing societies; then its organization must be such as will bring into play the effectually combined forces of its units at specific times and places. It needs no proof that if its units are left to act without concert they will be forthwith subjugated; and it needs no proof that to produce concerted action, they must be under direction. Conformity to such direction must be insured by compulsion; the agency which compels must issue consistent orders; and to this end the orders must emanate from a single authority. Thacing up the genesis of the militant type (see Principles of Sociology, secs. 547—61) leads irresistibly to the conclusion that for efficient external action of a society against other societies, centralization is necessary; and that establishment of it becomes more decided the more habitual is such external action. Not only does the fighting body itself become subject to despotic rule, but also the community which supports it. The will of the aggregate, acting through the governing power it has evolved, overrides and almost suppresses the wills of its individual members. Such rights as they are allowed they hold only on sufferance.

Hence so long as militancy predominates, the constitution of the state must be one in which the ordinary citizen is subject either to an autocrat or to an oligarchy out of which an autocrat tends continually to arise. As we saw at the outset, such subjection, with its concomitant loss of freedom and contingent loss of life, has a quasi-ethical warrant when necessitated by defensive war. The partial suspension of rights is justifiable when the object is to prevent those complete obliterations and losses of them which result from death or subjugation. Ordinarily, however, the militant type of society is developed more by offensive wars than by defensive wars; and where this is the case, the accompanying constitution of the state has no ethical warrant. However desirable it may be that the superior races should conquer and replace the inferior races, and that hence during early stages aggressive wars subserve the interests of humanity; yet, as before said, the subserving of such interests after this manner must be classed with the subserving of life at large by the struggle for existence among inferior creatures–a species of action of which ethics takes no cognizance.

Here, that which we have to note is that when the surrounding conditions are such that a society is endangered bodily by other societies, its required coercive constitution is one which, far though it may be from the absolutely right, is yet relatively right–is the least wrong which circumstances allow.

§ 350. When, ignoring intermediate forms, we pass from the militant type to the industrial type, considered as fully developed, we see that the required constitution of the state is quite different. To maintain the conditions under which life and its activities may be carried on, is in either case the end; but to maintain these conditions against external enemies, and to maintain them against internal enemies, are two widely unlike functions calling for widely unlike appliances. Observe the contrasts.

In the one case the danger is directly that of the community as a whole and indirectly that of individuals; while in the other case it is directly that of individuals and indirectly that of the community as a whole. In the one case the danger is large, concentrated, and in its first incidence local; while in the other case the dangers are multitudinous, small, and diffused. In the one case all members of the community are simultaneously threatened with injury; while in the other case the injury threatened or experienced is now of one person, now of another; and the citizen at one time aggressed upon is at another time an aggressor. And while the vast evil to be dealt with in the one case is, when warded off, no longer to be feared for some time at least; the evils to be dealt with in the other case, though small, are unceasing in their occurrence. Evidently, then, having functions so unlike, the political appliances employed should be unlike.

For preventing murders, thefts, and frauds, there does not need an army; and an army, were it used, could not deal with transgressions which are scattered everywhere. The required administration must be diffused as are the wrongdoings to be prevented or punished; and its action must be continuous instead of being occasional. But in the absence of large combined forces required for military purposes, there does not need that coercive rule by which alone combined forces can be wielded. Contrariwise, there needs a rule adapted for maintaining the rights of each citizen against others, and which is also regardful of those rights in its own dealings with citizens.

What is the appropriate constitution of the state? At first sight it seems that since every citizen (supposing him not to be himself an aggressor) is interested in the preservation of life and property, the fulfillment of contracts, and the enforcement of all minor rights, the constitution of the state should be one in which each citizen has an equal share of power with his fellows. It appears undeniable that if, in pursuance of the law of equal freedom, men are to have equal rights secured to them, they ought to have equal powers in appointing the agency which secures such rights.

In the last chapter but one it was shown that this is not a legitimate corollary; and various illustrations made it clear that the approved means did not achieve the desired end. Here we have to observe why they are not likely to achieve them.

§ 351. Of truths concerning human conduct none is more certain than that men will, on the average, be swayed by their interests, or rather by their apparent interests. Government is itself necessitated by the general tendency to do this; and every act of Parliament makes provisions to exclude its injurious effects. How universally operative and how universally recognized such tendency is, every will, every lease, every contract proves.

The working of this or that form of government is inevitably determined by this tendency. Of those who form parts of the political agency, and of those who directly or indirectly appoint them, it must be true, as of all others, that they will be swayed by their apparent interests. The laws of every country furnish proofs without end. And history having thus conclusively shown that those who have predominant power will use it to their own advantage, there has been drawn the inference that only by endowing all with power can the advantage of all be secured. But the fallacy is becoming obvious.

A generation ago, while agitations for the wider diffusion of political power were active, orators and journalists daily denounced the "class-legislation" of the aristocracy. But there was no recognition of the truth that if, instead of the class at that time paramount, another class were made paramount, there would result a new class legislation in place of the old. That it has resulted every day proves. If it is true that a generation ago landowners and capitalists so adjusted public arrangements as to ease themselves and to press unduly upon others, it is no less true that now artisans and laborers, through representatives who are obliged to do their bidding, are fast remolding our social system in ways which achieve their own gain through others' loss. Year after year more public agencies are established to give what seem gratis benefits, at the expense of those who pay taxes, local and general; and the mass of the people, receiving the benefits and relieved from the cost of maintaining the public agencies, advocate the multiplication of them.

It is not true, then, that the possession of political power by all ensures justice to all. Contrariwise, experience makes obvious that which should have been obvious without experience, that with a universal distribution of votes the larger class will inevitably profit at the expense of the smaller class. Those higher earnings which more efficient actions bring to the superior, will not be all allowed to remain with them, but part will be drafted off in some indirect way to eke out the lower earnings of the less diligent or the less capable; and in so far as this is done, the law of equal freedom must be broken. Evidently the constitution of the state appropriate to that industrial type of society in which equity is fully realized, must be one in which there is not a representation of individuals but a representation of interests. For the health of the social organism and the welfare of its members, a balance of functions is requisite; and this balance cannot be maintained by giving to each function a power proportionate to the number of functionaries. The relative importance of the different functions is not measured by the number of units occupied in discharging them; and hence the general welfare will not be achieved by giving to the various parts of the body politic, powers proportionate to their sizes.

§ 352. Whether hereafter there will arise a form of society in which equal political powers may be given to individuals, without giving to classes powers which they will misuse, is an unanswerable question. It may be that the industrial type, perhaps by the development of cooperative organizations, which theoretically. though not at present practically, obliterate the distinction between employer and employed, may produce social arrangements under which antagonistic class interests either will not exist, or will be so far mitigated as not seriously to complicate matters. And it may be that in times to come men's regard for others' interests will so far check undue pursuit of their own interests, that no appreciable class legislation will result from the equal distribution of political powers. But the truth we have to recognize is that with such humanity as now exists, and must for a long time exist, the possession of what are called equal political rights will not ensure the maintenance of equal rights properly so-called.

Moreover, that constitution of the state which relative ethics justifies must, for another reason, diverge widely from that justified by absolute ethics. The forms of government appropriate to existing civilized societies must be transitional forms. As implied throughout the argument, the constitution of a state devoted to militancy must be fundamentally unlike the constitution of a state devoted to industrialism; and during the stages of progress from the one to the other, mixed forms of constitution have to be passed through–variable forms which are adjusted now to the one set of requirements, now to the other, as contingencies determine. For, as I have shown elsewhere (Principles of Sociology, secs. 547-75), if we exclude those nonprogressive types of mankind which have evolved social organizations that are no longer changeable, and contemplate the more plastic types still evolving, individually and socially we see that increase in either kind of social action begins soon to produce change of structure.

We must therefore conclude that there is a quasi-ethical warrant for these mixed constitutions of the state which are appropriate to these mixed requirements. To maintain the conditions under which individual life and its activities may be carried on, being the supreme end; and maintenance of these conditions being endangered, now by masses of external enemies and now by single internal enemies; it results that there is a quasi-ethical justification for such political constitution as is best adapted to meet both kinds of dangers at any particular time; and there must be tolerated such unfitness for the one end as is necessitated by fitness for the other.

§ 353. The title of the chapter covers a further question, which must not be passed over–the use of political power by women. Already we have concluded that in militant societies, and partially militant societies, the possession of the franchise by women is not strictly equitable: they cannot justly have equal powers unless they have equal responsibilities. But here, supposing that with the cessation of militancy this obstacle should disappear, we have to ask whether, in that case, the giving of votes to women would be expedient. l say expedient, because, as we have seen, it is not a question of right in the direct and simple sense. The question is whether rights, properly so-called, are likely to be better maintained if women have votes than if they have not. There are some reasons for concluding that maintenance of them would be less satisfactory rather than more satisfactory.

The comparative impulsiveness of women is a trait which would make increase of their influence an injurious factor in legislation. Human beings at large, as at present constituted, are far too much swayed by special emotions, temporarily excited, and not held in check by the aggregate of other emotions; and women are carried away by the feelings of the moment still more than men are. This characteristic is at variance with that judicial mindedness which should guide the making of laws. Freedom from passions excited by temporary causes or particular objects, is an obvious prerequisite to good legislation. This prerequisite is at present but imperfectly fulfilled, and it would be more imperfectly fulfilled were the franchise extended to women.

This moral difference is accompanied by a kindred intellectual difference. Very few men, and still fewer women, form opinions in which the general and the abstract have a due place. The particular and the concrete are alone operative in their thoughts. Nine legislators out of ten, and ninety-nine voters out of a hundred, when discussing this or that measure, think only of the immediate results to be achieved–do not think at all of the indirect results, or of the effect which the precedent will have, or of the influence on men's characters. Had women votes, this absorption of consciousness in the proximate and personal to the exclusion of the remote and impersonal, would be still greater; and the immense mischiefs at present produced would be augmented.

At the outset it was shown that there is a radical opposition between the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state, and that introduction of either into the sphere of the other is injurious–fatal, indeed, if extensive and continuous. Character is that which eventually determines conduct: the intelligence joined with it simply serving as a minister, procuring satisfactions for those feelings which make up the character. At present, both men and women are led by their feelings to vitiate the ethics of the state by introducing the ethics of the family. But it is especially in the nature of women, as a con-comitant of their maternal functions, to yield benefits not in proportion to deserts but in proportion to the absence of deserts–to give most where capacity is least. The love of the helpless, which may serve as a general description of the parental instinct, stronger in women than in men, and swaying their conduct outside the family as well as inside more than it sways the conduct of men, must in a still greater degree than in men prompt public actions that are unduly regardful of the inferior as compared with the superior. The present tendency of both sexes is to contemplate citizens as having claims in proportion to their needs–their needs being habitually proportionate to their demerits; and this tendency, stronger in women than in men, must, if it operates politically, cause a more general fostering of the worse at the expense of the better. Instead of that maintenance of rights which, as we have seen, is but a systematic enforcement of the principle that each shall receive the good and evil results of his own conduct, there would come greater and more numerous breaches of them than at present. Still more than now would the good which the superior have earned be forcibly taken away from them to help the inferior; and still more than now would evils which the inferior have brought upon themselves be shouldered on to the superior.

Another trait of nature by which women are distinguished, arises by adjustment, not to the maternal relation but to the marital relation. While their feelings have become molded into special fitness for dealing with offspring, they have also become adjusted to an appropriate choice of husbands–so far at least as conditions have allowed them to choose. Power, bodily or mental, or both, is, and ever has been, that masculine trait which most attracts women; and by doing so furthers multiplication to the stronger. Varieties in which this instinctive preference was least marked must, other things equal, have ever tended to disappear before other varieties. Hence in women a worship of power under all its forms; and hence a relative conservatism. Authority. no matter how embodied–politically, ecclesiastically. or socially–sways women still more than it sways men. Evidence of this is furnished by societies of all grades. Sanctified by the injunctions of ancestry, customs are adhered to by women more than by men, even where instinctive feelings might have been expected to produce an opposite effect; as instance the adhesion by the women among the Juangs to something less than Eve's dress after the men had taken to loincloths. Religious fanaticism, which is the expression of extreme subordination to a power conceived as supernatural, has always been carried further by women than by men. The difference was remarked among the Greeks; observers have noticed it in Japan; instances are supplied by the Hindoos; and it is at present manifest throughout Europe. This sentiment, then, which power and the trappings of power under all forms excite, must, if votes were given to women, strengthen all authorities, political and ecclesiastical. Possibly it may be thought that under present conditions a conservative influence of this kind would be beneficial; and did there not exist the trait above described, this might be so. But cooperating with the preference for generosity over justice, this power worship in women, if allowed fuller expression, would increase the ability of public agencies to override individual rights in the pursuit of what were thought beneficent ends.

Whether in time to come, when the existing political complications caused by our transitional state have disappeared, such evils would result, is another question. It is quite possible that the possession of votes by women would then be beneficial.

But the immediate enfranchisement of women is urged on the ground that without it they cannot obtain legal recognition of their equitable claims. Experience does not countenance this plea. During the last thirty years various disabilities of women have been removed with but little resistance from men. Comparing the behavior of men to men with the behavior of men to women, it is manifest that in modern times the sentiment of justice has been more operative in determining the last than in determining the first. Ill-treated classes of men have had to struggle far longer before they obtained from the classes who ill treated them, the concessions they demanded, than women as a class have had to struggle before obtaining from men as a class, the various freedoms they asked. They have obtained these without political power; and there is no reason to doubt that such further injustice as they complain of–chiefly in respect of the custody of children–may be similarly removed without making the gigantic constitutional change which some of them seek.

That this probability amounts, indeed, to certainty. will be manifest if we look at the expectations in their simplest form. When it is openly contended that women must have the suffrage because otherwise they cannot get from men their just claims, it is practically contended that men will concede the suffrage knowing that with it they concede these claims, but will not concede the claims by themselves. A, the suffrage, involves the establishment of B, the claims; and the proposition is that though men will surrender A plus B, they will not surrender B by itself!

§ 354. Under the head of the constitution of the state, something must be said concerning the distribution of state burdens as well as the distribution of state power. Clearly there is as much reason for insisting on equitable sharing in the costs of government as for equitable sharing in the direction of government.

In the abstract the question does not appear to present any great difficulty. The amounts individually paid should be proportionate to the benefits individually received. So far as these are alike, the burdens borne should be alike; and so far as they are unlike, the burdens borne should be unlike. Hence arises a distinction between the public expenditure for protection of persons and the public expenditure for protection of property. As life and personal safety are, speaking generally, held equally valuable by all men, the implication appears to be that such public expenditure as is entailed by care of these should fall equally on all. On the other hand, as the amounts of property possessed at the one extreme by the wage earner and at the other extreme by the millionaire differ immensely, the implication is that the amounts contributed to the costs of maintaining property rights should vary immensely–should be proportionate to the amount of property owned, and vary to some extent according to its kind. In respect to the costs of internal protection an approximately just distribution seems indicated by these considerations; but in respect of external protection a just distribution is more difficult to conceive. Invasion endangers both property and person. The citizen may be robbed, or he may be injured in body, or he may lose more or less freedom. A just distribution depends on the relative values put by each on these; and no expression of such values, either special or general, seems possible. Hence we must say that while militancy, or partial militancy. continues, nothing more than a rude approximation to a just incidence of public burdens can be made.

One conclusion, however, is clear. State burdens, however proportioned among citizens, should be borne by all. Every one who receives the benefits which government gives should pay some share of the costs of government, and should directly and not indirectly pay it.

This last requirement is all-important. The aim of the politician commonly is to raise public funds in such ways as shall leave the citizen partly or wholly unconscious of the deductions made from his income. Customs duties and excise duties are not unfrequently advocated for the reason that through them it is possible to draw from a people a larger revenue than could be drawn were the amount contributed by each demanded from him by the tax gatherer. But this system, being one which takes furtively sums which it would be difficult to get openly, achieves an end which should not be achieved. The resistance to taxation, thus evaded, is a wholesome resistance; and, if not evaded, would put a proper check on public expenditure. Had each citizen to pay in a visible and tangible form his proportion of taxes, the sum would be so large that all would insist on economy in the performance of necessary functions and would resist the assumption of unnecessary functions; whereas at present, offered as each citizen is certain benefits for which he is unconscious of paying, he is tempted to approve of extravagance; and is prompted to take the course, unknowingly if not knowingly dishonest, of obtaining benefits at other men's expense.

During the days when extensions of the franchise were in agitation, a maxim perpetually repeated was–"Taxation without representation is robbery." Experience has since made it clear that, on the other hand, representation without taxation entails robbery.

[II-201]

CHAPTER XXV.

THE DUTIES OF THE STATE.↩

§ 355. Whether or not they accept the ethical principles set forth in the opening chapters of this part, most readers will agree with the practical applications of them made in subsequent chapters. Some, indeed, are so averse to deductive reasoning that they would gladly reject its results, even though they are verified by induction, could they do so. But the results in this case reached deductively, have one after another proved to be beliefs empirically established among civilized men at large, and, with increasing experience, have been more and more authoritatively formulated in law; so that rejection is scarcely practicable.

But here we are about to enter on topics concerning which there are divers opinions. To avoid raising prejudices against the conclusions reached, as being reached by a disapproved method, it will be best to proceed by a method which cannot be disapproved; and which, however insufficient taken by itself, all must admit to be good as far as it goes. Let us, then, commence inductively our inquiries concerning the duties of the state.

If the admired philosopher Hobbes, instead of deducing his theory of the state from a pure fiction, had prepared himself by ascertaining the facts as they are actually presented in groups of primitive men, or men in the first stages of social life, he never would have propounded it. Had he known something more of savages as they really exist, he would not have ascribed to them those ideas of social order and its benefits, which are the products of developed social life; and he would have learned that subordination to a ruling power is at the outset not in the least prompted by the motive he assigns. Instead of proceeding a priori as he did, let us proceed a posteriori–let us contemplate the evidence.

§ 356. The first fact is that where there neither is, nor has been, any war there is no government. Already it has been pointed out that among the Esquimaux, in the absence of intertribal conflicts, there are scarcely any of those conflicts between members of the tribe which Hobbes assumes must necessarily arise among ungoverned men. If, as occasionally happens, one Esquimo is ill used by another, his remedy is an appeal to public opinion through a satirical song. The Fuegians, who gather in tribes of from twenty to eighty. have no chiefs; "nor did they seem to require one for the peace of their society" says Weddell. Of the Veddahs, again, we read that the small clans have divisions of the forest which "are always honorably recognized"; and the head man of each, who is simply the most influential person, according to Tennant, "exercises no sort of authority beyond distributing at a particular season the honey captured by the various members of the clan."

The second fact is that when between tribes ordinarily peaceful there occur wars, leading warriors acquire predominant influence. In each case there arises some man distinguished from others by greater strength, courage, skill or sagacity; and who, consequently deferred to, becomes acknowledged leader. But at first, as shown us by the Tasmanians, the man who thus acquires predominance during war, loses it when peace is reestablished: there returns the state of equality and absence of government. As, however, the wars between tribes commonly become chronic, it usually happens that the man who acts as leader, now in one war and presently in another, gains permanent authority. The deference shown to him extends over the interval between the wars, as well as during the wars; and chieftainship is initiated. The Shoshones or Snakes of North America, which fall into three divisions, well illustrate these relationships of structure. The Mountain Snakes, scattered and wandering bands of men, who make no combined efforts to defend themselves against their hostile kindred, have no government. Among the War-are-aree-kas, or Fish-eaters, there is no trace of social organization, "except during salmon time"; when, resorting to the rivers in numbers, there arises temporarily "some person called a chief," whose advice is accepted rather than obeyed. And then the Shirry-dikas, who hunt buffaloes and are better armed, show us more pronounced chieftainship; though authority still depends on "the personal vigor of the chief" and is readily transferred to another. Among the Comanches, who are relatively warlike, chiefs have more power; though the office is not hereditary. but results from "superior cunning, knowledge, or success in war." And from these stages upwards we may trace the rise of definite chieftainship as a concomitant of chronic hostilities with other tribes.

The third fact is that where the enterprising leader in war subdues adjacent tribes, and, by successive conquests, forms a larger consolidated society, his supremacy becomes settled; and with increase of his power goes the imposing of his will in other than militant actions. When, by this process, nations are formed and chiefs grow into kings, governmental power, becoming absolute, becomes also coextensive with social life. Still it is to be observed that the king is above all things the leader in war. The records of the Egyptians and Assyrians, equally with the records of European nations, show that the ruler is primarily the head soldier.

And then, grouping several minor facts under the head of a fourth fact, we see that where, as in modern nations, the head of the state no longer commands his armies in battle, but deputes this function, he nevertheless is nominally a soldier–receives a military or naval education. Only in republics do there arise civil headships, and these are apt to lapse back into military ones. It needs only continued war to transform the government into its primitive type of a military dictatorship.

Thus induction puts beyond doubt the truth that government is initiated and developed by the defensive and offensive actions of a society against other societies. The primary function of the state, or of that agency in which the powers of the state are centralized, is the function of directing the combined actions of the incorporated individuals in war. The first duty of the ruling agency is national defense. What we may consider as measures to maintain intertribal justice, are more imperative, and come earlier, than measures to maintain justice among individuals.

§ 357. While we are thus taught that the subordination of citizens to rulers has at first no such purpose as that which Hobbes fancied, we are also taught that for a long time the fulfillment of such purpose is not even attempted. Many simple societies exist permanently, and many complex societies have existed for long periods, without any measures being taken by the ruler to prevent aggressions of individuals on one another.

While the necessity for combined action against enemies of the tribe is obvious and peremptory, and prompts obedience to the leader, no obvious necessity exists for defending one member of the tribe against another: danger to tribal welfare is either not recognized or not thought great enough to call for interference. While there was no headship at all, and during times when headship existed only as long as war lasted, each member of the tribe maintained his own claims as well as he could: when injured, he did his best to injure the aggressor. This rude administration of justice, which we see among gregarious animals as well as among primitive hordes of men, having been a recognized custom before any political rule existed, long survived the establishment of political rule, as being a custom accepted from ancestry and sanctified by tradition. Hence in all early societies we find the lex talionis in force–now independently of the ruler, and now recognized by the ruler.

Beginning with the North American Indians we read of the Snakes, the Creeks, the Dacotahs, that private wrongs were avenged by the injured individuals or their families; that among the Comanches this system of retaliation was habitual, though councils sometimes interfered without success; and that among the Iroquois, with a comparatively well-developed government, the private righting of wrongs was permitted. So in South America, the Uaupes, the Patagonians, the Araucanians may be named as showing us degrees, more or less marked, of political subjection coexisting with primitive administration of justice by each man for himself, or by his family for him. In Africa, containing peoples in various stages of advance, we meet with various mixtures of systems. A Bechuanas king or chief makes little use of his power for punishment of any other crimes than those committed against himself or his servants. An injured man among the East Africans sometimes revenges himself and sometimes appeals to the chief. Some tribes of coast Negroes have judicial punishments, while in others murder is avenged by deceased's kindred; and there is a like variation in Abyssinia. Turning to Asiatics, we find that among the Arabs the prevalence of one or other of these modes of checking aggressions, depends on the state of the group as wandering or settled: where wandering, private retaliation and enforced restitution is the practice, but punishment by a ruler is usual in Arab towns. By the Bheels is shown a ratio between the chief's punitive action and that of the individual, which changes according to the chief's power; and by the Khonds, who pay little respect to authority, justice is enforced by private action. The custom of the Karens, too, is for each man to take the law into his own hands: the principle being that of equal damage.

That kindred states of things existed among the Aryan tribes which peopled Europe in early days, is a familiar fact. Private vengeance and public punishment were mingled in vanous proportions: the one decreasing and the other increasing along with progress to a higher state. Says Kemble: "The right of feud . . . lies at the root of all Teutonic legislation . . . each freeman is at liberty to defend himself, his family and his friends; to avenge all wrongs done to them." Instead of being, as at first, his own judge respecting the extent of retaliation, the injured man presently came to have restraints put upon him by custom; and there grew up established rates of compensation for injuries, varying according to rank. When political authority gained strength, the first step was that of enforcing the customary fines, and, in default, permitting private rectification–"Let amends be made to the kindred, or let their war be borne." During this transitional stage, which is traceable among some of the German tribes when first described, part of the compensation went to the man or family injured, while part went to the ruler. Under feudalism the system of private rectification of wrongs slowly yielded to the public rectification only as the central government gained power. The right of private war between nobles continued among ourselves down to the 12th and 13th centuries, and in France even later. So deeply rooted was it that in some cases, feudal lords thought it a disgrace to maintain their rights in any other ways than by force of arms. With all which we must join the long survival of judicial duels and of private duels.

The facts have to be contemplated under two other aspects. Not only is the primary function of government that of combining the actions of the incorporated individuals for war, while its secondary function of defending its component members against one another is step by step established; but this secondary function arises by differentiation from the primary one. Even in the earliest stages the private rectification of wrongs is in part the business of the individual wronged and in part the business of his family or relatives. The progress which brings development of the family organization, at the same time that it brings aggregation of clusters of families or clans into a society, develops the doctrine of family responsibility. That is to say, the private wars between family groups come to be of the same nature as the public wars between societies; and the enforcement of private justice is akin to the enforcement of intertribal justice. Hence arises the idea, which seems to us so strange, that if, when a member of one group has been murdered, a member of the group to which the murderer belongs is killed, it is indifferent whether the victim be the murderer or not. The group is injured to an equivalent extent, and that is the essential requirement.

The other noticeable aspect of the facts is that this rude enforcing of justice by private wars, is changed into public administration of justice, not because of the ruler's solicitude to maintain equitable relations, but much more because of his solicitude to prevent that weakening of his society which internal dissensions must produce. Be he primitive chief, or be he captain of banditti, a leader must check fights among his followers; and what is by these shown on a small scale was shown on a larger scale when, in feudal times, kings forbade private wars between nobles during the times when international wars were going on. Manifestly a king's desire to maintain a social order which conduces to fighting efficiency. prompts the practice of arbitrating between antagonist followers; and manifestly appeals made to him by the injured, recognizing as they do his authority. and responded to for this reason, tend more and more to establish his judicial and legislative powers.

Once established, this secondary function of the state goes on developing; and becomes a function next in importance to the function of protecting against external enemies. The truth to be specially emphasized here, is that while other kinds of governmental action diminish, this kind of governmental action increases. Militant activities may become gradually less, and political agency may retire from various regulative actions previously exercised over citizens. But with the progress of civilization, the administration of justice continues to extend and to become more efficient.

§ 358. And now, having reached these conclusions inductively, let us see whether corresponding conclusions cannot be reached deductively. Let us see whether from the natures of men as socially conditioned, it is not inferable that these two state duties are the essential ones.

At the outset it was shown that the prosperity of a species is achieved by conformity to two opposite principles, appropriate to the young and to the adult respectively: benefits being inversely proportioned to worth in the one case and directly proportioned to worth in the other. Confining our attention to the last of these principles, which now alone concerns us, it is clear that maintenance of those conditions under which each one's efforts bring their rewards is, in the case of a society, liable to be traversed by external foes and by internal foes. The implication is that for the prosperity of a species, or in this case of a society, these conditions must be maintained by a due exercise of force; and for the exercise of such force the corporate action of the society is demanded–imperatively in the one case and with something approaching to imperativeness in the other. To such exercise of force, citizens at large (excluding criminals) have good reasons to assent. Observe their motives.

Such contingent loss of life and partial loss of liberty as are entailed on soldiers, and such deductions from their earnings as other citizens have to contribute to support soldiers, are felt by each to be justified as instrumental to the supreme end of enabling him to carry on his activities and to retain the reward for them–sacrifice of a part to ensure the remainder. Hence he tacitly authorizes the required state coercion.

Though the need for corporate guardianship against internal foes is less urgently felt, yet from the pursuit of his ends by each there arises a resultant desire for such guardianship. As in every community the relatively strong are few, and the relatively weak are many, it happens that in the majority of cases purely private rectification of wrongs is impracticable. If beyond the aid of family and friends, often inadequate, there can be obtained the aid of some one more powerful, it is worth buying–at first by a bribe, and presently by tribute. Eventually, all find it answers best to pay for security rather than suffer aggressions.

Thus these primary and secondary duties of the state are implied by those fundamental needs which associated men experience. They severally desire to live, to carry on their activities, and reap the benefits of them. All have motives to maintain against external enemies the conditions under which these ends may be achieved, and all, save aggressors of one or other kind, have motives to maintain these conditions against internal enemies. Hence at once the duty of the state and the authority of the state.

§ 359. If these duties devolve upon the state, then the state is under obligation to take such measures as are needful for efficiently discharging them.

That defensive appliances sufficient to meet imminent dangers must be provided, every one admits. Even where no attack by foreign foes seems likely, there should be maintained adequate forces to repel invasion; since total unpreparedness may invite attack. Though in this part of the world, and in our days, descents made without excuse by plundering hordes may not have to be guarded against; yet the readiness shown by peoples called civilized to hurl large armies upon one another with but small provocation, makes it manifest that even the most advanced nations cannot prudently trust their neighbors. What amount of military power is needful for safeguarding, of course depends on circumstances, and is a matter of judgment in each case.

But while the need for maintaining such an organization as is requisite for duly discharging the first duty of the state is fully recognized, the need for maintaining such an organization as is requisite for duly discharging its second duty is far from fully recognized. As we have seen above, the defense of citizens one against another, not at first a business of the government, has been undertaken by it but gradually; and even in the most civilized societies its discharge of this business is still but partial, and the propriety of full discharge of it is denied. I do not of course mean that the responsibility of the state for guarding citizens against offenders classed as criminal, is not admitted and fulfilled; but I mean that the state neither admits, nor is supposed by citizens to have, any responsibility for guarding them against offenders classed as civil. Though, if one who receives a rude push invokes the agents of the state, they will take up his case and punish the assailant; yet if he is defrauded of an estate they turn deaf ears to his complaint, and leave him either to bear the loss, or run the risk of further and perhaps greater loss in carrying on a suit and possibly appeals.

Not by lawyers only, but by most other people this condition of things is defended; and the proposition that it is the duty of the state to administer justice without cost, in civil as well as in criminal cases, is ridiculed: as, indeed, every more equitable arrangement is ridiculed before successful establishment of it proves its propriety. It is argued that did the state arbitrate between men gratis, the courts would be so choked with cases as to defeat the end by delay: to say nothing of the immense expense entailed on the country. But this objection proceeds upon the vicious assumption that while one thing is changed other things remain the same. It is supposed that if justice were certain and could be had without cost, the number of trespasses would be as great as now when it is uncertain and expensive! The truth is that the immense majority of civil offenses are consequent on the inefficient administration of justice–would never have been committed had the penalties been certain.

But when we come to contemplate it, it is a marvelous proposition, this which the objection implies, that multitudinous citizens should be left to bear their civil wrongs in silence or risk ruin in trying to get them rectified; and all because the state, to which they have paid great sums in taxes, cannot be at the trouble and expense of defending them! The public evil of discharging this function would be so great, that it is better for countless citizens to suffer the evils of impoverishment and many of them of bankruptcy! Meanwhile, through the officers of its local agents, the state is careful to see that their stink traps are in order!

§ 360. One further duty of the state, indirectly included in the last but distinguishable from it, must be set down, and its consequences specified. 1 refer to its duty in respect of the inhabited territory.

For employments of the surface other than those already established, and tacitly authorized by the community through its government, there require state authorizations. As trustee for the nation the government has to decide whether a proposed undertaking–road, canal, railway, dock &c.–which will so change some tract as to make it permanently useless for ordinary purposes, promises to be of such public utility as to warrant the alienation; and has to fix the terms for its warrant: terms which, while they deal fairly with those who stake their capital in the enterprise, and while they protect the rights of the existing community, also keep in view the interests of future generations, who will hereafter be supreme owners of the territory. For the achievement of these several ends, the equitable arrangement would seem to be, not a permanent alienation of the required tract; nor an unscrupulous breaking of the contract by the state at will, as now; but an alienation for a specified period, with the understanding that the conditions may, at the termination of that period, be revised.

In discharge of its duties as trustee, the ruling body has to exercise a further control–allied but different. If not itself, then by its local deputies, it has to forbid or allow the breaking up of streets, roads, and other public spaces for the establishment or repair of water, gas, telegraph, and kindred appliances. Such supervisions are required for protecting each and all members of the community against the aggressions of particular members or groups of members.

That like considerations call for oversight by the state of rivers, lakes, or other inland waters, as also of the adjacent sea, is sufficiently clear. On the uses made of these and their contents, there may rightly be put such restraints as the interests of the supreme owner, the community, demand.

§ 361. And now what are these duties of the state considered under their most general aspect? What has a society in its corporate capacity to do for its members in their individual capacities? The answer may be given in several ways.

The prosperity of a species is best subserved when among adults each experiences the good and evil results of his own nature and consequent conduct. In a gregarious species fulfillment of this need implies that the individuals shall not so interfere with one another as to prevent the receipt by each of the benefits which his actions naturally bring to him, or transfer to others the evils which his actions naturally bring. This, which is the ultimate law of species life as qualified by social conditions, it is the business of the social aggregate, or incorporated body of citizens, to maintain.

This essential requirement has to be maintained by all for each, because each cannot effectually maintain it for himself. He cannot by himself repel external invaders; and on the average, his resistance to internal invaders, if made by himself or with the aid of a few, is either inefficient, or dangerous, or costly, or wasteful of time, or all of these. To which add that universal self-defense implies chronic antagonisms, either preventing or greatly impeding cooperation and the facilitations to life which it brings. Hence, in distinguishing between things to be done by corporate action and things to be done by individual action, it is clear that, whether or not it does anything else, corporate action may rightly be used to prevent interferences with individual action beyond such as the social state itself necessitates.

Each citizen wants to live, and to live as fully as his surroundings permit. This being the desire of all, it results that all, exercising joint control, are interested in seeing that while each does not suffer from breach of the relation between acts and ends in his own person, he shall not break those relations in the persons of others. The incorporated mass of citizens has to maintain the conditions under which each may gain the fullest life compatible with the fullest lives of fellow citizens.

Whether the state has other duties is a question which remains now to be discussed. Between these essential functions and all other functions there is a division which, though it cannot in all cases be drawn with precision, is yet broadly marked. To maintain intact the conditions under which life may be carried on is a business fundamentally distinct from the business of interfering with the carrying on of the life itself, either by helping the individual or directing him, or restraining him. We will first inquire whether equity permits the state to undertake this further business; and we will then inquire whether considerations of policy coincide with considerations of equity.

[II-215]

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE LIMITS OF STATE-DUTIES.↩

§ 362. During those early stages in which the family and the state were not differentiated, there naturally arose the theory of paternal government. The members of the group were "held together by common obedience to their highest living ascendant, the father, grandfather, or great-grandfather." Ignoring those still earlier social groups of which Sir Henry Maine takes no account, we may accept his generalization that among Aryan and Semitic peoples, the despotic power of the father over his children, surviving more or less as his children became heads of families, and as again their children did the same, gave a general character to the control exercised over all members of the group. The idea of government thus arising, inevitably entered into the idea of government which became established as compound families grew into communities; and it survived when many of such small communities, not allied in blood or but remotely allied, became consolidated into larger societies.

The theory of paternal government originating in this way is a theory which tacitly asserts the propriety of unlimited government. The despotic control of the father extends to all acts of his children; and the patriarchal government growing out of it, naturally came to be exercised over the entire lives of those who were subject. The stage was one in which distinctions and limitations had not yet arisen; and while the group retained something like its original constitution, having in the main a common origin and holding in partial if not entire community the inhabited tract and its produce, the conception of government as unlimited in range was probably one best adapted to the requirements.

But this ancient social idea, like ancient religious ideas, survives, or continually reappears, under conditions utterly unlike those to which it was appropriate. The notion of paternal government is entertained in a vague sentimental way, without any attempt being made definitely to conceive its meaning; and consequently without any perception of the inapplicability of the notion to develop societies. For none of the traits of paternal government as it originally arose, exists now, or is possible. Observe the contrasts.

Fatherhood habitually implies ownership of the means by which children and dependents are supported; and something like such ownership continued under the patriarchal form of rule. But in developed nations not only is this trait absent, but the opposite trait is present. The governing agent does not now support those over whom it exercises authority. but those over whom it exercises authority support the governing agent. Under paternal rule, truly so called, the possessor of the power, being possessor of everything else, was benefactor to his children as well as controller of them; whereas a modern government, along with a power which is in chief measure given by those who are supposed to stand in the place of children, cannot be in such sense a benefactor, but has to receive from the children the means which enable it to do anything for them. Again, in simple and compound family groups there is an approach to identity of interests between rulers and ruled: the bonds of blood relationship go far to ensure a regulative action conducive to the general welfare. But in advanced societies there enter into the political relations no such emotions as those arising from family feeling and kinship, which serve to check the self-seeking of the ruling agent, be it king, oligarchy, or such democratic body as the United States show us. Once more, the supposed parallel fails in respect of knowledge and wisdom. With the primitive paternal power, and the patriarchal power derived from it, there generally went wider experience and deeper insight than were possessed by the descendants who were ruled. But in developed societies no such contrast exists between the mental superiority of those supposed to stand in the position of father, and the mental inferiority of those supposed to stand in the position of children. Contrariwise, among those figuratively spoken of as children, there exist many who are at once better informed and intellectually stronger than the ruling head, single or multiple, as the case may be. And where, the head being multiple, the so-called children have to choose from among themselves those who shall constitute it, they habitually ignore the best fitted: the result being that rule is exercised not so much by the collective wisdom as by the collective folly–the paternal and filial relation is in another way reversed.

Hence that theory of the functions of the state which is based on this assumed parallelism is utterly false. The only justification for the analogy between parent and child and government and people is the childishness of the people who entertain the analogy.

§ 363. A conception of state duties which is connate with the last but gradually diverges from it, must next be noticed. I refer to the conception generated by experiences of those governmental actions needful for carrying on wars, which, up to recent times, have been its chief actions.

In social groups to types preceding the patriarchal, headship becomes established by frequent wars; and in the patriarchal group the head of the warriors is ordinarily head of the state. This identity, continuing through subsequent stages, determines the nature of government at large. That men may be good soldiers they must not only be subordinate, grade under grade, and must not only be drilled in warlike exercises, but must have their daily habits regulated in ways conducive to efficiency. More than this: the soldier-king, regarding the whole community as a body from which soldiers and supplies are to be drawn, extends his control over the entire lives of his subjects. And since nations in general have been, as many of them still are, predominantly militant, this idea of governmental power, with its concomitant idea of the duties of the state, has been almost universal.

In the most militant of Greek states, Sparta, preparation for war was the business of life, and the whole of life was regulated with a view to this preparation. Though in Athens no such strenuous efforts to achieve this end were made, yet there was a recognition of this end as the predominant one. Plato's ideal republic was one in which, by education, citizens were to be molded into fitness for social requirements, of which the chief was national defense; and this power of the incorporated community over its units was to go to the extent of regulating the procreation of them, both by selection of parents and by due adjustment of their ages. So, too, in Aristotle's Politics, it is urged that education should be taken out of the charge of parents, and that the different classes of citizens, differently educated, should be respectively adapted to public needs: authority being also assigned to the legislator to regulate marriage and the begetting of children. Thus the conception of governmental functions developed by militancy, and appropriate to a fighting body, becomes the conception of governmental functions at large.

Here, as before, we see that ideas, sentiments, and habits appropriate to early stages of development survive throughout later stages, to which they are no longer appropriate; and pervert the prevailing beliefs and actions. For by many the conception of state duties that was fit for Greek societies, is supposed to be fit for modern societies. Though the best social organization as conceived by Socrates and approved by Plato, was one in which the industrial classes were to be absolutely subject to the classes above them–though, in his Politics, Aristotle, regarding the family as normally consisting of freemen and slaves, taught that in the best regulated states no mechanic should be a citizen, and that all tillers of the ground should be serfs; yet it is believed that we may with advantage adopt the accompanying theory of state duties! One whose conceptions of right and wrong were shown in the belief that it is impossible for a man who lives the life of a mechanic or hired servant to practice virtue, is supposed to be one to whose conceptions of right and wrong in social affairs we may wisely defer! It is thought that the ideas appropriate to a society organized throughout on relations of status, are adapted to a society organized throughout on relations of contract! A political ethics belonging to a system of compulsory cooperation applies also to a system of voluntary cooperation!

§ 364. There is indeed the excuse that to some extent among ourselves, and to a much larger extent among Continental peoples, the militant life, potential when not actual, still forms so considerable, and in many cases so great, a part of the social life as to render these traditional doctrines appropriate.

Compromise between old and new, which has perpetually to be made in practice, has to be made also in theory; for this must, on the average, conform itself to practice. It is therefore out of the question that there can be generally entertained the belief that governmental action should be subject to certain imperative restraints. The doctrine that there is a limited sphere within which only state control may rightly be exercised, is a doctrine natural to the peaceful and industrial type of society when fully developed; and is not natural either to the militant type or to types transitional between militancy and industrialism. Just relations between the community and its units cannot exist during times when the community and its units are jointly and severally committing injustices abroad. Men who hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the equity of their cause, are not men by whom there can be established equitable social arrangements. While the nations of Europe are partitioning among themselves parts of the earth inhabited by inferior peoples, with cynical indifference to the claims of these peoples, it is foolish to expect that in each of these nations the government can have so tender a regard for the claims of individuals as to be deterred by them from this or that apparently politic measure. So long as the power to make conquests abroad is supposed to give rights to the lands taken, there must of course persist at home the doctrine that an act of Parliament can do anything–that the aggregate will may rightly impose on individual wills without any limit.

It may indeed be contended with reason that under existing conditions belief in the unrestricted authority of the state is necessary. The tacit assumption that the controlling agency which a community appoints or accepts, is subject to no restraints, has the defense that without it there could not be ensured that combined action from time to time required for meeting emergencies. As in war lack of faith in a leader may be a cause of defeat, so in war skepticism respecting governmental authority may produce fatal hesitations and dissensions. So long, therefore, as the religion of enmity so largely qualifies the religion of amity, the doctrine of unlimited state authority must prevail.

§ 365. And now, having seen how the current conception of state duties originated, and how it has survived into modern conditions for which it is but partially adapted, we are the better prepared to entertain the true conception of state duties. After recognizing the probability, if not the certainty, that a theory concerning the proper sphere of government which was fit for societies organized on the principle of compulsory cooperation, must be unfit for societies organized on the principle of voluntary cooperation, we may proceed to ask what is the theory appropriate to these.

Each nation constitutes a variety of the human race. The welfare of humanity at large will be achieved by the prosperity and spread of the best varieties. After there has ended the predatory stage of progress–after there has come the stage in which the competition among societies is carried on without violence, there will, other things equal, be an increasing predominance of societies which produce the greatest numbers of the best individuals. Production and maintenance of the best individuals is achieved by conformity to the law that each shall receive the good and evil results of his own nature and consequent conduct; and in the social state, the conduct of each bringing to him these results, must be restrained within the limits imposed by the presence of others similarly carrying on actions and experiencing results. Hence, other things equal, the greatest prosperity and multiplication of efficient individuals will occur where each is so constituted that he can fulfill the requirements of his own nature without interfering with the fulfillment of such requirements by others.

What, then, becomes the duty of the society in its corporate capacity, that is, of the state? Assuming that it is no longer called on to guard against external dangers, what does there remain which it is called on to do? If the desideratum, alike for the individuals, for the society, and for the race, is that the individuals shall be such as can fulfill their several lives subject to the conditions named; then it is for the society in its corporate capacity to insist that these conditions shall be conformed to. Whether, in the absence of war, a government has or has not anything more to do than this, it is clear it has to do this. And, by implication, it is clear that it is not permissible to do anything which hinders the doing of this.

Hence the question of limits becomes the question whether, beyond maintaining justice, the state can do anything else without transgressing justice. On consideration we shall find that it cannot.

§ 366. For if the state goes beyond fulfillment of its duty as above specified, it must do this in one or both of two ways which severally or jointly reverse its duty.

Of further actions it undertakes, one class comes under the definition of actions which restrain the freedom of some individuals more than is required by maintenance of the like freedom of other individuals; and such actions are themselves breaches of the law of equal freedom. If justice asserts the liberty of each limited only by the like liberties of all, then the imposing of any further limit is unjust; no matter whether the power imposing it be one man or a million of men. As we have seen throughout this work, the general right formulated, and all the special rights deducible from it, do not exist by authority of the state; but the state exists as a means of preserving them. Hence if, instead of preserving them, it trenches upon them, it commits wrongs instead of preventing wrongs. Though not in every society, yet in our society, the killing of all infants which do not reach the standard of goodness required by public authority, would probably be regarded as murder, even though committed by many individuals instead of one; and though not in early times, yet in our time, the tying of men to the lands they were born on, and the forbidding any other occupations than prescribed ones, would be considered as intolerable aggressions on their liberties. But if these larger inroads on their rights are wrong, then also are smaller inroads. As we hold that a theft is a theft whether the amount stolen be a pound or a penny so we must hold that an aggression is an aggression whether it be great or small.

In the other class of cases the wrong is general and indirect, instead of being special and direct. Money taken from the citizen, not to pay the costs of guarding from injury his person, property and liberty, but to pay the costs of other actions to which he has given no assent, inflicts injury instead of preventing it. Names and customs veil so much the facts, that we do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of freedom; and yet it clearly is one. The money taken represents so much labor gone through, and the product of that labor being taken away either leaves the individual to go without such benefit as was achieved by it or else to go through more labor. In feudal days, when the subject classes had, under the name of corvées, to render services to their lords, specified in time or work, the partial slavery was manifest enough; and when the services were commuted for money. the relation remained the same in substance though changed in form. So is it now. Taxpayers are subject to a state corvée, which is none the less decided because, instead of giving their special kinds of work, they give equivalent sums; and if the corvée in its original undisguised form was a deprivation of freedom, so is it in its modern disguised form. "Thus much of your work shall be devoted, not to your own purposes, but to our purposes," say the authorities to the citizens; and to whatever extent this is carried, to that extent the citizens become slaves of the government.

"But they are slaves for their own advantage," will be the reply, "and the things to be done with the money taken from them are things which will in one way or other conduce to their welfare." Yes, that is the theory–a theory not quite in harmony with the vast mass of mischievous legislation filling the statute books. But this reply is not to the purpose. The question is a question of justice; and even supposing that the benefits to be obtained by these extra public expenditures were fairly distributed among all who furnish funds, which they are not, it would still remain true that they are at variance with the fundamental principle of an equitable social order. A man's liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus imposing by force their wills upon his will, they are breaking the law of equal freedom in his person; and what the motive may be matters not. Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one is not sanctified when committed by a host.

Doubtless most persons will read with astonishment this denial of unrestricted state power, and this tacit assertion that the state commits an offense when it exceeds the prescribed limits. In all places and times the beliefs which accompany the established institutions and habits, seem to those who hold them uncontrovertible. The fury of religious persecution has everywhere had behind it the conviction that dissent from the current creed implied deliberate wickedness or demoniacal possession. It was thought monstrous to question the authority of the church in days when the Pope was supreme over kings; and at the present time, in parts of Africa, how monstrous it is thought to reject the local creed is shown by the remark concerning disbelieving Europeans–"What fools these white men are!" So has it been politically. As in Fiji where, until recently, a man stood unbound to be killed, himself declaring that "whatever the king says must be done," it was held impossible to doubt the unbounded power of the ruling man–as throughout Europe, while the doctrine of the divine right of kings was universally accepted, the assertion that the many ought not to obey the one was regarded by nearly all as the worst of crimes–as, even but a century ago, a church-and-king mob were ready to take the life of a preacher who publicly dissented from the established forms of government, political and ecclesiastical; so is it in a measure even still. One who denies the unlimited authority of the state is sure to be regarded by men at large as a fool or a fanatic. Instead of that "divinity which doth hedge a king," we have now the divinity which doth hedge a Parliament. The many-headed government appointed by multitudes of ignorant people, which has replaced the single-headed government supposed to be appointed by heaven, claims, and is accorded, the same unrestricted powers. The sacred right of the majority, who are mostly stupid and ill informed, to coerce the minority. often more intelligent and better informed, is supposed to extend to all commands whatever which the majority may issue; and the rectitude of this arrangement is considered self-evident.

Hence, just as among those who uphold the "sacred duty of blood-revenge," the injunction to forgive injuries is unlikely to meet with much acceptance; so it is not to be expected that among party politicians, eagerly competing with one another to gain votes by promising state aids of countless kinds, any attention will be paid to a doctrine of state duties which excludes the great mass of their favorite schemes. But in face of all the contemptuous reprobation coming from them, it must still be asserted, as above, that their schemes are at variance with the fundamental principle of a harmonious social life.

§ 367. Here, if kept strictly within its limits, this division of the Principles of Ethics should be brought to a close. Having seen what is the dictum of absolute ethics respecting the duties of the state, and having seen what qualifications are implied by that relative ethics which takes cognizance of the requirements generated by international aggressiveness–having further seen that during the transition between the militant and industrial forms of social life, an unduly exalted conception of state authority (which is natural and in large measure necessary) fosters a multiplicity of unjust state actions; there remains, from an ethical point of view no more to be said. But it will be desirable here to devote some space to the proofs that these actions which are unjust in theory are also impolitic in practice.

The subject is a vast one, and cannot of course be fully dealt with in the space available. It will not be practicable to do more than present in outline the various divisions of the argument, with such few illustrations as are needful to indicate their bearings.

We will first deal with the state considered generally as an instrumentality, in contrast with other instrumentalities. We will examine next the assumption that it has a nature fitting it to remedy other evils than those entailed by aggression, external or internal. We will then consider the validity of the reasons for ascribing to it the duty and the power of achieving positive benefits. And we will end by inquiring whether the ultimate purpose–a higher development of human nature–is likely to be aided or hindered by its extended activities.

NOTE. Respecting the conclusions set forth in the following three chapters, it seems proper to say that their validity must not be measured solely by the evidence given, and the arguments used, in support of them. For the full vindication of these conclusions, and for the multitudinous facts which justify them, the reader is referred to various essays from time to time published, and now republished in the library edition of my essays. The titles of them are: "Over-Legislation"; "Representative Government–What Is it Good for?" "State-Tamperings with Money and Banks"; "The Collective Wisdom"; "Political Fetishism"; and "Specialized Administration." To these may be added sundry chapters forming the latter part of Social Statics, at present withdrawn from circulation, but selected portions of which I hope presently to re-publish.

[II-228]

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE LIMITS OF STATE-DUTIES CONTINUED.↩

§ 368. We saw (in chap. 23) that at a later stage of evolution a society may acquire a nature fundamentally unlike the nature it had at an earlier stage; and we drew the corollary that a theory of state duties appropriate when it had one nature must be inappropriate when it has the other nature. Here we have to draw a further corollary. The implied change of nature absolves the state from various functions for which it was at first the best agent; and generates for these functions other and better agents.

While war was the business of life, while militant organization was imperative, and while coercive rule was needful for disciplining improvident men and curbing their antisocial natures, agencies of a nongovernmental kind could not develop. Citizens had neither the means, nor the experience, nor the characters, nor the ideas, needed for privately cooperating in extensive ways. Hence all large purposes devolved on the state. If roads had to be made, if canals had to be cut, if aqueducts had to be built, the only instrumentality was governmental power exercised over slaves.

But with decline of militancy and rise of industrialism–the decay of the system of status and growth of the system of contract–there have gradually become possible, and have gradually arisen, multitudinous voluntary associations among citizens for discharging numerous kinds of functions. This result has been consequent on modifications of habits, dispositions, and modes of thought, which have been, generation after generation, produced by the daily exchange of services under agreement, in place of the daily enforcing of services. One result is that there can now be achieved without governmental power, various ends which in early days governmental power alone could achieve.

In discussing the sphere of state action we must take into account this profoundly significant fact. More than this: we must take into account a manifest inference. The changes above indicated are far from being ended; and we are justified in concluding that with further progress of them there may rightly go further relinquishment of functions which the state once discharged.

§ 369. That such relinquishment of functions by the state, and assumption of them by other agencies, constitutes a progress, should be manifest to all who know anything about the laws of organization: though, unhappily, this truth seems no more appreciated by them than by those who began their school days with making nonsense verses and pass their mature years in pushing forward ad captandum legislation. For concerning individual organisms and social organisms, nothing is more certain than that advance from lower to higher, is marked by increasing heterogeneity of structures and increasing subdivision of functions. In both cases there is mutual dependence of parts, which becomes greater as the type becomes higher; and while this implies a progressing limitation of one function to one part, it implies also a progressing fitness of such part for such function.

When, some fifty years ago, Milne-Edwards gave to this principle of development in animals the name "physiological division of labor," he recognized the parallelism between vital economy and social economy; and this parallelism has been since growing ever clearer. But though among the cultured few, there is now some vague recognition of it; and though more especially the increasing division of labor which the industrial part of the social organism displays, has been made familiar by political economists, and the advantages of it duly insisted upon; there is little or no perception of the truth that the principle holds also within the controlling part, and throughout its relations to the other parts. Even without the facts which illustrate it, we might be certain that specialization, with consequent limitation, normally takes place in the regulative structures of a society as in all its other structures; that advantage is achieved by such specialization and limitation; and that any reverse change constitutes a retrogression.

The implication is therefore the same as before. All embracing state functions characterize a low social type; and progress to a higher social type is marked by relinquishments of functions.

§ 370. Most readers will feel little faith in these general conclusions. It will be needful to enforce them by arguments more readily appreciated.

In section 5 I named the fact that the welfare of any living body depends on the due proportioning of its several parts to their several duties; and that the needful balance of power among the parts is effected by a constant competition for nutriment, and the flowing to each of a quantity corresponding to its work. That competition throughout the industrial parts of a society achieves a kindred balance in a kindred way, needs no proof; and that social needs at large are best subserved by carrying out, wherever possible, this relation between effort and benefit, is manifest.

Now in all those nongovernmental cooperations constituting the greater part of modern social life, this balancing is spontaneously effected. I need not dwell on the principle of supply and demand as displayed throughout our industrial organization; and I need not do more than hint that this same principle holds throughout all other nongovernmental agencies–bodies for voluntary religious teaching, philanthropic associations, trades unions. Among all such, activity and growth, or quiescence and decay, occur according as they do or do not fulfill wants that are felt. Nor is this all. A truth which cannot be too much emphasized is that under this stress of competition, each of these agencies is impelled to perform the greatest amount of function in return for a given amount of nutrition. Moreover, competition constantly impels it to improve; to which end it not only utilizes the best appliances but is anxious to get the best men. The direct relation between efficiency and prosperity obliges all voluntary cooperations to work at high pressure.

Contrariwise, the compulsory cooperations by which governmental actions are effected, instead of direct relations between function and nutrition, show us highly indirect relations. Public departments, all of them regimented after the militant fashion, all supported by taxes forcibly taken, and severally responsible to their heads, mostly appointed for party reasons, are not immediately dependent for their means of living and growing on those whom they are designed to benefit. There is no fear of bankruptcy to prompt efficient and rapid performance of duty; there is no taking away of business by an opponent who does work more economically; there is no augmenting of profits by adopting improvements, still less by devising them. Every kind of defect results. As was lately said to me by one official concerning another, on whose remissness I was commenting, "Oh, he gets good pay and doesn't want to be bothered." In consequence of this indirectness of relation between benefits yielded and payments received, governmental agencies may continue to exist and draw funds for years, and sometimes for generations, after they have ceased to be of service; and when they are weak, or careless, or slow, the inefficiency has to be rectified by pressure exercised through the governmental machine–a machine so cumbrous and complex that only great pressure exercised with great patience can effect the needful change.

§ 371. Every day's papers thrust illustrations of these truths before the world, in relation even to those essential functions which we have no alternative but to devolve on the state. The ill-working of the appliances for national protection and individual protection is a ceaseless scandal.

Army administration is exemplified by the retention of a royal duke as commander-in-chief, by the multiplicity of generals made in satisfaction of class interests, by promotion that is only in small measure determined by merit. It is again exemplified by keeping our own officers in ignorance of improvements which foreign officers are allowed to see; and by the repeated leaking out of secrets through employees in the arsenals. And it is yet again exemplified by the astounding disclosures respecting stores–bayonets that bend, swords that break, cartridges that jam, shells of wrong sizes; so that, as said by the Inquiry Commission of 1887: "The present system is directed to no definite object; it is regulated by no definite rules; it makes no regular stated provision, either for the proper supply and manufacture of warlike stores, or for enforcing the responsibility of those who fail to make them properly, or for ascertaining the fact that they are made improperly."

That the navy keeps the army in countenance, complaint, inquiry. and exposure, continually remind us. All remember the story of the naval evolutions on the occasion of the Jubilee, when, without the stress of a sea fight, more than a dozen vessels, great and small, came to grief in one way or other–collisions, explosions, breakdowns of engines, and so forth. And then there were the smaller but equally significant disasters which, in the same year, attended the cruise of twentyfour torpedo boats down channel and back; during which eight of the twenty-four were more or less disabled. Vessels that will not steer, guns that burst, ships that run aground, are frequently reported; and then, furnishing a significant contrast, when a first-class man-of-war, the Sultan, after running on a rock, sinks and is regarded by the Admiralty as lost, it is raised again and saved by a private company. To which add that the report concerning Admiralty administration issued in March 1887 showed that "such management as is here disclosed would bring any commercial firm into the Bankruptcy Court in a few months."

Similarly is it with the making and administration of laws. So constant is the exposure of folly and failure, that the public sense of them is seared. In parliamentary procedure we meet with the extremes of utter recklessness and irrational carefulness: now a bill is hurried through all its stages without debate, and now, after careful consideration has delayed its enactment, it is dropped and has to pass through the whole process again next session. While we see the amending and reamending of clauses aimed to meet every contingency, we see the whole act when passed thrown on to the immense chaotic heap of preceding legislation, making its confusion worse confounded. Complaint and denunciation lead to nothing. Here, in 1867, is the report of a commission formed of leading lawyers and statesmen–Cranworth, Westbury, Cairns, and others–urging the need for a digest as a preparation for a code; and urging that it is a national duty to provide citizens with a means of knowing the laws they have to conform to. Yet, though the question has been occasionally raised, nothing has been done–nothing, that is, by the state, but something by private individuals: Chitty's Equity Index and Sir James Stephen's Digest of the Criminal Law, have to some extent taught legislators what has been done by themselves and their predecessors. Then there is the fact, to the monstrosity of which custom blinds us, that even lawyers do not know what the bearings of a new act are until judges have made decisions under it; while the judges themselves exclaim against the bungling legislation they have to interpret: one judge saying of a clause that he "did not believe its meaning was comprehended either by the draftsman who drew it" or "the parliament that adopted it," and another declaring that "it was impossible for human skill to find words more calculated to puzzle everybody." As a natural consequence we have every day appeals and again appeals–decisions being reversed and re-reversed, and the poorer litigants being compelled to submit by the wealthier ones, who can ruin them by going from court to court. The incredible disproportion of sentences, too, is a daily scandal. Here a hungry harvester is sent to prison for eating a pennyworth of the field beans he was cutting, as happened at Faversham; and there a rich man who has committed a violent assault has to pay a fine which to him is trivial. Still more disgraceful is the treatment of men charged with unproved offenses, and men who have been proved innocent: these being kept in prison for months before trials which show them to be guiltless, and those, after bearing long punishments before their innocence is shown, being granted "free pardons" and no compensation for inflicted sufferings and damaged lives.

Even the smallest daily transaction–the paying of a cab-man or the purchase of a necktie–serves to remind one of official bungling; for how can it be better shown than by the coinage? In this we have frequent changes where changes are undesirable. We have mixed systems: decimal, duodecimal, and nondescript. Until recently we had two scarcely distinguishable pieces for threepence and fourpence; we had, four years since, the Jubilee sixpence withdrawn because it stimulated a half-sovereign so exactly that it needed only to be gilt to pass for one. We have the lately introduced four-shilling piece, only by deliberate inspection distinguishable from a five-shilling piece. In most cases there lacks the one needful piece of information–the declared value of the coin. And once more there are no proper adjustments to the demands: everywhere there is an unsatisfied cry for small change.

So that the inference which the general laws of organization compel us to draw, is inductively verified in respect of the three all-essential departments of the state, as well as in a subordinate department, by evidence which every day increases.

§ 372. There are two leading implications of this general truth above exhibited in the abstract, and above exemplified in the concrete.

If people at large tolerate the extravagance, the stupidity, the carelessness, the obstructiveness, daily exemplified in the military, naval, and legal administrations; much more will they tolerate them when exemplified in departments which are neither so vitally important nor occupy so large a space in the public mind. The vices of officialism must exist throughout public organizations of every kind, and may be expected to go to greater extremes where the necessity for checking them is less pressing. Not only, then, may we rationally conclude that when, beyond its essential functions, the state undertakes nonessential functions, it will perform these equally ill, but we may rationally conclude that its performance of them will be still worse.

The second implication is that the ill-performance of essential functions is itself made more extreme by the absorption of attention and energy in discharging nonessential functions. It cannot but be that the power to conduct a few businesses is diminished by the addition of many other businesses to be conducted: and it cannot but be that when public criticism is directed to shortcomings of many kinds it must be less efficient than when directed to shortcomings of few kinds. If, instead of being almost wholly occupied with other things, Parliament were occupied almost wholly with the administrations for external protection and internal protection, no one will dare to deny that these would be more efficient than now; and no one will dare to assert that, if discussions on the platform and in the press were almost wholly about these administrations instead of being almost wholly about other things, the public would tolerate such inefficiency of them as it now does.

Thus whether we wish to avoid the multiplication of ill-performed functions, or whether we wish to have the essential functions better performed, the requirement is the same–limitation. Specialization of functions directly improves the discharge of each function by adjusting the organ to it, and indirectly improves the discharge of other functions by permitting each to acquire an appropriate organ.

§ 373. The foregoing reasons for concluding that in the administration of social affairs the just is also the politic, will weigh but little with the majority. The beliefs in natural law and the universality of causation are not very strong even in the scientific world when vital phenomena are in question; and they are very feeble in the outer world. Only such of the above arguments as are based on facts daily published are likely to tell; and the adequacy of even these will be denied by most.

It will, therefore, be needful to reinforce them by others drawn from evidences directly relevant. Let us devote a chapter to these.

[II-237]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LIMITS OF STATE-DUTIES CONTINUED,↩

§ 374. In simple matters direct perception cannot be trusted: to insure trustworthy conclusions we must use some mode of measurement by which the imperfections of the senses may be corrected. Contrariwise, in complex matters unaided contemplation suffices: we can adequately sum up and balance the evidences without reference to any general truth."

Does anyone smile at this absurd proposition? Why should he do so? The probabilities are ten to one that, under a disguised form, this proposition forms part of his tacitly accepted creed. If he hears of an artisan who pooh-poohs thermometers, and says he can tell better by his hand what is the right temperature for the liquid he uses, the reader, knowing that the sensation of heat or cold which anything yields varies greatly according to the temperature of the hand, sees how absurd is this self-confidence resulting from want of knowledge. But he sees no absurdity in the attempt to reach without any guiding principle a right conclusion respecting the consequences of some action affecting in multitudinous ways millions of people: here there needs no kind of meter by which to test the correctness of direct impressions. If, for instance, the question is whether he shall advocate the system of payment by results in state-aided schools, he thinks it obvious that the stimulus given by it to teachers cannot fail to be beneficial to pupils. It does not occur to him that perhaps the induced pressure will be too great; that perhaps it will foster a mechanical receptivity; that mere cram may end in ultimate aversion to learning; that there may be prompted special attention to clever pupils whose success will profit the teacher, and consequent neglect of dull ones; that a system which values knowledge for gaining money grants, and not for its own sake, is unlikely to produce healthy intelligence; and that even the teachers under such a system are likely to become mere machines. Seeing, as he thinks quite clearly, the immediate results, and either not perceiving at all the remote results or making light of them, he has no doubt that the plan will be a good one. And then when, after some twenty years the effects of the plan are found to be so injurious that it is abandoned, after having damaged the healths of millions of children and inflicted an immeasurable amount of physical and mental pain, he is not in the least the wiser for his disastrous misjudgment, but is ready next day to decide about some newly proposed scheme in the same way–by simple inspection and balancing probabilities. That is, as above said, though the aid of general principles is thought needful in simple matters, it is thought not needful in the most complex matters.

And yet a minute's thought should make it clear to every one not only that these unguided judgments are very likely to be wrong, but also that there must exist some guidance by which correct judgments may be reached. For what can be more nonsensical than the belief that there is no natural causation in social affairs? And how can anyone evade the charge of folly who, admitting that there must be natural causation, devises laws which take no account of it? As argued in a preceding chapter, if there is no causation then one law is as good as another, and lawmaking ridiculous. If one law is not as good as another, it must be that on men socially aggregated one law will operate more beneficially than another; and its more beneficial operation implies some adaptation to the natures of the men and their modes of cooperation. Concerning these there must exist some general truths, some deepest uniformities; and the ultimate effect of any legislation must depend on its recognition of such uniformities and its subordination to them. How, then, can there be anything more senseless than to proceed before inquiring what they are?

§ 375. Pursuit of happiness without regard to the conditions by fulfillment of which happiness is to be achieved, is foolish socially as well as individually–nay. indeed, more foolish; since the evils of disregarding the conditions are not unfrequently evaded by the individual, but, in consequence of the averaging of effects among many individuals, cannot be evaded by the society.

Estimating the probable results of each act apart from any general sanction other than the pursuit of happiness, is the method pursued by every criminal. He thinks the chances are in favor of gaining pleasures and escaping pains. Ignoring those considerations of equity which should restrain him, he contemplates the proximate results and not the ultimate results; and, in respect of the proximate results, he is occasionally right: he has the gratifications which his ill-gotten gains bring and does not suffer the punishment. But in the long run it turns out that the evils are greater than the benefits; partly because he does not always avoid the penalties, and partly because the kind of nature fostered by his actions is incapable of the higher kinds of happiness.

The policy thus pursued with egoistic ends by the lawbreaker is pursued with altruistic ends by the expediency politician. He, too, not for his own good, but, as he thinks, for the good of others, makes calculations of probable pleasures and pains; and, ignoring the dictates of pure equity, adopts such methods as he thinks will achieve the one and avoid the other. If it is a question of providing books and newspapers in so-called free libraries, he contemplates results which he makes no doubt will be beneficial; and practically ignores the inquiry whether it is just to take by force the money of A, B, and C, to pay for the gratifications of D, E, and F. Should his aim be the repression of drunkenness and its evils, he thinks exclusively of these ends, and, determined to impose his own beliefs on others, tries to restrict men's freedom of exchange and to abolish businesses in which capital has been invested with legal and social assent. Thus, as above said, the altruistic aggressor, like the egoistic aggressor, disregards all other guidance than that of estimated proximate results–is not restrained by the thought that his acts break the first principle of harmonious social life.

Clearly this empirical utilitarianism, which makes happiness the immediate aim, stands in contrast with the rational utilitarianism, which aims at fulfillment of the conditions to happiness.

§ 376. The upholders of political empiricism cannot object if we bring their own method to the empirical test. If, ignoring abstract principles, we are to be guided by results, either as calculated beforehand or as ascertained by experience, then, clearly, we cannot do better than judge in like manner of the empirical method itself. Let us do this.

In a discussion on socialistic legislation which took place in the House of Lords on May 19, 1890, our Prime Minister said, "We no more ask what is the derivation or philosophical extraction of a proposal before we adopt it than a wise man would ask the character of a footman's grandfather before engaging the footman."

After thus ridiculing the supposition that there are any general laws of social life to which legislation should conform, he went on to say, "We ought first to discuss every subject on its own merits." And Lord Salisbury's method thus distinctly avowed, is the method universally followed by politicians who call themselves practical and sneer at "abstract principles."

But unhappily for them their method is the method which has been followed by those legislators who, throughout past thousands of years, have increased human miseries in multitudinous ways and immeasurable degrees by mischievous laws. Regard for "the merits of the case" guided Diocletian when he fixed the prices of articles and wages of workers, and similarly guided rulers of all European nations who, century after century, in innumerable cases, have decided how much commodity shall be given for so much money, and in our own country guided those who, after the Black Death, framed the Statute of Labourers, and presently caused the peasant revolt. The countless acts which, here and abroad, prescribed qualities and modes of manufacture, and appointed searchers to see that things were made as directed, were similarly prompted by consideration of "the merits of the case": evils existed which it was obviously needful to prevent. Doubtless, too, the orders to farmers respecting the proportions of their arable and pasture lands, the times for shearing sheep, the number of horses to a plough, as well as those which insisted on certain crops and prohibited others, had "the merits of the case" in view. Similarly was it with the bounties on the exports of some commodities and the restrictions on the imports of others; and similarly was it with the penalties on forestallers, and the treatment of usury as a crime. Each one of those multitudinous regulations enforced by swarms of officials, which in France nearly strangled industry, and was a part cause of the French revolution, seemed to those who established it, a regulation which "the merits of the case" called for; and no less did there seem to be called for the numberless sumptuary laws which, generation after generation, kings and their ministers tried to enforce. Out of the 14,000-odd acts which, in our own country, have been repealed, from the date of the Statute of Merton down to 1872–some because of consolidations, some because they proved futile, some because they were obsolete–how many have been repealed because they were mischievous? Shall we say one-half? Shall we say one-fourth? Shall we say less than one-fourth? Suppose that only 3,000 of these acts were abolished after proved injuries had been caused, which is a low estimate. What shall we say of these 3,000 acts which have been hindering human happiness and increasing human misery; now for years, now for generations, now for centuries?

See then the verdict. If we are to be led by observation and experience, what do observation and expenence say respecting this method of guidance? Do they not show beyond all possibility of denial that it has proved a gigantic failure? "No," may perhaps be the reply–"You forget that though numerous laws have been repealed after doing mischief, numerous others have not been repealed but have proved beneficial." Very true; but this reply is no less unfortunate than the original allegation. For which are the successful laws? They are the laws which conform to those fundamental principles which practical politicians pooh-pooh. They are the laws countenanced by that social philosophy of which Lord Salisbury speaks so contemptuously. They are the laws which recognize and enforce the various corollaries from the formula of justice. For, as we have seen in a number of preceding chapters, social evolution has been accompanied by the progressive establishment of these ethically enjoined laws. So that the evidence yields a double condemnation of the method of empirical utilitarianism. Facts conclusively prove the failure of that method and the success of the opposite method.

But now observe that neither Lord Salisbury nor any adherent of the same political creed, pursues with consistency this method of judging by "the merits of the case." Contrariwise, throughout by far the most important classes of cases they pursue the method they ridicule. Bring them to the test, and they will emphatically repudiate guidance by "the merits of the case," when the case is one in which the issues are simple and clear.

In explanation of the frequent escapes of thieves in public thoroughfares, a letter to one of the daily papers narrated how, after witnessing a theft, the writer asked a man who was passed by the thief when running away, why he did not stop him. The reply was–"I was not going to stop the poor fellow. I expect the things he stole would do him more good than the man he stole them from." Here, consideration of "the merits of the case" was the avowed way of judging: the relative degrees of happiness of the thief and the person robbed were estimated and the decision justified the theft. "But the rights of property must be maintained," Lord Salisbury would reply. "Society would dissolve if men were allowed to take other men's goods on the plea that they had more need of them than the owners." Just so. But this is not judging by "the merits of the case"; it is judging by conformity to a general principle. That philosophy at which Lord Salisbury sneers, shows that social cooperation can be effectively and harmoniously carried on, only if the relations between efforts and benefits are maintained intact. And, as we have seen, it is the same with all those laws the enforcement of which constitutes the administration of justice, and which it is part of Lord Salisbury's essential business to uphold: all of them are embodied corollaries from the philosophy he scorns.

The essential difference is that though the lessons of thousands of years show that society improves in proportion as there is better and better conformity to these corollaries; and though it is to be inferred that it will be best to conform to them in each new case which arises; Lord Salisbury thinks that nonconformity to them is proper if a majority decides that "the merits of the case" demand it.

§ 377. That anyone who has before him the facts daily set forth in newspapers, should suppose that when measures are taken to meet "the merits of the case," the consequences can be shut up within the limits of the case, is astonishing. That, after seeing how a change set up in some part of a society initiates other changes unforeseen, and these again others, anyone should think he is going to produce by act of Parliament certain effects intended and no unintended effects, shows how possible it is to go on reading day by day without getting wiser. In any aggregate formed of mutually dependent parts, there comes into play what I have elsewhere described as fructifying causation. The effects of any cause become themselves causes, often more important than their parent; and their effects, again, become other causes. What happened when a great rise in the price of coals occurred some years ago? The expenditure of every household was affected, and the poor were especially pinched. Every factory was taxed, and either the wages lowered or the price of the commodity raised. The smelting of iron became more expensive, and the cost of all those things, such as railways and engines, into which iron enters largely, was increased. The ability to compete with various classes of foreign manufactures was diminished; fewer vessels were chartered for carrying products abroad; and the shipbuilding trade flagged with all the dependent trades. Similarly throughout in directions too numerous to follow. See, again, what has resulted from the late dock strike–or rather, from the ill-judged sympathy which, guided by "the merits of the case," led public and police to tolerate the violence employed by dockers to achieve their ends. Successful use in this case of assaulting, bullying, and boycotting, prompted elsewhere strikes enforced by like means–at Southampton, Tilbury, Glasgow, Nottingham, &c. Other classes followed the lead–painters, leather workers, cabinetmakers, scalemakers, bakers, carpenters, printers, sandwich men, &c. And there were prompted like movements, still more unscrupulous, in Australia and America. Then, as secondary results, came the stoppages and perturbations of businesses, and through them of connected businesses, with consequent decrease of employment. Among tertiary results we have encouragement of the delusion that it only requires union for workers to get what terms they please, prompting suicidal demands. And, among still remoter results, we have the urging on of meddling legislation and the fostering of socialistic ideas.

The indirect effects, multiplying and again multiplying, are often in the long run the reverse of those counted on. Past and present alike supply instances. Among those from the past may be named the Act of 8th Elizabeth, which, to protect the inhabitants of Shrewsbury against strangers, forbade all save freemen to trade in Welsh cottons, and which, six years afterwards, the Shrewsbury people begged should be repealed, because "of the impoverishing and undoing of the poor artificers and others, at whose suit the said act was procured": an experience paralleled in later days by that of the Spitalfields weavers. Then of striking examples which present times furnish, we have the results of certain laws in the Western states of America. In his message to the Colorado legislature, January 8, 1885, Governor Grant says: "These laws were designed to exterminate the hawks, wolves, and loco weeds. . . the hawks and wolves have steadily increased under the auspices of these bounty laws"; that is, as measured by the amount paid. Kindred results have been experienced in India.

From the times when vagrants swarmed round monasteries to the old Poor Law days when many parishes were nearly swamped by paupers, experience has continually shown that measures guided by the apparent "merits of the case," have done exactly the reverse of that which was proposed to be done–have increased distress instead of diminishing it. And recent facts have continued to illustrate the same thing. The chairman of the Bradfield Union, writing to the Spectator of April 19, 1890, points out that seventeen years' administration led by principle instead of impulse, had reduced the indoor paupers from 259 to 100, and the outdoor paupers from 999 to 42: the conviction with which he ends his letter being that "the majority of paupers are created by out-relief." And this warning against being guided by the seeming necessities, has been since emphasized by Mr. Arnold White, writing from Tennyson Settlement, Cape Colony, to the Spectator for January 10, 1891, in which he says: "Any colonizing scheme that does not distinctly include death to the willfully idle if they choose to die, is predestined to failure. . . . the lesson has been burned into me by long and bitter years of hard-earned experience." Which is to say that if, in respect of charity, we let ourselves be swayed by the apparent "merits of the case," we shall eventually exacerbate the evils instead of curing them.

The judgments of the legislator who derides philosophy, and thinks it needful only to look at the facts before him, are equally respectable with those of the laborer who joins his fellows in vociferous advocacy of some public undertaking, for the reason that it will give employment–thus looking, as he does, at "the merits of the case" as directly to be anticipated, and thinking nothing of the remoter consequences: not asking what will be the effect of expending capital in doing something that will not bring adequate returns; not asking what undertakings, probably more remunerative and therefore more useful, the capital would have been otherwise devoted to; not asking what other trades and artisans and laborers would then have had employment. For though the legislator may contemplate effects somewhat more remote, yet he is practically as far as the laborer from conceiving the ultimate waves of change, reverberating and re-reverberating throughout society.

§ 378. Which is the more misleading, belief without evidence, or refusal to believe in presence of overwhelming evidence? If there is an irrational faith which persists without any facts to support it, there is an irrational lack of faith which persists spite of the accumulation of facts which should produce it; and we may doubt whether the last does not lead to worse results than the first.

The average legislator, equally with the average citizen, has no faith whatever in the beneficent working of social forces, notwithstanding the almost infinite illustrations of this beneficent working. He persists in thinking of a society as a manufacture and not as a growth: blind to the fact that the vast and complex organization by which its life is carried on, has resulted from the spontaneous cooperations of men pursuing their private ends. Though, when he asks how the surface of the earth has been cleared and made fertile, how towns have grown up, how manufactures of all kinds have arisen, how the arts have been developed, how knowledge has been accumulated, how literature has been produced, he is forced to recognize the fact that none of these are of governmental origin, but have many of them suffered from governmental obstruction; yet, ignoring all this, he assumes that if a good is to be achieved or an evil prevented, Parliament must be invoked. He has unlimited faith in the agency which has achieved multitudinous failures, and has no faith in the agency which has achieved multitudinous successes.

Of the various feelings which move men to action, each class has its part in producing social structures and functions. There are first the egoistic feelings, most powerful and most active, the effects of which, as developing the arrangements for production and distribution, have been above adverted to, and which, whenever there is a new sphere to be profitably occupied, are quick to cause new growths. From the cutting of a Suez Canal and the building of a Forth Bridge, to the insurance of ships, houses, lives, crops, windows, the exploration of unknown regions, the conducting of travelers' excursions, down to automatic supply boxes at railway stations and the loan of opera glasses at theaters, private enterprise is ubiquitous and infinitely varied in form; and when repressed by state agency in one direction buds out in another. Reminding us of the way in which, in Charles II's time, there was commenced in London a local penny post, which was suppressed by the government, we have, in the Boy Messengers' Company and its attempted suppression, illustrations of the efficiency of private enterprise and the obstructiveness of officialism. And then, if there needs to add a case showing the superiority of spontaneously formed agencies we have it in the American Express Companies, of which one has 7,000 agencies, has its own express trains, delivers 25,000,000 parcels annually. is employed by the government, has a moneyorder system which is replacing that of the Post Office, and has now extended its business to Europe, India, Africa, South America, and Polynesia.

Beyond those egoistic feelings by the combined forces of which the sustaining organization of every society has been developed, there are in men the ego-altruistic and altruistic feelings–the love of approbation and the sympathy–which prompt them to various other single and combined actions, and generate various other institutions. It is needless to go back into the past to exemplify the operation of these in the endowments for charitable and educational purposes. The present day furnishes ample evidence of their potency. Here, and still more in America, we have vast sums left for founding colleges, and, in more numerous cases, sums for endowing professorial chairs and scholarships; we have gifts of immense sums to build and fill public libraries; we have parks and gardens given to towns by private individuals; we have museums bequeathed to the nation. In The Standard for April 11, 1890, is given an account showing that the bequests to hospitals, asylums, missions, societies, for 1889 amounted to £1,080,000; and that for the first quarter of 1890 they amounted to £300,000. Then, in The Nineteenth Century, for January, 1890, Mr. Huish has pointed out that during the last few years, the gifts of private individuals for the support of art, have been respectively. for buildings £347,500, and in pictures or money £559,000; to which may be added the more recent donation of £80,000 for a gallery of British Art.

Nor must we forget the daily activities of multitudinous philanthropic people in urging one or other movement for the benefit of fellow citizens. Countless societies, with an enormous aggregate revenue, are formed for unselfish purposes: all good in design if not in result. And the motives, largely if not wholly altruistic, which prompt the establishment and working of these, far from showing any decrease of strength, become continually stronger.

Surely, then, if these forces have already done so much and are continually doing more, their future efficiency may be counted upon. And it may be reasonably inferred that they will do many things which we do not yet see how to do.

§ 379. So that even if we disregard ethical restraints, and even if we ignore the inferences to be drawn from that progressing specialization which societies show us, we still find strong reasons for holding that state functions should be restricted rather than extended.

Extension of them in pursuit of this or that promised benefit, has all along proved disastrous. The histories of all nations are alike in exhibiting the enormous evils that have been produced by legislation guided merely by "the merits of the case"; while they unite in proving the success of legislation which has been guided by considerations of equity.

Evidence thrust before us every morning shows throughout the body politic a fructifying causation so involved that not even the highest intelligence can anticipate the aggregate effects. The practical politician so-called, who thinks that the influences of his measure are to be shut up within the limits of the field he contemplates, is one of the wildest of theorists.

And then, while his faith in the method of achieving artificially this or that end, is continually discredited by failures to work the effects intended and by working unintended effects, he shows no faith in those natural forces which in the past have done much, are at present doing more, and in the future may be expected to do most.

[II-251]

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE LIMITS OF STATE-DUTIES CONCLUDED.↩

§ 380. Of the many reasons for restricting the range of governmental actions, the strongest remains to be named. The end which the statesman should keep in view as higher than all other ends, is the formation of character. And if there is entertained a right conception of the character which should be formed, and of the means by which it may be formed, the exclusion of multiplied state agencies is necessarily implied.

"How so?" will doubtless be the exclamation of many. "Is not the formation of character the end to which much of the legislation we advocate is directed? Do we not contend that an all-important part of the state's business is the making of good citizens? and are not our school systems, our free libraries, our sanitary arrangements, our gymnasia, &c., devised with the view of improving their natures?"

To this interrogative reply. uttered with an air of astonishment and an implied conviction that nothing remains to be said, the answer is that everything depends on the goodness of the ideal entertained and the appropriateness of the appliances for realizing it; and that both of them are radically wrong.

These paragraphs sufficiently indicate the antagonist views to be here discussed. Let us now enter on the discussion of them systematically.

§ 381. Upwards from hordes of savages to civilized nations, countless examples show that to make an efficient warrior preparation is needed. Practice in the use of weapons begins in boyhood; and throughout youth the ambition is to be a good marksman with the bow and arrow to throw the javelin or the boomerang with force and precision, and to become an adept in defense as well as in attack. At the same time speed and agility are effectually cultivated, and there are trials of strength. More relevant still to the end in view comes the discipline in endurance; sometimes going to the extent of submission to torture. In brief, each male of the tribe is so educated as to fit him for the purposes of the tribe–to fit him for helping it in maintaining its existence, or subjugating its neighbors, or both. Though not a state education in the modern sense, the education is one prescribed by custom and enforced by public opinion. That it is the business of the society to mold the individual is asserted tacitly if not openly.

With that social progress which forms larger communities regularly governed, there goes a further development of state education. Not only are there now deliberately cultivated the needful strength, skill, and endurance, but there is cultivated that subordination which is required for the performance of military evolutions, and that further subordination to leaders and to rulers without which the combined forces cannot be used in the desired ways. It is needless to do more than name Greece, and especially Sparta, as exemplifying this phase.

With this practice went an appropriate theory. From the belief that the individual belonged neither to himself nor to his family but to his city, there naturally grew up the doctrine that it was the business of his city to mold him into fitness for its purposes. Alike in Plato and in Aristotle we have elaborate methods proposed for the due preparation of children and youths for citizenship, and an unhesitating assumption that in a good state, education must be a public business.

Evidently, then, while war is the chief business of life, the training of individuals by governmental agency after a pattern adapted to successful fighting, is a normal accompaniment. In this case experience furnishes a tolerably correct ideal to be aimed at, and guidance in the choice of methods productive of the ideal. All free men have to be made as much as may be into military machines, automatically obedient to orders; and a unifying discipline is required to form them. Moreover, just as in the militant type the coercive system of rule which regimentation involves, spreads from the fighting part throughout the whole of the ancillary parts which support it; so, there naturally establishes itself the theory that not soldiers only, but all other members of the community, should be molded by the government into fitness for their functions.

§ 382. Not recognizing the fundamental distinction between a society which, having fighting for its chief business, makes sustentation subordinate, and a society which, having sustentation for its chief business, makes fighting subordinate, there are many who assume that a disciplinary policy appropriate to the first is appropriate to the last also. But the relations of the individual to the state are in the two cases entirely different. Unlike the Greek, who, not owning himself was owned by his city, the Englishman is not in any appreciable degree owned by his nation, but in a very positive way owns himself. Though, if of fit age, he may on great emergency be taken possession of and made to help in defending his country; yet this contingency qualifies to but small-extent the private possession of his body and the self-directing of his actions.

Throughout a series of chapters we saw that the progressive establishment by law of those rights which are deduced by ethics, made good the free use of himself by each individual, not only against other individuals but, in many respects, against the state: the state, while defending him against the aggressions of others, has in various directions ceased to aggress upon him itself. And it is an obvious corollary that in a state of permanent peace this change of relation would be complete.

How does this conclusion bear on the question at issue? The implication is that whereas the individual had to be molded by the society to suit its purposes, the society has now to be molded by the individual to suit his purposes. Instead of a solidified body politic, wielding masses of its units in combined action, the society. losing its coercive organization, and holding together its units with no other bonds than are needed for peaceful cooperation, becomes simply a medium for their activities. Once more let me emphasize the truth that since a society in its corporate capacity is not sentient, and since the sentiency dwells exclusively in its units, the sole reason for subordinating the sentient lives of its units to the unsentient life of the society, is that while militancy continues the sentient lives of its units are thus best preserved; and this reason lapses partially as militancy declines, and wholly as industrialism becomes complete. The claim of the society to discipline its citizens disappears. There remains no power which may properly prescribe the form which individual life shall assume.

"But surely the society in its corporate capacity, guided by the combined intelligences of its best members, may with advantage frame a conception of an individual nature best fitted for harmonious industrial life, and of the discipline calculated to produce such a nature?" In this plea there is tacitly assumed the right of the community through its agents to impose its scheme–an assumed right quite inconsistent with the conclusions drawn in foregoing chapters. But not here dwelling on this, let us ask what fitness the community has for deciding on the character to be desired, and for devising means likely to create it.

§ 383. Whether the chosen ideal of a citizen, and the chosen process for producing him, be good or bad, the choice inevitably has three implications, any one of which condemns it.

The system must work towards uniformity. If the measures taken have any effect at all, the effect must in part be that of causing some likeness among the individuals: to deny this is to deny that the process of molding is operative. But in so far as uniformity results advance is retarded. Everyone who has studied the order of nature knows that without variety there can be no progress–knows that, in the absence of variety, life would never have evolved at all. The inevitable implication is that further progress must be hindered if the genesis of variety is checked.

Another concomitant must be the production of a passive receptivity of whatever form the state decides to impress. Whether submissiveness be or be not part of the nature which the incorporated society proposes to give its units, it cannot enforce its plans without either finding or creating submissiveness. Whether avowedly or not, part of the desired character must be readiness in each citizen to submit, or make his children submit, to a discipline which some or many citizens determine to impose. There may be men who think it a trait of high humanity thus to deliver over the formation of its nature to the will of an aggregate mostly formed of inferior units. But with such we will not argue.

One further necessary implication is that either there exists no natural process by which citizens are in course of being molded, or else that this natural process should be superseded by an artificial one. To assert that there is no natural process is to assert that, unlike all other beings, which tend ever to become adapted to their environments, the human being does not tend to become adapted to his environment–does not tend to undergo such changes as fit him for carrying on the life which circumstances require him to lead. Anyone who says this must say that the varieties of mankind have arisen without cause; or else have been caused by governmental action. Anyone who does not say this must admit that men are in course of being naturally adjusted to the requirements of a developed social state; and if he admits this, he will hesitate before he asserts that they may be better adjusted artificially.

§ 384. Let us pass now from these most abstract aspects of the matter to more concrete aspects.

It is decided to create citizens having forms fit for the life of their society. Whence must the conception of a fit form be derived? Men inherit not only the physical and mental constitutions of their ancestors, but also, in the main, their ideas and beliefs. The current conception of a desirable citizen must therefore be a product of the past, slightly modified by the present; and the proposal is that past and present shall impose their conception on the future. Anyone who takes an impersonal view of the matter can scarcely fail to see in this a repetition, in another sphere, of follies committed in every age by every people in respect of religious beliefs. In all places and in all times, the average man holds that the creed in which he has been brought up is the only true creed. Though it must be manifest to him that necessarily in all cases but one, such beliefs, held with confidence equal to that which he feels, are false; yet, like each of the others, he is certain that his belief is the exception. A confidence no less absurd, is shown by those who would impose on the future their ideal citizen. That conceived type which the needs of past and present times have generated, they do not doubt would be a type appropriate for times to come. Yet it needs but to go back to the remote past, when industrial life was held contemptible and virtue meant fortitude, valor, bravery; or to the less remote past when noble meant highborn while laborer and villein were equivalents; or to the time when abject submission of each grade to the grade above was thought the primary duty; or to the time when the good citizen of every rank was held bound to accept humbly the appointed creed; to see that the characters supposed to be proper for men were unlike the characters we now suppose proper for them. Nevertheless, the not very wise representatives of electors who are mostly ignorant, are prepared, with papal assumption, to settle the form of a desirable human nature, and to shape the coming generation into that form.

While they are thus confident about the thing to be done, they are no less confident about the way to do it; though in the last case as in the first, the past proves to them how utter has been the failure of the methods century after century pursued. Throughout a Christendom full of churches and priests, full of pious books, full of observances directed to fostering the religion of love, encouraging mercy and insisting on forgiveness, we have an aggressiveness and a revengefulness such as savages have everywhere shown. And from people who daily read their Bibles, attend early services, and appoint weeks of prayer, there are sent out messengers of peace to inferior races, who are forthwith ousted from their lands by filibustering expeditions authorized in Downing Street; while those who resist are treated as "rebels," the deaths they inflict in retaliation are called "murders," and the process of subduing them is named "pacification."

At the same time that we thus find good reason to reject the artificial method of molding citizens as wrong in respect alike of end and means, we have good reason to put faith in the natural method–the spontaneous adaptation of citizens to social life.

§ 385. The organic world at large is made up of illustrations, infinite in number and variety. of the truth that by direct or indirect processes the faculties of each kind of creature become adjusted to the needs of its life; and further, that the exercise of each adjusted faculty becomes a source of gratification. In the normal order not only does there arise an agent for each duty, but consciousness is made up of the more or less pleasurable feelings which accompany the exercise of these agents. Further, the implication is that where the harmony has been deranged, it gradually reestablishes itself–that where change of circumstances has put the powers and requirements out of agreement, they slowly, either by survival of the fittest or by the inherited effects of use and disuse, or by both, come into agreement again.

This law holding of human beings among others, implies that the nature which we inherit from an uncivilized past, and which is still very imperfectly fitted to the partially civilized present, will, if allowed to do so, slowly adjust itself to the requirements of a fully civilized future. And a further implication is that the various faculties, tastes, abilities, gradually established, will have for their concomitants the satisfactions felt in discharging the various duties social life entails. Already there has been gained a considerable amount of the needful capacity for work, which savages have not; already the power of orderly cooperation under voluntary agreement has been developed; already such amounts of self-restraint have been acquired that most men carry on their lives without much impeding one another; already the altruistic interests felt by citizens in social affairs at large are such as prompt efforts, individual and spontaneously combined, to achieve public ends; and already men's sympathies have become active enough to generate multitudinous philanthropic agencies–too multitudinous in fact. And if, in the course of these few thousand years, the discipline of social life has done so much, it is folly to suppose that it cannot do more–folly to suppose that it will not in course of time do all that has to be done.

A further truth remains. It is impossible for artificial molding to do that which natural molding does. For the very essence of the process as spontaneously carried on, is that each faculty acquires fitness for its function by performing its function; and if its function is performed for it by a substituted agency, none of the required adjustment of nature takes place; but the nature becomes deformed to fit the artificial arrangements instead of the natural arrangements. More than this: it has to be depleted and dwarfed, for the support of the substituted agencies. Not only does there result the incapable nature, the distorted nature, and the nature which misses the gratifications of desired achievement; but that the superintending instrumentalities may be sustained, the sustentation of those who are superintended is diminished: their lives are undermined and their adaptation in another way impeded.

Again, then, let me emphasize the fundamental distinction. While war is the business of life, the entailed compulsory cooperation implies molding of the units by the aggregate to serve its purposes; but when there comes to predominate the voluntary cooperation characterizing industrialism, the molding has to be spontaneously achieved by self-adjustment to the life of voluntary cooperation. The adjustment cannot possibly be otherwise produced.

§ 386. And now we come round again at last to the general principle enunciated at first. All reasons for going counter to the primary law of social life prove invalid; and there is no safety but in conformity to that law.

If the political meddler could be induced to contemplate the essential meaning of his plan, he would be paralyzed by the sense of his own temerity. He proposes to suspend, in some way or degree, that process by which all life has been evolved–to divorce conduct from consequence. While the law of life at large is to be partially broken by him, he would more especially break that form of it which results from the associated state. Traversing by his interference that principle of justice common to all living things, he would traverse more especially the principle of human justice, which requires that each shall enjoy the benefits achieved within the needful limits of action: he would redistribute the benefits. Those results of accumulated experiences in each civilized society which, registered in laws, have, age after age, established men's rights with increasing clearness, he proposes here or there to ignore, and to trespass on the rights. And whereas in the course of centuries, the ruling powers of societies, while maintaining men's rights against one another more effectually, have also themselves receded from aggressions on those rights, the legislative schemer would invert this course, and decrease that freedom of action which has been increasing. Thus his policy, setting at nought the first principle of life at large and the first principle of social life in particular, ignores also the generalized results of observations and experiments gathered during thousands of years. And all with what warrant? All for certain reasons of apparent policy, every one of which we have found to be untrustworthy.

But why needs there any detailed refutation? What can be a more extreme absurdity than that of proposing to improve social life by breaking the fundamental law of social life?

[II-263]

CHAPTER I.

KINDS OF ALTRUISM.↩

§ 387. One division of an earlier work in this series of works–The Principles of Psychology–was devoted to showing that all intellectual operations are ultimately decomposable into recognitions of likeness and unlikeness, with mental grouping of the like and separation of the unlike. The process of intelligence as there analyzed, was shown to be a differentiation in perception and thought, of the impressions produced on us by surrounding things and actions, and the integration of each series of similar impressions into a general conception: the result being the formation of as many different general conceptions as there are objects and acts and combined groups of them, which the particular type of intelligence is able to distinguish. In its lower stages, the process is one which we may call unconscious classification; and through many gradations, it rises to conscious classification, such as we see carried on by men of science.

The mental action by which from moment to moment we thus, in ways commonly too rapid to observe, class the objects and acts around, and regulate our conduct accordingly, has been otherwise named by some, and especially by Professor Bain, "discrimination." Intelligence is, in its every act, carried on by discrimination; and has advanced from its lowest stages to its highest by increasing powers of discrimination. It has done this for the sufficient reason that during the evolution of life under all its forms, increase of it has been furthered by practice or habit as well as by survival of the fittest; since good discrimination has been a means of saving life, and lack of it a cause of losing life. Let us note a few marked stages of its increase.

Look out towards the sky; shut your eyes; and pass your hand before them. You can discriminate between the presence and absence of an opaque object in front. If, being passive, an object is moved before your closed eyes by some one else, you cannot say whether it is a hand, or a book, or a lump of earth; and cannot say whether it is a small object close to, or a larger object farther off. This experience exemplifies to us the smallest degree of visual discrimination, such as that which is achieved by low creatures possessing nothing more than eye specks–minute portions of sensitive pigment in which light produces some kind of change. Evidently a creature having only this nascent vision is at great disadvantage–cannot distinguish between the obscuration caused by the moving frond of a weed in the water it inhabits, and the obscuration caused by a passing creature; cannot tell whether it results from a small creature near at hand or a larger one at a distance; cannot tell whether this creature is harmless and may serve for prey or is predacious and must be avoided. Thus one of the appliances for maintaining life is deficient, and early loss of life is apt to occur.

Passing over all intermediate grades, observe next the results of presence or absence among herbivorous creatures of the power to discriminate between plants of different kinds and qualities. By appearance, or odor, or taste, one animal is warned off from a poisonous herb, which another animal, less keenly perceptive, eats and dies. As intelligence develops, complex groups of attributes are separated in consciousness from other complex groups to which they are in many respects similar, and survival results from the discrimination; as when the fatal Monkshood is distinguished from the harmless Larkspur.

As we rise to creatures of relatively great intelligence, increasingly complicated clusters of attributes, relations and actions have to be distinguished from one another, under heavy penalties. Instance the ordinary case in which the shape and color and movements of a distant animal are mentally united into a perception of an enemy, or else are discriminated as forming some not unlike perception of a harmless animal: the result being now a successful flight and now a successful chase.

§ 388. A much higher degree of discrimination is reached in creatures capable of appreciating the differences not only between objects perceived or presented, but also between objects conceived or represented–between the imaginations of them. The degree of mental power required for this is occasionally shown in small measure by the higher animals; as when a dog recognizes in idea the difference in length between a road that goes round the angle of a field and a short cut across the field, and takes the last. But generally it is only among men that the ability to discriminate between imagined clusters of things and properties and relations becomes appreciable. Even among men the discriminations often fail in consequence either of inaccuracy of such observations as have been made, or of imperfect ability to reproduce in thought the things observed. The contrast between Monkshood and Larkspur may serve again. Able as they are, when these two plants are before them, to see that though the two are similar in their sizes, modes of growth, deeply cut leaves, colors of flowers, &c., yet the structures of their flowers are unlike, the majority of people, even those having gardens, cannot so compare their ideas of these plants as to be able to say what the points of difference are.

If, then, between their imaginations of objects of but moderate degrees of complexity, most ordinarily disciplined minds fail to discriminate, still more will they fail to discriminate where the clusters of related attributes and properties and actions are immeasurably involved. Especially will they fail if, while many of the components are coexistent, many of them are sequent; and if, too, the groups of ideas which have to be distinguished from one another, include not only forms, colors, motions, sounds, and the feelings implied in those who make them; but include both the immediate effects wrought by a particular kind of action and the effects to be hereafter wrought by it. When the combinations of thoughts which must be simultaneously kept in mind reach these degrees of involution, the ability to discriminate either from the other, which is like it in many respects but differs in some essential respect, fails even in many highly cultured minds. Let us take instances.

Here is a geometrical problem–say, how to erect a perpendicular at the end of a straight line. Following the established routine, an ordinary teacher either shows his pupil how to solve this problem or tells him what he must do to solve it: the result being that the perpendicular is drawn as directed, and the pupil, not much interested in the proceeding, thenceforth knows how to draw it. Here is another teacher who, disapproving of this mechanical culture, adopts a different method. His pupil having been initiated through simpler problems, severally solved by his persevering efforts, takes to the new problem with zest; and, trying various experiments, in no very long time succeeds. In doing this he receives a relatively strong impression, due partly to the strained attention required, and partly to the pleasurable excitement of success. At the same time he acquires increased aptitude and increased courage; enabling him to deal by and by with more complex problems. Here, then, are two clusters of actions and acquisitions and feelings, which are in sundry respects alike. The problem is the same, the method of solution is the same, the knowledge acquired is the same; and the mechanical teacher, recognizing nothing more, does not discriminate between the two clusters of mental actions, and thinks it just as well to teach by instruction as by discovery.

Of more complex cases, one is furnished by a recent incident–the case of the Eastbourne salvationists. Most of the townspeople object to their processions headed by noisy bands; while these boisterous Christians say that they are simply maintaining that religious liberty which all now admit. But here comes the lack of discrimination. It is forgotten that while, in the interests of religious liberty, each citizen or group of citizens may rightly perform ceremonies ancillary to his belief; in the interests of general liberty, individual citizens or groups of them, may rightly resist intrusions upon that peaceful course of life they are pursuing. There is inability to separate in thought those assertions of religious freedom which do not involve aggressions on others, from those which do involve aggressions on others, in the form of nuisances. And not only do these fanatics fail to distinguish between religious liberty and religious license, but even our legislators (if we suppose them to be acting sincerely instead of seeking votes) also fail.

One more instance furnished by the politics of the day may be added–the failure, alike by legislators and people, to discriminate between the effects of moral injunctions on those having natures with which they are congruous, and their effects on those having natures with which they are incongruous. Here is a set of precepts, printed, read, explained, emphasized; and here are children's minds with their clusters of ideas, powers of understanding, and groups of feelings. The prevalent assumption is that since certain effects result where there is intellectual apprehension of these precepts plus responsive sentiments, like effects will result where there is the same intellectual apprehension minus the responsive sentiments. People think it needs only to teach children what is right and they will do what is right! They expect that by education–nay, even by mere acquisition of a knowledge which is not related to conduct–they will diminish crime!

Discrimination, then, characterizing intelligence from its lowest to its highest forms, is certain to be still very incomplete where the things to be discriminated are not visible objects and actions, but are mental representations of complex aggregates of things and actions and feelings, and causes and effects; part of them belonging to the passing time, and part of them to the time coming. After observing the stretch of imagination required for proper recognition of differences in this wide and obscure field, we may feel certain that alike in sociology and in ethics, failures to discriminate must be many and disastrous.

§ 389. But why this long psychological disquisition? The answer is foreshadowed in the title of the chapter–"Kinds of Altruism." That altruistic conduct has divisions which must be distinguished is obviously implied. That the conceptions of these respective divisions, made up of represented things, acts, relations, and results, present and future, are among those complex things which are difficult to part from one another, has been above shown by analogy. That only those who are at once observant, critical, and have great powers of mental representation, can adequately make the discriminations, is a further implication. And that grave evils result from the prevalent inability is a corollary.

As distinguished from egoistic actions, altruistic actions include all those which either negatively by self-restraint, or positively by efforts for their benefit, conduce to the welfare of fellow men: they include both justice and beneficence. As we have seen in the last part, the first of these great divisions of altruism implies a sympathetic recognition of others' claims to free activity and the products of free activity; while the other great division implies a sympathetic recognition of others' claims to receive aid in the obtainment of these products, and in the more effectual carrying on of their lives. In section 54 I pointed out that the highest form of life, individual and social, is not achievable under a reign of justice only; but that there must be joined with a reign of beneficence. Here is a part of the argument:

A society is conceivable formed of men leading perfectly inoffensive lives, scrupulously fulfilling their contracts, and efficiently rearing their offspring, who yet, yielding to one another no advantages beyond those agreed upon, fall short of that highest degree of life which the gratuitous rendering of services makes possible. Daily experiences prove that every one would suffer many evils and lose many goods, did none give him unpaid assistance. The life of each would be more or less damaged had he to meet all contingencies single-handed. Further if no one did for his fellows anything more than was required by strict performance of contract, private interests would suffer from the absence of attention to public interests. The limit of evolution of conduct is consequently not reached, until, beyond avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others, there are spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others.

Throughout the past there has been slowly growing into clearness the distinction between these two primary divisions of altruism. But though justice and generosity have in recent days come to be fairly well discriminated, the changes now going on are confusing them again. The universal dissolution by which the old order of things is being abolished while a new order is being established, is bringing with it a dissolution of old conceptions: many of them wrong but some of them right. Among the last is this distinction between justice and beneficence. On the one side the many, eagerly expecting good, and on the other side the few, anxious to do good to them, agree in practically disregarding the line of demarcation between things which are to be claimed as rights and things which are to be accepted as benefactions; and while the division between the two is being obliterated, there is ceasing to be any separation made between means appropriate to the one and means appropriate to the other. Hotheaded philanthropy, impatient of criticism, is, by helter-skelter legislation, destroying normal connections between conduct and consequence; so that presently, when the replacing of justice by generosity has led to a redistribution of benefits irrespective of deserts, there will be reached a state having for its motto the words: It shall be as well for you to be inferior as to be superior.

§ 390. The two great divisions of altruism, justice and beneficence, are to be discriminated as the one needful for social equilibrium, and therefore of public concern, and the other as not needful for social equilibrium, and therefore only of private concern. Observe why the two must be kept separate.

We have seen that justice in its primordial form, as seen throughout the animal kingdom at large, requires that each creature shall take the consequences of its own conduct; and among all ungregarious creatures this law operates without any qualification.

Along with gregariousness, especially when it reaches the degree which the human race exhibits, there arises a further requirement. While, as before, the relation between conduct and consequence has to be so maintained that actions shall be restrained by experience of results, actions have to be further restrained by the necessity of so limiting them that the interference of each citizen with others shall not be greater than is implied by the associated state.

But, as shown in the above quotation, before life, individual and social, can reach their highest forms, there must be fulfilled the secondary law, that besides exchange of services under agreement there shall be a rendering of services beyond agreement. The requirements of equity must be supplemented by the promptings of kindness.

And here we come upon the truth above hinted, and now to be emphasized, that the primary law of a harmonious social cooperation may not be broken for the fulfillment of the secondary law; and that therefore, while enforcement of justice must be a public function, the exercise of beneficence must be a private function. A moment's thought will make this implication manifest.

Beneficence exercised by a society in its corporate capacity, must consist in taking away from some persons parts of the products of their activities, to give to other persons, whose activities have not brought them a sufficiency. If it does this by force it interferes with the normal relation between conduct and consequence, alike in those from whom property is taken and in those to whom property is given. Justice, as defined in the foregoing pages, is infringed upon. The principle of harmonious social cooperation is disregarded; and the disregard and infringement, if carried far, must bring disasters. There are three, which we may contemplate separately.

§ 391. If, that the inferior may have benefits which they have not earned, there are taken from the superior benefits which they have earned, it is manifest that when this process is carried to the extent of equalizing the positions of the two, there ceases to be any motive to be superior. Long before any such extreme is reached, there must result an increasing discouragement of the industrious, who see the surplus products of their industry carried away; and there must result among these better citizens an intensifying dissatisfaction, tending ever towards revolution. There must be a decline towards an unprosperous state and an unstable state.

A further result must be a slow degeneracy. bodily and mental. If, by an indiscriminate philanthropy, means of subsistence are forcibly taken from the better for the improved maintenance of the worse, the better, most of whom have means already insufficient for the good nurture of offspring, must have those means made still further deficient; while the offspring of the worse must, to a like extent, be artificially fostered. An average deterioration must be caused.

An equally disastrous, or still more disastrous, effect remains to be named. The policy. if persistently pursued, leads on to communism and anarchism. If society in its corporate capacity undertakes beneficence as a function–if, now in this direction and now in that, the inferior learn by precept enforced by example, that it is a state duty not simply to secure them the unhindered pursuit of happiness but to furnish them with the means to happiness; there is eventually formed among the poorer, and especially among the least deserving, a fixed belief that if they are not comfortable the government is to blame. Not to their own idleness and misdeeds is their misery ascribed, but to the badness of society in not doing its duty to them. What follows? First there grows up among numbers, the theory that social arrangements must be fundamentally changed in such ways that all shall have equal shares of the products of labor–that differences of reward due to differences of merit shall be abolished: there comes communism. And then among the very worst, angered that their vile lives have not brought them all the good things they want, there grows up the doctrine that society should be destroyed, and that each man should seize what he likes and "suppress," as Ravachol said, everyone who stands in his way. There comes anarchism and a return to the unrestrained struggle for life, as among brutes.

Such then are the ultimate results of not discriminating between justice and beneficence, and between the instrumentalities proper for carrying on the two.

§ 392. But now we come to a question, no doubt existing unshaped in the minds of many, the right answer to which clears up, in another way, the prevailing confusion. Let me put this question in the form most favorable to those whose illusions I am seeking to dissipate.

"You say that justice in its primordial form requires that each creature shall receive the results of its own nature and consequent conduct. Of human justice, however, you say that while, as before, it demands that actions shall bring their natural consequences, the actions which do this must be limited to such as do not interfere with the similarly limited actions of others. Obviously the result is that while, under the reign of brute justice, each individual takes advantage of his powers, to the extent of injuring or destroying not only prey but also competitors, under the reign of human justice he may not do this–he is forbidden to injure competitors. What happens? Being protected by the incorporated society, the inferior members are enabled to carry on their activities and reap all the benefits; which they could not have done had the superior used their superiorities without control. May it not be, then, that under the reign of human justice raised to a higher form, the inferior, thus partially saved from the results of their inferiority, shall be still further saved from them–shall not only be equalized with the superior by preserving for them their spheres of activity, but shall also be equalized with them in respect of the benefits they obtain within their spheres of activity?"

Doubtless, as I have elsewhere admitted, it seems, from one point of view, unjust that the inferior should be left to suffer the evils of their inferiority, for which they are not responsible. Nature, which everywhere carries on the struggle for life with unqualified severity, so as even to prompt the generalization–"the law of murder is the law of growth," cares not for the claims of the weaker, even to the extent of securing them fair play; and if it be admitted that this severity of nature may, among associated men, rightly be mitigated by artificially securing fair play to the inferior, why ought it not to be further mitigated by saving them from all those evils of inferiority which may be artificially removed?

Here we reach the place of divergence. Here we see the need for discrimination among complex conceptions. Here we see how important is recognition of the difference between justice and beneficence, and consequent difference between the instrumentalities appropriate to the two. For with the admission that that ferocious discipline of brute justice which issues in survival of the fittest, has, in societies of men, to be much qualified, not only by what we distinguish as human justice, but also by what we distinguish as beneficence, there must go the assertion that while the first may rightly be enforced, the second must be left to voluntary action. Denial that the second as well as the first should be attended to by the state, by no means involves denial that the second should be attended to; but merely implies that it should be otherwise attended to. It is admitted that the evils caused by inferiority should be mitigated in both ways; but it is asserted that while mitigations of the one kind should be public and general, those of the other kind should be private and special. For, as we have seen, the primary law of harmonious cooperation may not be broken for the purpose of fulfilling the secondary law; since, if it is so broken to any great extent, profound mischiefs result.

§ 393. For the discrimination thus demanded by a due regard for social stability. social prosperity, and social health, yet a further reason must here be urged. Only by maintaining this discrimination can the reciprocal benefits of beneficence, "blessing him that gives and him that takes," be preserved. When any of the evils which their inefficiencies or other defects bring on the inferior, are diminished by aid which some of the superior voluntarily furnish, these are made better by the exercise of their fellow feeling; but if, to mitigate them, funds are taken by force from the superior, none of this moralization results: often a demoralization–an excitement of ill feeling. Not only. as the poet says, "the quality of mercy is not strained," but also the quality of beneficence in general. If it is strained it ceases to be beneficence.

At the same time there is a corresponding difference between the effects produced on the beneficiaries. Kindly acts spontaneously done, usually excite in them emotions of gratitude and attachment; and a community containing beneficiaries thus related to benefactors, is one in which not only are the feelings of the lower favorably exercised as well as those of the higher, but one in which there is thereby produced an increased coherence and stability.

§ 394. Having, too elaborately perhaps, discriminated between the primary altruism we call justice and the secondary altruism we call beneficence, and emphasized the need for the discrimination, we may now deal with the different kinds of beneficence. Let us first group these under certain subdivisions.

There comes first the species of beneficent conduct which is characterized by passivity in deed or word, at times when egoistic advantage or pleasure might be gained by action. Many forms of self-restraint, not commonly regarded as ethically enjoined, ought nevertheless to be so regarded; and have here to be pointed out and emphasized. These, which we have first to consider, fall under the general title–negative beneficence.

After them there come to be dealt with those kinds of actions alone recognized in the ordinary conception of beneficence, but which are here distinguished as positive beneficence. Under this head are comprised all actions which imply sacrifice of something actually or potentially possessed, that another or others may be benefited–sacrifice, it may be, of strength which would otherwise be economized, sacrifice of the product of efforts actually obtained, or of the forthcoming product of efforts made in the past. In all these there is a proximate loss of pleasure or means to pleasure; though there may be an immediate or remote compensation in sympathetic pleasure.

To complete preliminaries it needs to add that there is a cross-classification by which both of these groups have to be divided. The most conspicuous, though not the most familiar, kinds of beneficent actions, positive and negative, are those shown towards individuals who are inferior, or unfortunate, or both. But there are also beneficent actions, usually small but very numerous, which benefit those who are neither inferior nor unfortunate–actions which further the gratifications of persons around, and raise the tide of happiness in all.

In treating these divisions and subdivisions of beneficence in the order here indicated, we shall have to consider three sets of effects produced: 1, the reactive effects upon the benefactor, upon his dependents, and upon all who have claims on him; 2, the immediate effects on the beneficiary, as conducive to increase of his pleasure or diminution of his pain, and the remote effects as conducive to one or other change of character; and 3, the effects upon society at large, as influencing its stability, its immediate prosperity, and its remote prosperity.

[II-277]

CHAPTER II.

RESTRAINTS ON FREE COMPETITION.↩

§ 395. Beyond those limits to the actions of individuals which it is the business of the state to maintain, individuals have to impose on themselves further limits, prompted by sympathetic consideration for their struggling fellow citizens. For the battle of life as carried on by competition, even within the bounds set by law, may have a mercilessness akin to the battle of life as carried on by violence. And each citizen, while in respect of this competition not to be restrained externally, ought to be restrained internally.

Among those who compete with one another in the same occupation, there must in all cases be some who are the more capable and a larger number who are the less capable. In strict equity the more capable are justified in taking full advantage of their greater capabilities; and where, beyond their own sustentation, they have to provide for the sustentation of their families, and the meeting of further claims, the sanction of strict equity suffices them. Usually, society immediately benefits by the putting out of their highest powers, and it also receives a future benefit by the efficient fostering of its best members and their offspring.

In such cases then–and they are the cases which the mass of society, constituted chiefly of manual workers, presents us with–justice needs to be but little qualified by beneficence.

§ 396. This proposition is indeed denied, and the opposite proposition affirmed, by hosts of workers in our own day. Among the trade unionists, and among leading socialists, as also among those of the rank and file, there is now the conviction, expressed in a way implying indignant repudiation of any other conviction, that the individual worker has no right to inconvenience his brother worker by subjecting him to any stress of competition. A man who undertakes to do work by the piece at lower rates than would else be paid, and is enabled by diligence long continued to earn a sum nearly double that which he would have received as wages, is condemned as "unprincipled"! It is actually held that he has no right thus to take advantage of his superior powers and his greater energy; even though he is prompted to do this by the responsibilities a large family entails, and by a desire to bring up his children well: so completely have the "advanced" among us inverted the old ideas of duty and merit.

Of course their argument is that the man who thus "out-does" his fellow workers, and gets more money than they do, displaces by so much the demand for the labor of those who would else have been employed; and they further argue that, by executing the work at a smaller cost to the employer, he tends to lower the rate of wages: both of them regarded by these neo-economists, now so vociferous, as unmixed evils.

With them, as with nearly all thinkers about social and political affairs, the proximate result is the sole thing considered. Work and wages are alone thought of, and there is no thought given to the quantity of products, the concomitant prices of products, and the welfare of the consumers. Laborers and artisans conceived only as interested in getting high wages, are never conceived as interested in having cheap commodities; and there appears to be no conception that gain in the first end may involve loss in the second. When enlarging on the hardships entailed on those who, by cheaper piecework, are deprived of dearer day work, they ignore as irrelevant the fact that the article produced at less cost can be sold at less price; and that all artisans and laborers, in their capacity of consumers, benefit to that extent. Further they forget that the workers displaced become, after a time, available for other kinds of production: so benefiting the community as a whole, including all other workers.

We have here, in fact, but a new form of the old protest against machinery always complained of by those immediately affected, as robbing them of their livelihoods. Whether through human machinery or the machinery made of wood and iron, every improvement achieves an economy and dispenses with labor previously necessary; and if that change in the human machinery constituted by adoption of piecework, and the gaining of larger earnings by greater application, is to be reprobated because of the displacement of labor implied, so also must be reprobated every mechanical appliance which from the beginning has facilitated production. He was an "unprincipled" man who substituted ploughs for spades, who replaced the distaff by the spinning jenny, who brought into use steam pumping engines in place of hand pumps, or who outran horses on roads by locomotives on railways. It matters not whether we contemplate the living agents of production or the dead implements they use; every more economical arrangement eventually lowers prices and benefits people at large. The so-called unprincipled man does good to humanity, though he inflicts temporary evils on a small number; which in fact, every improvement inevitably must.

But there remains to note the marvelous inversion of thought and sentiment implied by this socialistic trade-union idea. The man who is superior in ability or energy is thought "unprincipled" in taking advantage of his superiority; while it is not apparently thought "unprincipled" on the part of the inferior to obtain benefit by preventing the superior from benefiting himself. If in any occupation the majority. who are less able, insist that the minority, who are more able, shall not be paid higher wages than they are, and shall not discredit them by doing more or better work, it is undeniable that the majority, or less able, do this for their own advantage. Either by requiring that the more skilled and the less skilled shall be paid at equal rates, they ensure for themselves higher average wages than they would have were there discriminating payments, or else, by excluding the keener competition of the more skilled, they escape the pressure or strain which would otherwise be brought to bear on them; and in one or both of these ways the majority advantage themselves at the cost of the minority. Now if the word "unprincipled" is to be rationally applied, it is to be applied to the man who does this; for no high-principled man wishes to obtain a benefit by tying another's hands. If they are conscientious in the proper sense of the word, those who form the majority, or inferior, will never dream of requiring that the minority, or superior, shall diminish their earnings by not using their powers; and still less will they dream of trying to gain by such a course. Contrariwise, each among them, regretting though he may his relative inferiority. and wishing though he may that he had the powers of those few more favored by nature, will resolve to make the best of his smaller powers; and so far from asking to have given to him the benefits which the greater powers of others yield, he will insist that he shall have none of such benefits–will refuse point-blank to have any benefits beyond those which his nature brings him: content if the better endowed yield not material but moral benefits to the less happily constituted. This is the truly principled man, and the unprincipled man is the one who does the reverse.

And then the high-principled man, prompted to this course by a sense of equity, will be further thus prompted by a beneficent regard for the race. If he is adequately endowed with the human ability to "look before and after," he will see that a society which takes for its maxim, "It shall be as well for you to be inferior as to be superior," will inevitably degenerate and die away in long-drawn miseries.

§ 397. But on passing from the working part of the industrial organization to the regulating part, we pass into a sphere in which a beneficent limitation of activity is sometimes called for. While the advantage which superiority gives to an artisan over his fellow artisans is relatively small, and may properly be appropriated without limit, the advantage which superiority gives to the director of many artisans over other such directors, may become very great; and it may, in the absence of a sympathetic self-restraint, be used by him to the ruin of his competitors. Such an one, so long as he does not break the law directly or indirectly, is commonly thought warranted in pushing his advantage to the extreme; but an undeveloped ethical consciousness is thus shown.

Not many years since there lived in New York a man named Stewart, who, carrying on a wholesale and retail business on a vast scale, acquired a colossal fortune. A common practice of his was suddenly to lower his prices for a certain class of goods to an unremunerative rate, seriously damaging, if nothing more, numerous small traders, and greatly hampering, if he did not ruin, sundry large ones. Another practice was to encourage and aid some manufacturer in apparently a friendly spirit, and then, when he was largely indebted, come down upon him for immediate payment; selling him up and often buying his stock when he could not at once pay.

Competitive warfare carried on in this style, might not unfitly be called commercial murder; and were its flagitiousness to be measured by the pain inflicted, it might be held worse than murder, originally so called: the amount of suffering eventually caused among the ruined men and their families, being greater than that which many an assassin visits on his victims and others.

Such utter lack of negative beneficence is to be condemned not only because of the intense evils thus directly inflicted, but is also to be condemned in the interests of society. as defrauding it of those advantages which competition, normally carried on, yields. For though, while competitors are being forced to sell at unremunerative prices, the public benefits; yet, after competitors have been thrust to the wall and a practical monopoly achieved, there comes a more than compensating rise of prices, by which the public suffers. In brief, the forms of competition are employed to destroy competition.

And then, as we shall see hereafter under another head, the transgressing trader himself, and his belongings, do in the long run suffer indirectly. They are led into a type of life lower than they might otherwise have led.

In its application to cases of this kind, the popular maxim "Live and let live" may, then, be accepted as embodying a truth. Anyone who, by command of great capital or superior business capacity, is enabled to beat others who carry on the same business, is enjoined by the principle of negative beneficence to restrain his business activities, when his own wants and those of his belongings have been abundantly fulfilled; so that others, occupied as he is, may fulfill their wants also, though in smaller measure.

§ 398. What is to be said in this connection concerning competition among professional men–especially among doctors and lawyers?

An eminent physician who gives advice to all patients asking it, including patients who have left the physicians they previously consulted, cannot be blamed for doing this; even though he has already an amply sufficient income. For, supposing his reputation to be deserved, the implication is that, by giving the advice asked, he diminishes suffering and perhaps saves life; and this he cannot well refuse to do out of regard for competing physicians. It may rightly be held, too, that he is justified in raising his fees. Did he not by doing this diminish the number of his patients, two evils would happen. The swarm would become so great that no one would get proper attention; and his own health would speedily so greatly suffer that he would become incapacitated. But negative beneficence may properly require that he shall send to some of his brother physicians patients suffering from trivial maladies, or maladies concerning the treatment of which there can be no doubt.

On turning from the consulting room to the law court, we meet with cases in which professional competition needs restraining, not by negative beneficence only. but by justice. A system under which a barrister is prepaid for services he may or may not render, as it chances–a system under which another barrister in less repute is also retained, and feed to do the work for him should he fail to appear–a system which proceeds by quasi-contract which is closed on the side of the one who pays but not closed on the side of the one who works, is clearly a vicious system. But such restraints on the taking of cases by counsel, as would result either from regard for the equitable claims of clients or from consideration for competitors, is said to be impracticable. We are told that at the bar a man must either take all the business which comes to him or lose his business. Now this plea, though perpetually repeated, may reasonably be doubted until the assertion that such would be the result had been verified by the proof that such has been the result. It requires a large faith to believe that one whose conscientiousness determines him to take no more work than he can efficiently perform, or else, from regard for his fellows, refuses cases that they may have them, cannot do this without losing all his cases. For since one who thus limited the number of his clients would, as a matter of course, deny himself to those whose causes he thought bad, the mere fact of his appearance in any cause would become a preliminary assurance that it was a good cause–an assurance weighing much with a jury; and how, under such circumstances, implying increased anxieties to obtain his services, the demand for them should decrease beyond the degree he desired, it is difficult to see.

Clearly in this case, such negative beneficence as is implied by relinquishment of business that competitors may benefit, is a concomitant of that justice which demands that pay shall not be received unless services are rendered, and is a concomitant of that social benefit which results if good causes have good advocates. Moreover, it is a concomitant of that normal regard for self which forbids excess of work.

§ 399. Yet another form of competition must be dealt with, though it is difficult to deal with it satisfactorily. I refer to the competition between one who has, by discovery or invention, facilitated some kind of production, and those who carry on such production in the old way.

Here, if he undersells competitors, he does so not, as in the cases instanced, to drive them out of the business; but he does so as a collateral result of giving a benefit to society. As already said (sec. 306), he has made a new conquest over nature, and giving, as he inevitably does, the greater part of the advantage to the community, he may rightly retain for himself something more than is obtained by carrying on production as before. Still there comes the question–How far shall he push his advantage? Should not negative beneficence restrain him from ruining his competitors by underselling them too much? But to this the answer is that if he does not undersell them in a decided manner, he does not give to the public the advantage which he might give. Out of regard for the few he disregards the many.

One way only does there seem to be in which, while consulting the welfare of the community, and while justly maintaining his own claim to a well-earned reward, he may also show due consideration for those whose businesses he of necessity diminished or destroyed. He may either offer them the use of his improved appliance at a moderate royalty, or may make them his agents for the sale of his products: giving them, in either case, a great advantage over any others who may wish to stand in the like positions, and may thus at any rate diminish the injury to them if he does not even cancel it.

§ 400. It is needless in this place to illustrate further the operation of negative beneficence in putting restraints on competition, in addition to those which justice maintains. With a population ever pressing on the means of subsistence, and amid struggles to attain higher positions and so be able, among other things, to rear offspring better, there must arise multitudinous cases in which natural capacities, or circumstances, or accidents, give to some great advantages over others similarly occupied. To what extent such advantages may be pushed, individual judgments, duly influenced by sympathy. must decide.

By refraining from certain activities which are at once legitimate and profitable, competitors may be benefited; and the question whether they should be so benefited must be answered by considering whether the wants of self and belongings have not been sufficiently regarded, and whether the welfare of competitors, as well as the welfare of society as a whole, do not enjoin desistance.

[II-287]

CHAPTER III.

RESTRAINTS ON FREE CONTRACT↩

§ 401. Society in its corporate capacity cannot be blamed for enforcing contracts to the letter–is often, indeed, to be blamed because it does not enforce them, but deliberately countenances the breaking of them, or itself breaks them; as when, after the houses forming a street have been taken on lease at high rents, because few vehicles pass, it authorizes the turning of this quiet street into a noisy thoroughfare; or as when, having given parliamentary titles to buyers of encumbered estates on certain terms, it, by subsequent laws, alters those terms; or as when it allows a proprietary agreement, entered into for one purpose, to be extended by a two-thirds majority so as to cover another purpose.

Contracts, then, must be strictly adhered to and legally enforced; save, as before pointed out, in cases where a man contracts himself away. And this necessity for severity in the enforcement of contracts, will be manifest on observing that if there grew up the system of judicially qualifying them, out of beneficent regard for defaulters, this beneficent regard would promptly be counted upon; and reckless contracts would be made in the expectation that, in cases of failure, the worst consequences would be staved off.

But while it is not for the state to relax contracts or mitigate their mischievous results, it remains open for those between whom they are made, voluntarily to modify the operation of them. Negative beneficence may still enjoin an entire or partial relinquishment of such undue advantage as a contract, literally interpreted, has given. Of merciless enforcement of contracts, and unscrupulous disregard of claims which have arisen under contracts, the treatment of tenants by landlords, especially in Ireland, furnish numerous instances. Where a barren tract–stony or boggy–taken on a short lease at a small rent, has by persistent labor been reclaimed, and the resulting fertility has given it some value, it not uncommonly happens that the landlord offers to this industrious tenant the option of either surrendering his occupancy at the end of his lease, or else of paying a greatly raised rent, proportionate to this raised value which his own toil has given to it. The contract not having been of a kind to exclude this disastrous result, the law can say nothing; but the landlord, if duly swayed by the sentiment of negative beneficence, will refrain from taking advantage of his tenant's position–will, indeed, feel that in this case what is here distinguished as negative beneficence does but enjoin a regard for natural justice, as distinguished from legal justice.

Kindred cases there are, as those of the Skye-crofters, in which the making of contracts, though nominally free, is not actually free-cases in which the absence of competing landlords gives to a local landlord an unchecked power of making his own terms, and in which the people, having little or no choice of other occupations and being too poor to emigrate, are compelled to accept the terms or starve. Here, where the conditions under which equitable exchange can be carried on are suspended, it remains for the promptings of negative beneficence to supplement those of equity, which are rendered inoperative. The landlord is called on to refrain from actions which the restraints of technically formulated justice fail to prevent.

There are cases of a more familiar kind in which sympathy demands, and often with success, that contracts shall be but partially enforced. During recent years of agricultural depression, the requirements of leases have been in multitudinous instances voluntarily relaxed, in ways which negative beneficence suggested. Landlords have returned parts of the rents agreed upon, when tenants have been impoverished by bad harvests to an extent which could not reasonably have been expected when the lease was made.

§ 402. In the transactions of businessmen, there occur sundry allied classes of cases in which compromises between self-regard and regard for others, imply desistance from actions which justice does not interdict. Let us take three such.

Here is a grazier who, with numerous cattle at the end of a long drought, has scarcely anything for them to eat, and who, because other graziers are similarly circumstanced, cannot sell his cattle without great loss; and here is his neighbor who happens to have reserved large stacks of hay. What shall this neighbor do? If he pushes his advantage to the uttermost, he will either entail on the unfortunate grazier immense loss by the sale of his cattle, or impoverish him for years by an enormous expenditure in fodder. Clearly negative beneficence requires him to moderate his terms.

Another instance is that of a contractor who has undertaken an extensive work on terms which, to all appearance, will leave him only a fair remuneration, making due allowance for ordinary contingencies–say a heavy railway cutting, or a tunnel a mile or two long. No one suspected when the contract was made, that in the hill to be tunneled there existed a vast intrusion of trap. But now where the contractor expected to meet with earth to be excavated he finds rock to be blasted. What shall be done? Unless he is a man of large capital, strict enforcement of the contract will ruin him; and even if wealthy he will do the work at a great loss instead of at a profit. It may be said that even justice, considered not as legally formulated but as reasonably interpreted, implies that there should be a mitigation of the terms; since the intention of the contract was to make an exchange of benefits; and still more is mitigation of the terms required by negative beneficence–by abstention from that course which the law would allow. But clearly it is only where a disastrous contingency is of a kind greatly exceeding reasonable anticipation, that negative beneficence may properly come into play.

Under pressure entailed by a commercial crisis, a trader, while unable to get further credit from his bank, is obliged to meet a bill immediately falling due. One who has capital in reserve is asked for a loan on the security of the trader's stock. He may make either a merciful or a merciless bargain. He may be content with a moderate gain by the transaction, or, taking advantage of the other's necessities, may refuse except on conditions which will involve immense loss, or perhaps eventual bankruptcy. Here, again, there is occasion for the self-restraint which sympathy prompts.

Since, in cases such as these three, there is voluntary action on both sides, insistence, on ruinously hard terms cannot be classed under the head of injustice; but we are led to recognize the truth that in such cases the injunctions of negative beneficence are scarcely less stern than those which justice utters. Though in the first and the last instances, the taking of a pound of flesh is not under a contract previously made, it is under a contract to which there is practically no alternative; and in the last case as in the first, if the contract is fulfilled the patient may be left to bleed to death.

Let it be added that not only does the sympathetic regard for others' welfare which we here class as negative beneficence, forbid the unscrupulous carrying out of certain transactions which strict justice does not forbid, but regard for public welfare does the same thing. Any course which needlessly ruins those who are on the whole carrying on well their occupations, entails an injury to the social organization.

§ 403. A still larger sphere throughout which the requirements of justice have to be qualified by the requirements of negative beneficence, is presented by the relations between employers and employed–the contracts between those who yield services and those who pay for them.

How far ought an employer to take advantage of the competition among workers, who often greatly exceed in number the number wanted, and are some of them willing to accept low payments rather than starve? This question is much less easy to answer than at first appears; since it is complicated by other questions than those which concern the qualification of justice by negative beneficence. People who blame, often in the strongest language, masters who do not give higher wages than the market rate obliges them to give, think only of the fates of those who are employed, and forget the fates of those who remain unemployed. Yet obviously a master who, in an overfull market of wage earners, gives more than he is obliged, rejects the offers of those who would have taken less. Hence the most needy go without work, while the work is given to those whose needs are not so extreme–those who would not accept such low pay. Now while contemplating the benefits derived by these less necessitous, it will not do to leave out of consideration the exacerbated distress of the more necessitous. It seems a necessary implication that a seemingly generous employer, who looks only at direct results, may. by his generosity, intensify the miseries of the most miserable, that he may mitigate the miseries of the less miserable.

A further disastrous effect may be entailed. The competition in each business is keen, and the margin of profit on transactions is often thereby made so narrow, that much increase in the cost of production consequent on payment of higher wages, must cause inability to meet competitors in the market. Bankruptcy, by no means uncommon even among traders who economize in wages as much as they can, must therefore be the fate of those who do not economize. Only one whose capital is greatly in excess of his immediate wants, can behave thus generously for a time; and even on him bankruptcy must come if he persists. To the reply that he might distribute among his work-people his surplus returns when these were greater than usual, the rejoinder is that disaster would follow were he ordinarily to do this. Though, during a time of prosperity, an employer makes large profits, yet when there presently comes a time of depression, he is not unfrequently obliged to continue working without profit, or even at a loss, that he may keep his staff employed and his machinery in order; and had he not allowed himself to accumulate while prosperous, he could not do this.

Once more there is the fact, either overlooked or deliberately ignored by those who foster the antagonism between employers and employed, that a universal rise in wages is of no use if there occurs simultaneously a universal rise in the prices of commodities. The members of each trade union, thinking only of themselves as producers, and of the advantage to be gained by forcing masters to pay them more, forget that, other things equal, the price of the article they produce must presently rise in the market to a proportionate extent. They forget that if the members of each other trade union do the like, the things they severally produce will also rise in price; and that since, in respect of the more important commodities, the chief consumers are the masses of producers, or the people at large, these will have to pay more for all the things they buy. A broad view of the matter would show them that the factors are these: 1. A quantity of labor expended by all workers. 2. A quantity of capital required for the producing appliances, for stocks of raw materials, and for stocks of the articles produced. 3. A proportion of brainwork for regulating the labor and carrying on the financial operation-purchase and sale. 4. A resulting supply of products, which, in one way or other, has to be divided out among members of the community. As this supply is for the time being fixed, an increased share awarded to bodily labor implies a decreased share to capital, or mental labor, or both. Reduction of the interest on capital is restrained, since, if it is great, capital will go elsewhere; and if, by combination, the reduction is universally pushed below a certain limit, capital will cease to be accumulated. There is also a limit to the lowering of the payment for mental labor. Business capacity will go abroad if ill paid at home; and if everywhere the remuneration is inadequate, the stock of it will diminish. Men will not undergo the intellectual labor and the discipline needed to make them good managers, if they are not tempted by the prospect of considerable rewards. Thus the margin within which, under ordinary circumstances, negative beneficence may mitigate the usually hard terms of the labor market, is but narrow; and even within this margin, it may, as we have seen, involve unintentional cruelty with intentional kindness.

In so far as pecuniary contracts for services are concerned, the only cases in which negative beneficence operates, with undoubted advantage, are cases in which an employer whose returns are being so rapidly augmented as to give him more than the needful reserve, does not continue passively to take advantage of the change until he is forced to raise wages by the increased demand for labor–declines to use his power of monopolizing all the profit which circumstances give him. But here we verge upon the province of positive beneficence.

§ 404. While, in the treatment of the employed by the employer, there is recognized scope for negative beneficence, in the treatment of an employer by the employed many suppose there is none. But this is untrue.

Every now and then the newspapers report some case in which a large contract for works, which have to be completed before a specified time under heavy penalty. is rendered unprofitable, or even ruinous, by workmen who seize the opportunity of demanding higher wages: believing that the contractor will have no alternative but to comply. If they give the required notices of termination of their engagements with the employer, they cannot be charged with injustice. They simply propose terms more favorable to themselves and decline continuing to work on the less favorable terms. How far the sentiment of negative beneficence ought to qualify their action, must depend on the circumstances of the particular case. Perhaps they have good reason to know that the contract has been taken at very profitable rates, and that payment of the higher wages demanded will still leave the contractor a sufficient return; and in this case the taking advantage of his necessity is consistent with a reasonable altruism. Perhaps, though not likely to gain largely by this particular contract, he has, during previous years, accumulated vast sums and has been a hard taskmaster; and in which case, too, sympathy with him does not indicate such regard for his interests as may prevent him from losing. But in other cases the treatment of an employer as one whose interests are to be entirely disregarded is indefensible. And not only does due consideration for him forbid this indirect coercion, but it is forbidden by regard for society. If, being frequently thus treated, a contractor is ruined, the society loses a useful functionary; and, at any rate for a time, the employed themselves find a diminished demand for their services.

But the endeavors of workers thus to better themselves by taking advantage of an employer's necessities, are in most cases not only unrestrained by the promptings of negative beneficence, but they are unrestrained by the promptings of justice. For while they refuse to work any longer on the terms previously agreed upon, the strikers commonly use their violence, or threats of violence, to prevent others from accepting those terms. They thus break the law of equal freedom. While they assert the right to enter into, or to refuse, contracts themselves, they deny to their fellows the same right. They may without ethical transgression try to persuade others to join them–may without doing wrong argue with those who propose to take their places, and frown on them if they persist; but any course which either forcibly hinders them from taking the places, or puts them in fear of evil consequences other than unpopularity, is morally forbidden: doubly forbidden, since negative beneficence joins with justice in reprobating their course. Those who would accept the terms they refuse (frequently good terms) are often impelled to do so by their responsibilities; and to prevent them is to entail distress not only on them but on their families.

If, as happens not only in the cases indicated but in cases of other kinds, both masters and nonunionist workers are coerced by some form of the system now called boycotting–if, as commonly happens, a united body of men refuse to work along with a man who is not a member of their union; or if, as in Ireland, a political combination enforces social outlawry against those who do not join them; we may see, as before, that the wrongs done are primarily injustices. Whatever the law may at present say about the matter, it is clear that men may, both individually and in combination, refuse to work with, or trade with, or hold any communication with, a certain person, so long as they do not in any way interfere with his activities. Their combination cannot properly be called a conspiracy, unless the thing which they conspire to do is wrong; and there is no breach of the law of equal freedom in declining to work along with one who is disapproved, or in declining to do business with him. The wrong done usually consists in the use of coercion to form and maintain the boycotting organization, and in inflicting penalties on those who do not obey it. No appreciable evil would result if each person remained not nominally but actually free to join or not to join the combination. Even without the checks which negative beneficence imposes the checks which justice imposes would suffice.

I may remark, in passing, that by their disregard of such checks, we are shown how far the mass of men are from fitness for free institutions. A society in which it has become a vice to maintain personal independence, and a virtue to submit to a coercive trade organization and to persecute those who do not, is a society which will rapidly lose again the liberties it has, in recent times, gained. Men who so little understand what freedom is will inevitably lose their freedom.

§ 405. On contracts which justice does not restrain, the restraints put by negative beneficence which have been thus far considered, are those which forbid unduly pressing against another an advantage which circumstances give. A higher form of negative beneficence operating in business transactions has to be considered.

Here and there may be found one who not only declines to sacrifice another's interests for his own benefit, but who goes further, and will not let the other make a sacrifice–will not let the other injure himself by a bad bargain. While not disregarding his own claims, he will not let his client or friend make bad terms for himself; but volunteers to give more, or to do more, than is asked. In a fully developed industrial society, formed of units having natures moulded to its requirements, such a mode of action will be normal. Beyond observance of that justice which consists in fulfillment of contract, there will be observance of that negative beneficence which forbids making a contract unduly advantageous to self.

Conduct thus guided is at present necessarily rare. People whose newspapers record in detail the betting transactions by which one receives pleasure through another's pain, are not people likely to refrain from hard bargains. The qualifying of contracts by sympathetic anxiety for another's welfare, cannot be prevalent in a nation which is given over to gambling throughout all its grades, from princes down to pot-boys.

[II-298]

CHAPTER IV.

RESTRAINTS ON UNDESERVED PAYMENTS.↩

§ 406. Still limiting ourselves to transactions in which money, or some equivalent, plays a part, we have here to consider a kind of negative beneficence which at first sight seems wholly unbeneficent. In daily occurring instances, immediate sympathy prompts certain actions which sympathy of a more abstract and higher form interdicts. I refer to refusals to do or to give things which are expected or asked.

This is a form of negative beneficence so unprepossessing, and so apt to be misinterpreted, that it is little practiced. The cases in which a selfish motive causes resistance to a claim made by another, enormously predominate in number; and hence most people find it nearly impossible to believe that such resistance may be instigated by an unselfish motive. Proximate effects exclusively occupy their thoughts; and they cannot see that recognition of remote pains may prevent actions which yield immediate pleasures. Usually there is scope for self-denial in doing a kind thing; but in some cases there is scope for self-denial in refusing to do what seems a kind thing, but is not so.

These are mostly cases in which regard for social interests, or the welfare of the many, ought to override regard for the welfare of individuals, or of the few. Let us contemplate instances.

§ 407. "Poor fellows! I must give them something," says a softhearted lady, as she opens the window to hand out sixpence to the leader of a worthless band, which, for some ten minutes, has been disturbing the neighborhood by discordant playing of miserable music; and so saying she thinks she has done a good act, and ascribes lack of feeling to one who disapproves the act.

In the discussion which follows it is of little avail to point out that money given in return for something done, is properly given only when this something done is in one or other way beneficial–that it is right to pay for the receipt of pleasure, but not right to pay for the receipt of pain; and that if the principle of equally paying for pleasure and pain were pursued generally, social relations would dissolve. This is too abstract a conclusion for her. Nor is it of much use to dwell on the obvious fact that every payment of incapable bandsmen, induces them to perambulate other streets, inflicting upon other people their intolerable noises. The evils do not end here. If money can be got by bad playing, good playing will not be to the same extent cultivated; and besides a diffused infliction of pain there results a deprivation of pleasure. Yet one more evil happens. The unmusical musicians, if they were not paid, would abandon the occupation for which they are unfit and take to occupations for which they are fit; and society would then profit by their efforts instead of being injured by them. But, as I have implied, these remoter results are commonly never thought of; and, if pointed out, are too faintly imagined to operate as restraints.

Here a superior negative beneficence is shown by bearing the several pains which refusal entails–The pain which denying the immediate promptings of sympathy implies, and the pain caused by misinterpretation of motives.

§ 408. Among the daily incidents of town life, as carried on by those who have means, may be named another in respect of which an unthinking generosity should be kept in check, and sometimes a considerable annoyance borne. I refer to dealings with cabmen.

The question of regulated cab fares versus cab fares left, like omnibus fares, to open competition, checked only by due announcement of the rates charged, must here be left aside. The established system has adjusted itself in respect of the numbers of cabs and rates of profit of masters and men; and the question is what are the effects of not abiding by the prescribed rates. In the great majority of cases cabmen, a fairly well-behaved class, are content with their due. Here, however, is one who asks more. You know the distance well–have perhaps daily paid the same fare with the certain knowledge that it covers the claim and leaves a wide margin. But the man demands another sixpence; threatens a summons; and even when you have entered the house keeps his cab standing at the door, thinking to alarm you by his persistence. What will you do? It is a disagreeable business; and you feel inclined to pay the extra sixpence, about which you care next to nothing, and thus end the dispute. Moreover you perceive that some of those around think you mean in refusing; so that perhaps, after all, it will be better to do the generous thing as it seems. But if you are swayed by that higher negative beneficence which takes into account distant effects as well as near ones, and the benefit of the many as well as the benefit of the few you will continue your refusal. Observe the various justifications.

If it is proper for you to yield, then it is proper for all others similarly overcharged, and similarly threatened, to yield; and it is proper that, by this process, the daily profits of cabmen should be raised. What do we learn respecting the effects, from political economy–the "dismal science," as Mr. Carlyle called it, much as a child might call its arithmetic dismal because of a like repugnance? The first effect would be a great increase in the number of cabdrivers: a pleasant occupation for idle fellows, of whom there is always no lack. The body of cabdrivers would be augmented partly by influx of these, and partly by recruits from other occupations which did not yield such good daily returns. Supposing the number of hirings of cabs remained the same (which it would not, since higher rates would lessen the demands of customers) what would be the subsequent effects on the enlarged body of cabdrivers? The same number of drives having to be divided among a larger number of drivers, it would result that, though each received more from every fare, he would have fewer fares. The reduction of his abnormally raised returns in this way, would go on until the profits of cabdriving no longer caused an influx into the occupation–until, that is, it had been brought down in its desirableness to the same level as before. A concomitant effect would be an increase in the number of cabs built; for an extra demand for them made by cabdrivers, would be met by an extra supply of cabs, and an extra rate charged for them: part of the total extra payments for cabs would go into the pockets of cab masters. Yet another evil sequence must be named. There would come a superfluous number of cabs and of horses drawing them–a wasteful investment of capital. A supply of cabs and horses in excess of the need implies a national loss. Nor have we even now got to the end of the mischief. To the wealthier of those who hire cabs, the payment of fares in excess of the authorized rates would be of no consequence, pecuniarily considered; but it would be of consequence to the less wealthy and more numerous, who are in some cases obliged to hire them, and who in other cases would be prevented from hiring them when fatigue or hurry prompted.

Of course it is not meant that through the mind of one who refuses the unwarranted demand, there suddenly pass thoughts of all these ultimate results. It is meant, rather, that if he has occasionally traced out the ramifying effects of men's actions, he is immediately conscious that breach of the understanding tacitly entered into when he took the cab, tends towards evil. He is aware, for instance, that the giving of considerable gratuities to the servants at hotels, had the effect of making their places so profitable that they had to buy them from the landlords; and he is aware that since the system of charging for servants in the bill has been established, the practice has been growing up afresh, and being presently taken account of by the landlords, will end in giving lower wages. That is, he recognizes the general truth that deviations from the normal relation of payments proportioned to services, are sure, after many mischievous perturbations, to end in reestablishment of the relation; and, being possessed by this general truth, he declines in the interests of all those who will in the long run be injuriously affected, to encourage a vicious system.

§ 409. Other acts which appear to be beneficent but are essentially unbeneficent, are committed every hour at every railway station in the "tipping" of guards and porters. Organizations when first formed are healthy. and time is required for corruptions to gain entrance and spread. In early railway days, boards of directors were pure, and the administrations they presided over were pure. There were no share traffickings, no floatings of bad schemes for the sake of premiums, no cooking of accounts; and officials of all grades down to the lowest were paid due wages, for which they were expected to perform prescribed duties without further payments. At first, and for many years, the taking of fees by those who came in contact with passengers, was peremptorily forbidden: punishment being threatened, and occasionally inflicted, for breach of the regulation. But slowly and insidiously the feeing of porters and bribing of guards crept in, and has now become so general that even those who long resisted it as a mischievous abuse, have had to yield. To fee has become proper, and not to fee contemptible. Scarcely anyone recognizes the truth that the system arose not from generosity but from selfishness, and that it works out in various disastrous ways. Here are some of them.

Originally the contract between passenger and company was one under which the company for a certain sum agreed to carry the passenger to a specified place, giving him prescribed accommodation; and part of the accommodation was taking charge of his baggage, to do which it employed and paid certain attendants. Every passenger had a claim to the services of these attendants, and no one could take more than his share without diminishing the share equitably due to others. From the beginning, however, some passengers to whom small sums were of no moment, secretly gave these in return for extra promptness or nonessential aid: not remembering that the gaining of these attentions was at the cost of others who equally needed them–often needed them more. While the porter, expecting sixpence from some wealthy-looking man entering a first class, is fussing about in the compartment arranging his bundle of rugs, and parcels, and umbrella, in the rack, or is coming back from the van to tell him his portmanteau and gun case have been duly placed in it, two or three others are kept waiting–a shabby-looking person with bag in hand, from whom probably not a penny will come, or a widow with a cluster of children and miscellaneous belongings, who is agitated lest the train should start without her. So that the richer passenger's seeming generosity to the porter, involves ungenerosity to other passengers.

Much more serious results arise. These passengers from whom nothing is to be expected, have eventually to be accommodated. The train must wait until they, too, have been seated and their things taken charge of. What necessarily happens? The time spent in doing needless things for the paying passenger, and in telling him that his baggage is safe, and in waiting for a fee, is time in which other passengers could have been attended to. The postponed attention to these now keeps the train waiting. This effect, which I have myself repeatedly observed, and have led friends to observe, recurs at every large station, producing delay upon delay; and the general result is–chronic unpunctuality. That some passengers may have an undue share of the services for which every one paid when he took his ticket, all passengers must lose time. Fifty or a hundred people get to their journeys' ends long after the announced hours: occasionally to their great inconvenience. Nor is this all. The great majority of railway accidents are caused by unpunctuality. Collisions never occur between trains which are where they should be at the appointed times.

Collateral mischiefs have followed. From the feeing of porters has grown the bribing of guards; and to this are due sundry evils. That a gentleman–or one dressed as such–who has given or promised a shilling, may have partial or entire monopoly of a compartment, other compartments are inconveniently crowded. Worse happens. Here is one who, seeking a place, looks in where there are but two persons, with coats and rugs on the seats to represent others, and hurriedly seeks elsewhere in vain. At length he asks the guard whether these seats are occupied, and, forcing out the reply that they are not, only after stern demand has the locked door opened: a transaction which shows clearly how the system of gratuities initiates a selfish habit of getting extra advantage by taking from others the advantages they have paid for. Still worse is a concomitant evil–the bribing of guards to allow smoking in nonsmoking compartments. This abuse has now grown to the extent that guards carry in their pockets labels with the printed word "Smoking," which they fasten on the window of this or that compartment, as their paying clients inside request. It has actually come to this, and the company condones practices by which all first-class compartments are being made to stink like the taproom of a pothouse.

Here, then, are illustrations of the mode in which an apparently innocent yielding to the tacit expectations of porters, leads the way to grave abuses: some of them occasionally entailing great loss of property and even loss of life. We are shown how that kind of negative beneficence which takes account of general and remote welfare, sometimes enjoins resistance to the instigations of immediate sympathy, and enjoins also the bearing of odium.

§ 410. Generalizing these conclusions, we may say that exchange of benefits should always conform as nearly as possible to actual or tacit contract where there is one; or, where there is no contract, to such a conceived one as might have been reasonably made.

One of the traits of evolution is increasing definiteness, and, in the course of social progress, we find increasing definiteness in the transactions among citizens. Originally there were no wages or salaries, no specified agreements, no avowed prices for commodities. The regime was one of compulsory services, of presents, of bribes; and exchanges of benefits were vague and uncertain. Hence the implication is that deviations from cooperation under contract, are retrograde changes–tend towards a lower type of society, and should be resisted.

That social life may be carried on well without gratuities, we have clear proof. A generation ago, while there still continued much of the purity which at first characterized American institutions, employees, and among others the servants in hotels, looked for nothing beyond the wages they had contracted to have for services rendered. In England, too, at the present time, there are to be found, even among the more necessitous, those who will not accept more than they have bargained to receive. I can myself recall the case of a poor workwoman who, seeming to be underpaid by the sum she asked, declined to receive the extra amount I offered her. So that, evidently, it is quite possible to have on both sides resistance to a retrograde form of social cooperation.

In such a state the function of negative beneficence, in so far as it concerns the relations of employers and employed, is that of seeing that the employed do not, when the agreement is made, underestimate the values of their services. Clearly, under the rule of the implied sentiments, that which is lost by the cessation of irregular payments will, in the long run, be gained by the raising of regular payments.

[II-307]

CHAPTER V.

RESTRAINTS ON DISPLAYS OF ABILITY.↩

§ 411. Beyond the material advantages which men give and receive under the system of social cooperation, they give and receive nonmaterial advantages. These are the benefits, or satisfactions, or pleasures, obtained during social intercourse; and which may or may not be apportioned in the most desirable ways. Here the office of negative beneficence is that of so restraining the actions which bring such gratifications to self, as to allow others to obtain their shares.

The superiorities, bodily or mental or both, which enable one citizen to exceed others in gaining wealth, but which, as we have seen, he ought not to utilize to the extreme, regardless of others' welfare, are superiorities which may also bring to him an unusually large share of approbation. Or an unusually large share of approbation may come to one who has superiorities of another order, conducive, say, not to material prosperity but to popularity. In such cases there arises the question–How far shall the superior push his advantages? To what extent shall he refrain from using his greater faculties; so that others may obtain applause, or may not experience the pain of defeat?

Difficult questions grow out of these. The battle of life through which all higher powers, subhuman and human, have arisen, may rightly be carried out of that activity which has sustentation for its end, into that activity which has for its end the pleasures given by superfluous play of the faculties. In the absence of this competition, partly bodily but mainly mental, social intercourse would lose its salt. And yet in this field, as in the other, sympathy ought to produce a self-restraint limiting the pleasures of success.

§ 412. A form of selfishness occasionally displayed, and rightly condemned, is that of men who display without bounds their remarkable conversational powers. Of various brilliant talkers we read that on some occasions the presence of others who vied with them, raised obvious jealousies; and that on other occasions, in the absence of able competitors, they talked down everyone, and changed what should have been conversation into monologue. Contrariwise, we sometimes hear of those who, though capable of holding continuously the attention of all, showed solicitude that the undistinguished or the modest should find occasions for joining in the exchange of thoughts: even going to the extent of "drawing them out." Men of these contrasted types exemplify the absence and presence of negative beneficence; and they exemplify. too, the truth, commonly forgotten, that undue efforts to obtain applause often defeat themselves. One who monopolizes conversation loses more by moral reprobation than he gains by intellectual approbation.

Over the dinner table, or in groups of persons otherwise held together, there frequently occur cases in which an erroneous statement is made or an invalid argument urged. One who recognizes the error may either display his superior knowledge or superior logic, or he may let the error pass in silence: not wishing to raise the estimate of himself at the cost of lowering the estimate of another. Which shall he do? A proper decision implies several considerations. Is the wrong statement or invalid argument one which will do appreciable mischief if it passes uncorrected? Is the person who utters it vain, or one whose self-esteem is excessive? Is he improperly regarded as an authority by those around? Does he trample down others in the pursuit of applause? If to some or all of these questions the answer is–Yes, the correction may fitly be made; alike for the benefit of the individual himself and for the benefit of hearers. But should the error be trivial, or should the credit of one who makes it, not higher than is proper, be unduly injured by the exposure, or should his general behavior in social intercourse be of a praiseworthy kind, then sympathy may fitly dictate silence–negative beneficence may rightly restrain the natural desire to show superiority.

Of course much of what is here said respecting the carrying on of conversation or discussion, applies to the carrying on of public controversy. In nearly all cases the intrusion of personal feeling makes controversy of small value for its ostensible purpose–the establishment of truth. Desire for the éclat which victory brings, often causes a mercilessness and a dishonesty which hinder or prevent the arrival at right conclusions. Negative beneficence here conduces to public benefit while it mitigates private injury. Usually the evidence may be marshaled and a valid argument set forth, without discrediting an opponent in too conspicuous a manner. Small slips of statement and reasoning, which do not affect the general issue, may be generously passed over; and generosity may fitly go to the extent of admitting the strength of the reasons relied on, while showing that they are inadequate. A due negative beneficence will respect an antagonist's amour propre; save, perhaps, in cases where his dishonesty, and his consequent endeavor to obscure the truth, demand exposure. Lack of right feeling in this sphere has disastrous public effects. It needs but to glance around at the courses of political controversy and of theological controversy, to see how extreme are the perversions of men's beliefs caused by absence of that sympathetic interpretation which negative beneficence enjoins.

§ 413. A few words may be added respecting more special motives which should occasionally prevent the superior from manifesting his superiority.

A game of skill is being played with one whose little boy is a spectator. The father's play is such as makes his antagonist tolerably certain of victory, should he put out his strength. But if he is adequately swayed by the sentiment of negative beneficence, he will, not obtrusively but in a concealed way, play below his strength, so as to let the father beat him. He will feel that such small pleasure as triumph might bring, would be far more than counterbalanced by sympathy with the annoyance of the father at being defeated in presence of his son, and by sympathy with the son on finding his father not so superior as he supposed. Though in this course some insincerity is implied, yet that evil is trivial in comparison with the evils otherwise entailed.

In like manner none will doubt that one who, in a discussion or in a wit combat, might be easily overcome, may, even though at other times unworthy of consideration, be rightly let off under particular circumstances. Say, for instance, that his fiancée is present. To show that he is ignorant, or that he is illogical, or to utter a witticism at his expense, would be cruel. All but the unusually callous will see that to shame him before a witness with whom he stands in such a relation, would be an improper exercise of intellectual power. An interlocutor who is swayed by due fellow feeling, will, in such a case, consent to see himself ill-informed or stupid, rather than inflict the pain which would follow any other course.

§ 414. Here, then, are ways in which negative beneficence should operate by voluntarily making a conscious superiority, and thus harmonizing social intercourse.

Perhaps in such cases we see more clearly than in others, the propriety of mitigating, so far as we can, the pains caused by inequalities of faculty. As admitted on a previous occasion, the harsh discipline of nature, which favors the well-endowed and leaves the ill-endowed to suffer, has, from the human point of view, an aspect of injustice; and though, as we have seen, it is not permissible so to traverse the normal relation between conduct and consequence, as to equalize the fates of the well-endowed and the ill-endowed, it is permissible to modify its results where this may be done without appreciably interfering with the further progress of evolution. Though many difficulties stand in the way of thus qualifying the material effects which severally come to the efficient and the inefficient in the battle of life, yet comparatively little difficulty stands in the way of qualifying the mental effects, as socially manifested.

There are doubtless cases in which display of mental power in conversation or controversy, conduces to pecuniary benefit, and may hence be regarded as rightly to be taken advantage of in the struggle for life; but in the cases above instanced, which typify the average cases, the more skilled player, or better talker, or keener logician, may hold his greater powers in check without endangering the prosperity of the superior, and may avoid discrediting a competitor without appreciably furthering the prosperity of the inferior. He may here diminish the evils caused by nature's unfairness, without entailing other evils.

And restraint of the desire for triumph, thus inculcated by negative beneficence, is the restraint of a barbarous desire appropriate to early stages of human evolution. For the pride taken in victory over an opponent, is of like kind whether the opponent fights with hand or with tongue–wields the sword or wields the pen. The militant nature which throughout social progress has gloried in successful bodily encounters, is essentially the same militant nature which glories in successful mental encounters. In the interests of a higher civilization, therefore, there should be practiced this self-restraint which prevents a needless discrediting of the mentally inferior.

[II-313]

CHAPTER VI.

RESTRAINTS ON BLAME.↩

§ 415. The subject matter of this chapter joins naturally on to that of the last chapter–is, in fact, scarcely to be parted from it: since criticisms passed in conversation and controversy necessarily imply a kind of blame. But blame, specially so called, is sufficiently distinguishable to be separately treated.

Neither sympathy alone, nor judgment alone, serves rightly to regulate the utterance of blame, either in respect of occasion or degree. Sometimes it is a duty to withhold censure, and sometimes censure cannot be withheld without breach of duty. For right guidance many things must be borne in mind. There are the relative positions of the two, as being in some cases parent and child, in some cases employer and employed, in some cases elder and younger; while in some cases they stand in relations of equality and independence. There are the characters of the person reproving and the person reproved, as being relatively superior or inferior, either to the other; and there are the effects as liable to be beneficial or injurious, immediately or remotely or both. The presence or absence of witnesses, too, must be taken into account; as also the degree and manner of the blame.

To adjust behavior in such ways as duly to regard all the facts and circumstances, there needs active fellow feeling and also quick perception and much foresight. Wherever possible, it is desirable that time should be taken for consideration.

§ 416. Blame of the most familiar kind is that which the relation of parent and child leads to. In countries where the imperative need for having a son results from the belief that only by a son can proper sacrifices be made to a father's ghost, we see clearly implied the conception, which has prevailed down to comparatively modern times, that children exist mainly for the benefit of parents. Along with the prevalence of this conception and along with the enjoining of punishment, which accompanied it, the blaming of children could not well be checked by careful thought for their welfare. In modern times, however, characterized if not by entire inversion of this conception, yet by partial inversion of it, so that very often parents exist chiefly for the benefit of children, the blaming of them has come to be qualified by considerations touching the effects wrought. The better natured among parents in our days, find scope for negative beneficence in often restraining themselves from those faultfindings which irritation prompts.

Insight and sympathy will, at the cost of some self-sacrifice, cause tolerance of that restlessness, mental and bodily, characterizing early life; and will, within reasonable limits, prompt submission to that cross-questioning which children are prone to. The aim will be to find pleasure in giving the desired information; and when the questioning becomes too troublesome, to end it, not by words of blame but in some indirect way.

Constant recognition of the truth that from an undeveloped nature there must not be expected conduct which only a developed nature is capable of, will stop many scoldings. The higher regulative emotions, later than others in coming into play, must not be counted upon as though fully operative. Remembering this a parent of well-balanced feelings will not harshly condemn minor transgressions. Not that faults are to be passed over in silence, but that disapproval is to be expressed in a moderated way.

Negative beneficence will check a too-frequent blame because of remote effects as well as because of immediate effects. Perpetual infliction of moral pain produces callousness and eventually alienation. Both of these conflict with salutary discipline. A parent who passes over small faults without comment, or at most visits them with disapproving looks, and reserves open reprobation for serious transgressions, will, other things equal, obtain a control not to be obtained by a harsh parent; for the harsh parent fails to bring into play those motives from which good conduct should have proceeded, and substitutes for them those lower motives which dread of him generates.

Of course much that is here said of the family circle may be said also of the school. The measures used, punitive in a kindly way, should have in view not only the control of present conduct but the permanent moulding of character; and should form parts of a government which though mild is not lax.

§ 417. Primarily. the relations of employer and employed, or of master and servant, must be such as are implied by conformity to contract. Justice takes precedence of beneficence; and here, therefore, considerations touching blame are subordinate to considerations touching duty. Fulfillment of the understanding made, may rightly be insisted on, and reproof for nonfulfillment may rightly be uttered-should, indeed, be uttered; for as healthy social cooperation depends on discharge of engagements, failure in the discharge (unless it is due to adequate unforeseen causes) should not be passed over in silence.

Ethical judgments on questions hence arising, are complicated by the consciousness that in the relation between employer and employed, and especially in that between master and servant, there is an element scarcely recognizable by absolute ethics. Though the agreement to render specified services for specified sums, is perfectly consistent with pure equity; yet, since fulfillment of one side of the contract, payment of money, occurs only at intervals while fulfillment of the other side by obedience to orders is continuous, there clings to it a feeling not wholly different from that which clings to the obedience of slave to owner (see sec. 169). Whether, under a reign of absolute ethics, social organization may become such as practically to eliminate this feeling, we cannot say; but under such social organizations as we now know, elimination is not possible, and a system of relative ethics has to make the best of forms of conduct which subordination gives rise to. One way of making the best of these forms is to restrain blame in amount and manner; so as to keep out of view, as much as may be, this undesirable relation.

Of the several nonfulfillments of duty, those which have their origin in the dishonest disregard of contracts entered into, are, as above implied, those on which blame may with least hesitation be visited. The withholding of blame in such cases, though it may be suggested by immediate sympathy, is not approved by that higher beneficence which recognizes distant results–the reform of the erring individual and the welfare of society. For the individual who, by lack of reproof, is encouraged in lax discharge of functions, is less likely to prosper than if his laxity is checked; and those with whom he may afterward be engaged will be advantaged by whatever improvement is made in him.

A mode of discipline to be used as much as possible in cases of the above class, may be used also with advantage in cases of another class–those in which the cause of failure in duty is forgetfulness. In the treatment of servants as in the treatment of children, the discipline of the natural reaction should be allowed to act where practicable. If they continually find that what has been left undone has eventually to be done, neglect, whether due to idleness or to carelessness, is not unlikely to be prevented. When one who in winter cannot remember to shut the door, is required to come back and shut it, there may be produced a certain amount of irritation; but the irritation will probably be less than that produced by perpetual scolding, and the desire to avoid trouble will often be effectual.

Faults which result from stupidity or awkwardness are those which, though frequently visited with the sharpest reproofs, deserve the mildest. Such faults more manifestly than most others arise from inherited defects of organization. A scarcely credible slowness of apprehension, even of simple things, is often found among children of the poor; and those in whom unintelligence is innate or superinduced by ill- nurture, are to be dealt with tenderly. If it is a function of beneficence to mitigate, so far as consists with other ends, the injustices of nature, then the lowly endowed should not have those injustices of nature from which they suffer, made harder to bear by the needlessly harsh treatment of men. Negative beneficence requires that such blame as their failures call for, shall be sparing in amount and gentle in kind.

Not for altruistic reasons only, but also for egoistic reasons, should the tendency to blame be kept under restraint. For beyond the direct self-injury caused by excess of it, there is the indirect self-injury arising from failure of its purpose. Those whose faultfinding is perpetual cease to be regarded; and those who, though in authority, but rarely blame, produce unusual effects.

§ 418. What is to be said about the expression of blame when the persons concerned are independent of one another–either friends or strangers? The question is one to which there seems no general answer. Each case must be separately considered.

Misbehavior on the part of a stranger, if not great in degree, may often be best ignored, or at any rate be noticed only by look or manner; since more evil than good is likely to result from word–especially if the misbehavior is towards oneself. But if it is of a grave kind, both immediate and remote reasons call for notice of it. Everyone is bound to resist distinct aggression, alike in his own interests and in the interests of other men; for if no one resists an aggressor he is encouraged in his aggressiveness. If the misbehavior is towards others, the utterance of blame is not therefore uncalled for, but is in some respects more called for; since self-interest is no longer a factor. Interference, even by words, is in such cases often resented. Among the vulgar there is commonly vented the exclamation "What is it to you?" and the vulgar-minded in any class usually entertain the thought thus expressed. In such cases negative beneficence has no place. Any desire there may be not to give pain to the transgressor, is a desire which should be overridden by sympathy with the injured. Positive beneficence comes into play. For the transgressor who in such case makes the common rejoinder "Mind your own business" needs to be told that it is the business of everyone to aid in maintaining harmonious social life, and to defend those who are ill-treated by word or deed.

If it is a friend who has misbehaved, toward either self or others, the desire not to give pain by utterance of a reproach, is often so far enforced by the desire not to lose a friend, or not to decrease friendly feeling, that it operates unduly. The negative beneficence which in such case prompts passivity is not always to be obeyed. Blame may rightly be uttered in defense of personal claims, and still more may rightly be uttered in defense of the claims of third persons, when these have been disregarded. Contemplation of remote effects as well as immediate effects, will then show that the disagreeable thing must be said, even at the cost of giving serious offense.

But when those concerned are intimate, expression of blame may often fitly be limited to change of behavior. For while coldness of manner frequently conveys a reproof as distinctly as words, and sometimes even more forcibly, since it leaves play to the imagination of the person reproved, it has the advantage that it does not inflict pain in the same overt way, and gives much less specific reason for complaint and possible alienation.

§ 419. Along with insufficient restraints on blame in some cases, there go, in other cases, restraints that are too great. The utterance of condemnation, or of statements which would lead to condemnation, is often withheld where it is not only deserved but demanded.

In countries where the moral tone is low, we see antagonism to the law and sympathy with the criminal. The law is regarded by citizens as the common enemy rather than as the common friend. A feeling of kindred nature is shown among ourselves at public schools, with the result that it is a point of honor to shield a transgressor from punishment and a disgrace to inform against him. This feeling goes even to the extent that a smaller boy who has been seriously ill treated by a bigger boy, dare not say anything about his grievance to those in authority. If he does, he is sent to Coventry: the result being that no blame comes on him who has deserved it, while blame comes on him who has not deserved it.

Influenced very much as they are by school ethics, many men betray in the afterlife sentiments like these of schoolboys; so that not unfrequently they take the side of one who has seriously misbehaved, while they frown on one who exposes his misbehavior. Often, indeed, it seems better to have done wrong than to have drawn attention to the wrongdoing. The strangest anomalies occasionally arise from this reluctance to express blame where it is called for. A chairman of directors was discovered in treasonable negotiations, injurious to the interests of the company he presided over. His colleagues forced him to resign; and then, by way of "letting him down easily," as the phrase goes, gave him a testimonial–a testimonial which was subscribed to by the member of the board who informed me of the fact.

Now, as rightly understood, negative beneficence does not require such withholdings of blame: quite the contrary. There can be no ethical justification for practice which enables demerit to prosper, and makes it dangerous to bring on demerit its normal results.

§ 420. Much that has been said in this chapter applies, with change of terms, to punishment–the blame which takes the form of hard deeds instead of hard words. Here, as elsewhere, the principle of the natural reaction should be acted upon whenever it is possible. For instance, though sympathy will rightly cause the occasional unpunctuality of an employee to be passed by in silence, yet if the unpunctuality is chronic, maintenance of contract, in which all citizens are concerned, requires that there shall be experienced the natural reaction, by losing, in some way, part of the sum agreed upon for services. If an employer has workmen who constantly come behind time, he is defrauded of a certain amount of the work which was to be given in return for the sum to be paid; and he may rightly deduct an equivalent amount–may impose fines. Unhappily there are in our present phase of progress, many natures on which neither sense of duty, nor mild expostulation, nor strong words, have any appreciable effects; and in dealing with them the normal punishment constituted by loss of benefit, is called for by justice, and must not be interdicted by negative beneficence.

Respecting punitive deeds as well as punitive words, we may say that where decisive blame is deserved, the function of negative beneficence is that of preventing the undue severity which anger–even a legitimate anger–is apt to prompt. The sympathy which in some cases checks a direct infliction of pain, and in others suggests mitigation of reproof, may in all cases rightly rein in the excited feelings.

Moderation not abstinence is the word. There is a general notion, taking for its formula "Never lose your temper," which assumes that under all circumstances anger is improper. This is quite a mistake. Anger is a normal, and in some cases a needful, mode of displaying feeling. Were anger never shown by those who are aggressed upon, aggressions would be multitudinous. Mankind are at present not sufficiently civilized to dispense with the check which fear puts upon them. Negative beneficence can do no more than keep anger within due bounds.

[II-322]

CHAPTER VII.

RESTRAINTS ON PRAISE.↩

§ 421. How that form of altruism which we here distinguish as negative beneficence, should put any check on praise, is not obvious: to most, indeed, will appear incomprehensible.

They see at once that regard for truth should in many cases suppress the wish to give pleasure by applause. They do not doubt that when, even if there is no thought of gaining favor, there is professed an admiration which is not felt, a fault has been committed. The ancient Egyptian Ptah-hotep declared that "he who departs from truth to be agreeable is detestable"; and in the intervening five thousand years there have continued to be reprobations of flattery. In our own day the untruthfulness of one who utters insincere eulogies, excites a little contempt, even in the person eulogized. All feel, if they do not say, that there is something wrong in a kindness which prompts undeserved compliments.

But the avoidance of falsehood is in such cases the implied requirement. From veracity, and not from negative beneficence, the interdict is supposed exclusively to come. The withholding of laudations when they are not merited, cannot, it is thought, be referred to that form of altruism which refrains from acts and words productive of pain. Surely it must be a mistake to include restraints on praise under the head of negative beneficence?

No, there are other restraints besides those which truthfulness imposes. Even supposing the applause uttered or displayed arises from genuine admiration, there are circumstances under which it should be kept back. The desire to give immediate pleasure has often to be suppressed by the desire to further ultimate welfare; now of the individual, now of society.

It is difficult to deal separately with these checks to laudation, shown sometimes in look and manner, sometimes in words, which are demanded sometimes by sincerity, and sometimes by consideration of remote effects instead of proximate effects. There will be no harm in massing together the variously required withholdings of praise, which often involve considerable self-sacrifice for others' benefit.

§ 422. Admiration for the child is by implication reflected on to the mother; and, consciously or unconsciously desiring this admiration, the mother summons her little boy from the nursery to be seen by a visitor. Already vanity, dominant enough in existing humanity at large, has been made specially active in the little urchin by daily ministrations–by special attentions to pretty clothes, to carefully curled hair, and by flattering remarks of the nursemaid. Shall you please the child and gratify the mother by some complimentary remark–shall you encourage her still more to foster the child's self-consciousness and appetite for approbation? Not to do this will cause disappointment to both, and will perhaps diminish the mother's friendly feeling. Yet a far-seeing regard for both will arrest the expected eulogy.

Here again is a handsome young lady accustomed to tribute in words and looks. She is constantly thinking of the admiration she excites and is looking for signs of it. Unquestionably her beauty is great–so great that you can scarcely avoid showing that you recognize it. Shall you give her the pleasure she seeks by letting your glances be seen? If you think only of proximate results you may; but not if you think also of remote results. If you recognize the fact that already her nature is in large measure deformed by vanity–if you watch the manifestations of her purely egoistic desire, and see how it excludes from consciousness altruistic desires, which should predominate; you will endeavor to avoid showing that you are thinking any more about her than about other persons.

Such self-restraint, called for by negative beneficence, will probably be thought by many needless or even absurd. If, however, they will consider that the mental attitude described often proves a deplorable one, eventually entailing unhappiness on self and others–if they remember that it is liable in after years to vitiate domestic life in various ways, even to the extent of making mothers jealous of their daughters; and if they remember that it has been developed year after year by the open and tacit flatteries of those around; they will see that the reticence here insisted on is not unimportant.

§ 423. Kindred restraints, imposed now by sincerity and now by the wish to avoid doing injury, are called for in multitudinous cases where the applause expected is of something achieved–a book, a poem, or a speech, a painting or other work of plastic art, a song or a musical performance. In private life the spectator or auditor finds it difficult to act conscientiously. The wish not to disappoint prompts the utterance of approval which is not felt, and shuts out from thought the evils that may arise from uncandid speeches. Where encouragement is needed, there should of course be no greater restraint on praise than is required by truthfulness; and something may commonly be found in the way of partial approval which, serving to give pleasure without fostering vanity may serve to excite further efforts. If the product is a sketch or a decorative work, there need to be no check caused by thought of remoter consequences; but if the product is of a literary kind–verses, an essay, or perhaps a volume–there should usually be a suppression of words which might encourage an unrealizable ambition. Silence, or adverse criticism gently expressed, is in such cases kind: not alone as perhaps preventing future disappointment of the aspirant, but also as tending to prevent public evil. Verses which have no true poetry in them, and books which contain neither facts nor thoughts of any value, do not simply entail loss to the community in paper and print thrown away, but help to smother things of true worth. The withholding of praise hence becomes in multitudinous cases a duty to the world at large. Negative beneficence commands silence.

Evils less widely diffused, but more conspicuous, arise from applauding those who have received the customary musical culture but have no considerable musical faculty, and who, on all available occasions, are invited to perform for the supposed pleasure of those around. The pestilent social system which aims to make every individual as like every other individual as possible, by passing all through the same educational mill, insists on giving to each young lady lessons in singing, and a course of instruction on the piano; even though she has not a tolerable ear, and is utterly averse to the practices she has to go through. Daily. for years, are caused weariness to the pupil and irritation to the teachers, annoyance to the household, nuisance to the neighbors; and all to achieve the result that when there comes an evening party, a song ill sung or an ill played piece on the piano, may be inflicted upon guests, who hypocritically say "Thank you." Manifestly the giving of praise, which sincerity forbids, is also here forbidden by regard for the general welfare. Negative beneficence of the wider kind interdicts utterances which, individually trivial though they may be, serve by their aggregate effect to maintain a system that vitiates social intercourse.

It goes without saying that duty to society should still more imperatively forbid the public critic from giving currency to unmerited encomiums.

§ 424. There is a form of praise allied to flattery which also needs to be restrained–the tacit flattery implied by constant agreement with another person's opinions. If, on the one hand, we must disapprove of that nature which always finds reason to dissent, we must, on the other hand, disapprove of that nature which (moved perhaps in some measure by sympathy but often in a greater measure by a kind of servility) always finds reason to assent.

Of course regard for truth represses this undue tendency to coincide with others' views. Save in those who have got no ideas at all, there cannot but frequently arise convictions at variance with those they hear; and to utter words inconsistent with these convictions, everyone condemns as dishonest. Not only does sincerity require that the tacit praise taking this form shall be restrained, but a far-seeing negative beneficence also requires it. It is not a matter of indifference whether another continues to believe that which you see reason to think is untrue. A double evil may result from an expressed acquiescence in his statement or opinion. The error itself may have injurious consequences to him; and, further, a groundless self-esteem may be fostered. Moreover, as an ultimate effect of this acquiescent habit, social intercourse is rendered uninteresting by absence of mental conflict. Emerson somewhere reprobates the man who is "a mush of concession"; and it is clear that among those who are thus characterized, conversation must lose its point. All pronounced opinions and all individualities of character must disappear in a tame uniformity, if everybody is anxious to please everybody else by agreeing with him.

The restraint which, in this sphere, negative beneficence may rightly enjoin, is the maintaining of silence in cases where no good will be effected by avowed dissidence. Often it requires some tact to preserve the right attitude–neither to express difference when it is useless nor to profess agreement when it is not felt; but there are cases in which such tact comes in aid of kindly feeling.

§ 425. The request to join in giving public honor to an individual who has probably done no more than perform well the duties before him, calls for another restraining action of negative beneficence.

Passive resistance to the getting up of testimonials, is seen by many to be needful to prevent further growth of an abuse. A presentation-portrait in recognition of services is proposed. If the man to be thus distinguished is actively sympathetic, he will prefer rather to go without such a mark of esteem than to have his friends taxed all round that he may receive it: knowing, as he does, that in most cases their contributions would be given under a kind of moral coercion. But if the beneficiary, not thus unusually sympathetic, countenances the subscription, then one who, under the ordinary circumstances refuses to subscribe, may do this simply from a beneficent regard for the general welfare.

Even where the applause takes the form of a costless testimonial, he may still often find good reason for refraining from joining in it. He may be restrained by the thought that the distribution of testimonials is ill adjusted to the merits of individuals: many of the more worthy being passed over while the less worthy are honored: the result being a misdirection of public opinion. And, further, he may be restrained by the belief that for the beneficiary to have done well what we had to do, should not be regarded as a reason for special eulogy; since everyone should do this as a matter of duty and not with a view to approbation.

And here, indeed, we come upon a final reason for being reticent of praise. As was pointed out in The Principles of Psychology, sections 519—23, the ego-altruistic sentiments have been, from early days down to our own, among the chief regulators of social conduct; and have been needful in the absence of anything like adequate amounts of the altruistic sentiments. Desires for reputation, fame, glory, have been the prompters; and not desires to do the appointed work, discharge obligations, behave kindly. Love of praise has in large measure served in place of love of rectitude. The proethical sentiments have had to rule because the ethical sentiments were not strong enough to take their places. But if so, it follows that a higher state, individual and social, will be one in which "the last infirmity of noble minds" will have greatly diminished; and in which, by implication, applause will be less sought for and less given. Men will be ruled by higher motives than love of approbation; and approbation being less demanded will be less yielded. From which conclusion it is a corollary that the appetite for praise should be discharged. A far-seeing desire to further human development, may rightly become a motive for often withholding applause–especially where it is greedily claimed.

[II-329]

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ULTIMATE SANCTIONS.↩

§ 426. Though occasionally, in the foregoing chapters, I have briefly indicated the origin of the obligation to be beneficent, I have not under each head referred to this origin, but have thought it best here to emphasize it generally.

The admitted desideratum being maintenance and prosperity of the species, or that variety of the species constituting the society, the implication is that the modes of conduct here enjoined under the head of negative beneficence, have their remote justification in their conduciveness to such maintenance and prosperity. It was pointed out that certain restraints on free competition are demanded not only by regard for a competitor as likely to be needlessly ruined, but also by regard for society at large; injury of which would result from partial destruction of its producing and distributing organization. It was tacitly alleged that restraints on free contract are imposed by recognition of extreme damages to individuals, considerable damage to society, and consequent damage to the local variety of the species, which result if contracts are under all circumstances enforced to the letter. And kindred reasons were implied for reprobating various minor divergencies from the fundamental principle of social cooperation–that each individual shall, under ordinary circumstances, receive neither more nor less than a true equivalent for his services.

Here it should be added that the maintenance or prosperity of the race, or the variety, is the ultimate sanction also for those kinds of negative beneficence treated of as restraints on praise and blame. For the right restraints are in all cases such as have in view the eventual welfare of the individual blamed or praised–his eventual improvement. But improvement of the individual consists in the better fitting of him for social cooperation; and this, being conducive to social prosperity, is conducive to maintenance of the race.

§ 427. The second sanction is a correlative of the first, or indeed, from one point of view, is the first; since, unless the race maintained is a recipient of happiness, maintenance of it ceases to be a desideratum. As was pointed out in section 16, "pessimists and optimists both start with the postulate that life is a blessing or a curse, according as the average consciousness accompanying it is pleasurable or painful. . . . The truth that conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results, to self or others or both, are pleasurable or painful, we found on examination to be involved in all the current judgments of conduct: the proof being that reversing the applications of the words creates absurdities. And we found that every other proposed standard of conduct derives its authority from this standard"; for "perfection of nature," or "virtuousness of action," or "rectitude of motive," cannot be conceived without including the conception of happiness as an ultimate result, to self, or others or both. Hence the conclusion that the ultimate sanction for the conduct we call beneficent is conduciveness to maintenance of the species, simultaneously implies that its ultimate sanction is conduciveness to happiness, special or general: the two being different aspects of the same truth.

Their fundamental correlation is, as we before saw, necessary–has been inevitably established during the evolution of life at large. For as in all types of creatures lower than the human, there have been no prompters to performance of some actions and desistance from others, except the pleasurable and painful feelings produced respectively, it follows that through myriads of generations of creatures preceding the human, there have been in course of establishment, organic relations between pleasures and beneficial actions, and between pains and detrimental actions–now to the individual, now to the species, now to both. Of these organic relations, the essential ones, referring to the needs of the physical life, are inherited by the human race, savage and civilized; and are on the average efficient guides to the welfare of the individual and of the species. Though change from the requirements of savage life to the requirements of civilized life, has put many of the more complex among these relations out of gear; and though readjustment, already to some extent effected, has to continue through long future periods, before harmony between the feelings and the needs is fully reestablished; yet there cannot be an abolition of this primordial method of guidance. The requisite reorganization of the human being, must make him like inferior beings in the sense that not the lower parts of his nature only but the higher parts, will be adjusted to the conditions imposed by his mode of life–so adjusted that in him, as in them, all the actions conducive to self-welfare and the welfare of the species will be pleasurable.

Hence the two correlative sanctions of beneficence are conduciveness to happiness, immediate or remote, or both, and consequent conduciveness to maintenance of the species or the variety, regarded as hereafter the recipient of increased happiness. And this is implied vaguely if not clearly in the current conception of beneficence; since a mode of conduct which tends to increase the total of unhappiness, immediate or remote or both, is universally recognized as not beneficent but maleficent.

Of course these considerations touching the nature of beneficence at large, here appended as a commentary on the actions classed under the head of negative beneficence, equally apply, and indeed apply still more manifestly, to the actions classed under the head of positive beneficence, to which we now pass.

[II-335]

CHAPTER I.

MARITAL BENEFICENCE.↩

§ 428. In the history of humanity as written, the saddest part concerns the treatment of women; and had we before us its unwritten history we should find this part still sadder. I say the saddest part because, though there have been many things more conspicuously dreadful–cannibalism, the torturings of prisoners, the sacrificings of victims to ghosts and gods–these have been but occasional; whereas the brutal treatment of women has been universal and constant. If, looking first at their state of subjection among the semi- civilized, we pass to the uncivilized, and observe the lives of hardship borne by nearly all of them–if we then think what must have gone on among those still ruder peoples who, for so many thousands of years, roamed over the uncultivated earth; we shall infer that the amount of suffering which has been, and is, borne by women, is utterly beyond imagination.

As I have before pointed out, this ill-treatment of women has been an unavoidable concomitant of the chronic struggle for life among tribes, which is still going on in some places and once went on universally (sec. 335). The brutality fostered in men by their dealings with enemies, necessarily operated throughout their daily lives. The weakest went to the wall inside the tribe as well as outside the tribe. Utter absence of sympathy made it inevitable that women should suffer from the egoism of men, without any limit save their ability to bear the entailed hardships. Passing this limit, the ill-treatment, by rendering the women incapable of rearing a due number of children, brought about disappearance of the tribe; and we may safely assume that multitudes of tribes disappeared from this cause: leaving behind those in which the ill-treatment was less extreme.

It must not be supposed, however, that the women who, throughout the past, had to bear all this misery, and in many places still have to bear it, were or are essentially better than the men. All along the brutality of nature has been common to the two; and, as we see in the love of torturing prisoners, is, among some of the North American tribes, even more pronounced in the women than in the men. The truth is simply that the unqualified and cruel egoism characterizing both, has worked out its evil results on those least able to resist. Hence the women have been compelled to carry all the burdens, do all the wearisome and monotonous work, remain unfed till their masters have satisfied themselves, and left to live on the remnants.

Only during these later periods of human history, in which the destructive passions have not been so constantly excited by the struggle for existence between societies, small and large, has the treatment of women slowly become less brutal; and only during this same period has there been growing up in men, a perception that women have certain special claims upon them, and a sentiment responding to the perception.

§ 429. Perhaps, however, it is going too far to ascribe this softening of conduct to any consciousness of its propriety. Little by little character has changed; and the accompanying amelioration in the behavior of men to women, leading to gradual modifications of customs, has had no recognized sanction beyond the authority of these customs. Such and such privileges are now conceded to women, partly because immediate sympathy prompts, and partly because social conventions direct; but there is recognized in no definite way the true ethical basis for this better treatment.

In preceding chapters we have several times seen that beyond the equalization which justice imposes upon us, by putting to the liberties of each limits arising from the liberties of all, beneficence exhorts us to take steps towards a further equalization. Like spheres of action having been established, it requires us to do something towards diminishing the inequalities of benefits which superior and inferior severally obtain within their spheres. This requirement has first to be fulfilled in the relations between men and women. Leaving aside all questions concerning mental powers, it is undeniable that in respect of physical powers, women are not the equals of men; and in this respect are disadvantaged in the battle of life. It is also unquestionable that, as the bearers of children, they are placed at a further serious disadvantage–are from time to time in considerable measure incapacitated for using whatever powers they have. Nor can it be doubted that though on the man devolves the business of providing sustenance for the family, yet the onerous duties of the woman, in unceasing attention to children from morning to night day after day, tie her more closely to home, and generally limit individual development to a greater degree. The inequalities thus necessarily arising between the lives of the two sexes, men have to rectify as much as they can–are called upon to make compensations.

Thus the observances which characterize the conduct of men to women in civilized societies, are not, as they at first seem, arbitrary conventions. If not consciously, still unconsciously, men have in modern times conformed their behavior to certain well-authorized dictates of positive beneficence.

§ 430. The ideas and sentiments which should regulate the relations between men and women at large, find their special sphere in the marital relation. Here, more than elsewhere, it is the duty of the man to diminish, so far as may be, the disadvantages under which the woman has to live.

During the early stages of married life this duty is usually well fulfilled. Save in the utterly brutal, the sentiment which unites the sexes ensures on the part of the man, at any rate for a time, a recognition of the woman's claim. Her relative weakness forms one element of attraction; and, by implication, there results the desire to shield off such evils as the relative weakness entails. But though the nature inherited from a ruder type of humanity has been rendered less exclusively egoistic, it eventually reasserts itself to some extent in a large proportion of cases. Frequently the solicitude at first shown, diminishes; and, occasionally, even the acts of consideration which custom dictates, come to be disregarded–sometimes with assignable excuse, and sometimes without excuse.

It is consequently needful that there should be kept in mind the true ethical basis for the sympathetic self-sacrifices required of men to women in general, and especially required of husbands in their behavior to wives. So long as the code of conduct which regulates the general relations of the sexes, and more especially the marital relation, is thought of as conventional in its origin, it is more apt to be disregarded than when it is seen to originate in that form of beneficence which seeks to make less unequal the lives of those to whom Nature has given unequal advantages.

The incidents of female life during the childbearing period, are such as from time to time demand special consideration. Perturbations of health, more or less marked, are ordinary concomitants; and with these there sometimes go mental perturbations. When recognized as accompaniments of the functions which bear so heavily on women, these are of course to be tenderly dealt with. There is a further more general effect liable to be produced, which, in some cases being misunderstood, undermines affection. As before indicated, the antagonism between reproduction and individuation not unfrequently causes in women a sensible diminution in mental activity. Intellectual interests which before marriage were marked, diminish or cease; and a highly cultured man, who had hoped for a wife's sympathy in his aims, finds himself disappointed. Hence, sometimes, an alienation leading to decrease of domesticity. But a beneficence of the enlightened kind, rightly construing this decline of brainpower, will not regard it with impatience but with regret: accompanied even with some extra sympathy, in consideration of the mental pleasures which are being lost.

§ 431. Of course these self-sacrifices, small and large, which a husband is called on to make for a wife, are not without limit. While on the one hand the inherited moral nature, at present so imperfect, frequently causes on the part of husbands a neglect of those attentions which a due beneficence requires of them; on the other hand, this same inherited moral nature frequently causes insistence by women on undue claims. Something much beyond the normal compensation for feminine disadvantages is demanded and gained.

Not unfrequently a relation of this kind is established during a first pregnancy. At such a time exigeante behavior on the part of a wife cannot well be resisted. Any considerable mental agitation might have disastrous consequences; and the husband, fearful of such consequences, feels obliged to yield, however unreasonable the demand may be. Once initiated and continued for some months, the relative attitudes of the two tend to become permanent. This result is evidently most liable to occur where the wife is one for whom unusually large sacrifices ought not to be made–one whose inferiority of nature is shown by thus using her advantage.

What should be done in such cases it is difficult to say. The answer must vary with the circumstances. While pronounced supremacy of husband over wife is undesirable, still more undesirable is pronounced supremacy of wife over husband–more undesirable because woman is less judicially minded and more impulsive than man. Though the undue assertions of claims on the part of a wife cannot well be resisted under the circumstances in which they are probably first made, yet they may be resisted afterward, when possible mischiefs no longer threaten. And for the happiness of both they should be resisted. For since the masculine trait which above all others attracts women, and gives permanence to their attachments, is the manifestation of power, the lack of power shown by constant yielding to aggression, eventually becomes a cause of declining affection and diminished conjugal happiness. The truth that a woman often loves more a strong man who ill treats her than a weak man who treats her well, shows how great a mistake it is for a husband to accept a position of subordination.

But all questions of this kind which take their rise in a human nature not yet sufficiently civilized for harmonious domestic life, any more than for harmonious social life, must remain with very indefinite answers. Active sympathy, and the beneficence resulting from it, are requisite in both husband and wife; and lack of them in either must have evil results, not in any way to be remedied. All one may say is that the needful beneficence on the part of a husband should err by excess rather than by defect.

§ 432. Of course marital beneficence should be reciprocal. Though it is owed in chief measure by husband to wife, it is owed in large measure by wife to husband. While there have to be made by her no compensations for relative weakness and vital disadvantages, yet a return for benefits and sacrifices received, has to be made in such smaller benefits and sacrifices as domestic life affords place for.

Indebtedness to the bread-winner has to be recognized, and in some measure discharged: the tacit contract implies this as a matter of justice. But beyond fulfillment of the tacit contract by due performance of necessary household duties, there is scope for beneficence in the multitudinous small acts which help to make a home happy. If, on the one hand, we often see among the least civilized of our people, husbands utterly regardless of their wives' claims, burdening them with labors such as are fit only for men, we often see on the other hand slatternly wives who, lounging at doors and spending their time in gossip, so neglect household work as to bring on continual altercations and domestic misery. Even among the well-to-do classes there are not a few married women who, now occupied in novel reading, now in visiting, now in fancy work, scarcely ever go into their kitchens, and delegate all their duties to servants. Beyond the efficient household administration demanded alike by justice and by beneficence, there needs on the part of a wife sympathy in a husband's interests and aims and anxieties. That this is spontaneously given to a large extent is true; but it is also true that there is frequently little or no attempt made to participate in his leisure occupations and tastes. The way in which girls who daily practice music before marriage, give up their music after marriage, exemplifies the failure in those small beneficences which due reciprocity demands.

§ 433. Respecting all that part of good conduct in the marital relation which goes beyond the demands of justice–the tacit contract for fostering and protection on the one side and discharge of domestic and maternal duties on the other–it may be remarked that it should be spontaneous. As before said, beneficence when constrained ceases to be beneficence.

Unfortunately many of the observances prompted by kindness, become mechanical as fast as they become established; and in so doing lose much of that beauty they originally had. When what were concessions come to be claimed as rights, the pleasurable feelings on both sides which at first accompanied them, disappear, and are sometimes replaced by opposite feelings–the claiming of the assumed rights implies egoism, and the yielding of them is without sympathy.

Hence alike in the social relations of men and women and in the marital relation, it is desirable to maintain, as much as may be, the distinction between justice and beneficence; so that the last may continue to bear about it the aspect of a freshly prompted kindness which has not been counted upon.

Full beneficence in the marital relation is reached only when each is solicitous about the claims of the other. So long as there continues that common attitude in which each maintains rights and resists encroachments, there can never be entire harmony. Only when each is anxious rather to make a sacrifice than to receive a sacrifice, can the highest form of the relation be reached.

[II-343]

CHAPTER II.

PARENTAL BENEFICENCE.↩

§ 434. Already in the chapter "Parenthood," forming part of "The Ethics of Individual Life," much has been said which might equally well or better have been reserved for treatment under the above title. But the conduct of parents to children has still several aspects, not included in that chapter, which remain to be considered here.

Speaking generally, we may say that parental conduct exemplifies beneficence more than any other conduct. Though in the relation of parent to child egoism now and then becomes more pronounced than altruism, and though there is such a thing as the selfishness of affection which sacrifices the higher interests of a child to gain immediate pleasurable emotion, yet there is here less need for emphasizing beneficence than there is for emphasizing certain restrictions upon it.

Thoughtless beneficence has to be replaced by thoughtful beneficence. In cases where there is an ungrudging supply of everything needful for bodily development, and a furnishing by proxy of all the requisite aids to intellectual development, there is often but a niggardly expenditure of the reflection and attention required for good management.

§ 435. To the mass of people nothing is so costly as thought. The fact that, taking the world over, ninety-nine people out of a hundred accept the creed to which they were born, exemplifies their mental attitude towards things at large. Nearly all of them pursue mechanically the routine to which they have been accustomed, and are not only blind to its defects but will not recognize them as defects when they are pointed out. And the reluctance to think which they show everywhere else, is shown in their dealings with children. The tacit assumption is that when they have provided well for their physical needs, and delivered them over to teachers paid by themselves or by the public, they have done their duty.

But parental beneficence truly conceived includes more than this. Some parts of mental culture may rightly be deputed; other parts cannot. Though the later stages of intellectual education may with advantage be consigned to teachers, the earlier stages of it, as well as the education of the emotions during all stages, devolve on parents. They may here be aided by others but cannot properly be replaced by others. Even while yet in arms, the child looks for intellectual sympathy: thrusting something given to it into your face that you too may look at it; and when it reaches a conversational age, constantly adding to its statements the question "Isn't it?"–so showing its desire for agreement and verification. From parents more than from others should come the response to this intellectual need; and by parents more than by others should the normal process of instruction be based on the child's habits of inquiry. For parental affection, where it is joined with an observing and reasoning intelligence, will give an interest to this process of unfolding–a greater interest than can be felt by others. The eagerness for knowledge which every child shows by perpetual questions, parental beneficence will aim to satisfy: from time to time opening the way to new classes of inquiries concerning facts which a child's mind can appreciate. It may be said that a father after his business fatigues, or a mother in the midst of her domestic cares, cannot do this. But a very small amount of attention given daily will suffice to aid and direct self-development; and rightly cultured parents will find interest in watching the progress.

Still more is home regulation required for the right molding of character, alike in the earlier and in the later stages of education. If parental conduct has been what it should be, the reciprocal affection produced gives to a parent a greater power of influencing the emotions than can be possessed by anyone else; and a good parent will regard it as a part of daily duty to use this influence to the best purpose. Not by coercive methods will he proceed; for if a right relation has been established these will rarely be needed, but he will proceed by influence–signs of approval and disapproval, of sympathy and repugnance, given to actions which are now above and now below the standard. Where from the beginning there has been pursued a proper course, and where there is a due amount of that inventive thought required for adjusting modes of control to peculiarities of nature, moral education will cease to be a trouble and may become a pleasure.

But whatever may be the difficulties in the way, parental beneficence includes ministration to the minds of children as well as ministration to their bodies. If the young are to be reared into fitness for life, it is absurd to suppose that parents are concerned with one factor in the fitness and not with the other.

§ 436. While parental beneficence usually falls far short of the requirement in some ways, it greatly exceeds the requirement in other ways; or rather, let us say, in other ways it prompts the giving of immediate happiness without due regard for remote happiness. Of course I refer to the practice, everywhere recognized and condemned, of "spoiling" children.

If it is the business of education to produce fitness for adult life, then it should make the life of early days simulate the life to be led in later days, in so far as to maintain, if not the same proportion, yet some proportion, between its labors and its pleasures. Doubtless early life, as being the time for growth and development, should differ from later life in the respect that more should be given and less demanded, both physically and mentally. But, nevertheless, there should from the first be initiated that relation between efforts and benefits which is to become pronounced at maturity. There should not be a perpetual giving gratification out of all relation to industry. A thoughtful beneficence will avoid a profuse ministration to childish desires.

Besides the mischief caused by too great a dissociation of benefits from efforts, there is often in modern times an accompaning mischief–not among the poorer members of the community but among those who have means. Various social pleasures which should be reserved for adult life, are provided in large amounts for children; and a necessary consequence is that adult life has much less to give them than it should have. In a rationally conducted education, the surrounding world and the incidents of every day, may be made to yield pleasures quite sufficient to fill the leisure parts of a child's life, without having recourse to many artificial pleasures; and a wise beneficence, by taking care fully to utilize these, will avoid the evil now frequently inflicted by indulgent parents, who make a son blasé before life in its full form has been entered upon.

§ 437. Often where parental beneficence is adequate in all other ways, there remains a way in which it falls short. There is a lack of proper self-control in the proportioning of kindnesses and attentions to different children. This causes much mischief, of which there seems but little consciousness.

It is in the nature of things that there cannot be equal amounts of affection felt by parents for all their children. The law of the instability of the homogeneous shows itself in this detail as everywhere else. There is inevitably a gravitation toward inequality, and more or less of favoritism. Even from birth some children commend themselves less to maternal affection than others do; and the differences in the feelings drawn out toward them, once established, are apt to be increased by the differences of treatment which result, and the different amounts of responsive affection.

Here we are shown the way in which blind instincts, even of the altruistic kind, require to be checked and guided by the higher sentiments. For beneficence and justice alike dictate as near an approach as may be to equal treatment of children–that is, to equal participation in parental care and kindness. No one will question that, as a matter of justice, each child has as good a claim as another to those aids to development which parents are called on to yield; and it can scarcely be denied that such parts of parental conduct as exceed justice and pass into beneficence, should also be distributed with approximate fairness.

It is important that in this sphere the rule of the sentiments over the instincts should be strong; for immense mischiefs arise from favoritism in families. Parents in many respects high-minded, often inflict great cruelties on some of their children, to whom they show habitual indifference while daily lavishing affection on their brothers and sisters. It is no small thing to cast a gloom over all the years of a child's life. But beyond the direct evil there are indirect evils. The mental depression produced tends toward discouragement; and often causes intellectual inefficiency. The character is unfavorably modified by the awakening of antagonistic and jealous feelings. And there is a loss of that controlling power which is gained by a parent who has fostered sympathetic relations with a child.

In few directions is parental beneficence more called for than in resisting the tendency which inevitably arises to distribute kindnesses to children unequally.

§ 438. The most injurious kind of ill-regulated parental beneficence remains to be named–an excess in one direction often associated with deficiencies in other directions. A father who has discharged his duties to children quite mechanically, taking no trouble about their mental culture, and giving to them throughout their early lives but little parental sympathy, has nevertheless devoted many years of untiring labor to accumulating a large fortune, which he bequeaths to them. Not, indeed, that he has been prompted wholly, or even mainly, by the wish to leave them well provided for. Often the purely egoistic desire to obtain the honor which wealth brings, has been the chief motive. But joined with this there has been the desire that his children shall have bequests which will enable them to live without labor and anxiety. In so far as this shows beneficence, it shows a mistaken beneficence.

Our existing social regime, with its vast amounts of property in relatively few hands, though a regime appropriate to the existing type of humanity, and probably essential to it, is one which we may rightly regard as transitional. Just as modern times have seen a decrease in those great political inequalities, and accompanying inequalities of power, which characterized earlier times; so future times will most likely see a decrease in those great pecuniary inequalities which now prevail. Having emerged from the militant social type, we appear to be passing through a social type which may be distinguished as militant industrialism–an industrialism which, though carried on under the system of contract, instead of under the system of status, is in considerable measure carried on in the old militant spirit; as, indeed, it could not fail to be, seeing that men's characters and sentiments can be changed only in the course of long ages. Though pecuniary inequalities–some of them perhaps not inconsiderable–may be expected to characterize the future, reasserting themselves after socialisms and communisms have temporarily triumphed; yet we may infer that under higher social forms and a better type of humanity, they will be nothing like so marked as now. There will be neither the possibilities nor the desires for accumulating large fortunes: decrease in the desires being, in part, caused by recognition of the truth that parental beneficence, instead of enforcing them, interdicts them.

For a man's children are injuriously influenced both by the hope that they will be enabled to live without labor and by the fulfillment of that hope. As indicated in the chapter "Activity" and elsewhere, there can be no truly healthful life if benefits are dissociated from efforts. The principle on which human beings, in common with all other beings (save parasites) are organized, is that sustentation shall be effected by action; and detriment results if the sustentation comes without the action. There is initiated a relaxation of the organic adjustments which, if continued generation after generation, will cause decay. There is no need to emphasize this. The demoralization caused by "great expectations" is matter of common remark.

While parental beneficence when it exceeds the normal requirement–that of fully preparing children for complete living, and helping them to make a fair start in life–is disastrous in the way pointed out, it is disastrous in another way. It generates in children thoughts and feelings profoundly at variance with the filial relation. The scene between Henry V and his dying father, when to Prince Henry's excuse for taking away the crown, "I never thought to hear you speak again," the king replies, "Thy wish was father, Henry, to that thought"; may be taken as typical of the state of mind which is apt to arise where a father's death brings to a son great power or property or both. The well-recognized fact that between the existing owner of an entailed estate and the expectant owner, there commonly arises a certain silent jealousy, sufficiently proves this. Inevitably, therefore, one who accumulates a large fortune which at his death will pass to his children, who will simultaneously escape from tutelage, runs an imminent risk of raising in their minds the dreadful wish that he may die. Thoughts about the benefits which will come after his decease frequently suggest themselves; and though filial affection may be strong enough to repress them, they cannot be long absent, and must produce a chronic emotional conflict of a demoralizing kind.

In all ways is this common habit of providing largely for children maleficent rather than beneficent. Besides tempting them to inactivity and carelessness while they are young, and besides confirming these traits when they come into possession, thus making their lives abnormal ones, it is injurious alike to parent and to society. Entire absorption in business–an utter materialization of aims, while it dwarfs the parental life mentally, undermines it physically: bringing on ill-health, and an end earlier than is natural. At the same time the greed of property frequently prompts that merciless competition which, as we saw in a preceding chapter, not only inflicts misery on competitors needlessly, but entails social mischief.

Hence it is inferable that due regard for his own claims, for the claims of fellow citizens, and for social claims, should conspire with a far-seeing beneficence in preventing a parent from making his children independent.

[II-351]

CHAPTER III.

FILIAL BENEFICENCE.↩

§ 439. Many years of childhood have to pass before there can be entertained the thought of naturally derived obligations to parents–whether those which justice imposes or those which beneficence imposes. The obligation to obedience is indeed perpetually insisted upon; and while in some cases ignored, is, in other cases, duly recognized. But in any case it is conceived as established by arbitrary authority. There is little or no idea of its natural fitness.

Here and there, however, even before the teens have been reached, especially in families having narrow means, predominant sympathy produces a constant helpfulness–an endeavor to lighten the burdens which fall especially on the mother; and in such cases there perhaps arises the thought that such helpfulness is but a small return for the fostering care received in preceding years. But more generally this praiseworthy assistance is due to the direct promptings of affection, and resulting kind feeling, rather than to recognition of parental claims.

In many cases, however, and it is to be feared in the great majority, not even the approach to maturity brings any idea of filial gratitude, as sequent on the idea of filial indebtedness. Feeding, clothing, and education are accepted as matters of course for which no thanks are due; but rather there come half-uttered grumblings because many things desired are not supplied. When, occasionally during an expostulation, a father points out to a youth the sacrifices that have been made for his benefit, and indicates the propriety of recognizing them, and conforming to a reasonable parental wish if nothing more, silent admission on the youth's part of the undeniable fact, is often not accompanied by the feeling which should be produced. Parents are in most cases regarded as ordained fountains of benefits from whom everything is to be expected and to whom nothing is due.

And this is, indeed, the primitive relation. Throughout the animate creation in general, this is the connection between each generation and the next. With untiring energy and persistent care, parents rear offspring to maturity; and the offspring, incapable of conceiving what has been done for them, are also incapable of any responsive feeling. This brute form of the parental and filial relation, still, to a considerable degree, persists in the human race. Often at an age when they should be capable of complete self-maintenance, the young continually claim aid from the old; and express in no very respectful words their vexation if they do not get what they ask. Recognitions of the immense indebtedness of child to parent, and of the resulting duties, have indeed been occasionally expressed from the earliest ages; as witness the words of the Egyptian sage Ani:

"Thou wast put to school, and whilst thou wast being taught letters she came punctually to thy master, bringing thee the bread and the drink of her house. Thou art now come to man's estate; thou art married and hast a house; but never do thou forget the painful labor which thy mother endured, nor all the salutary care which she has taken of thee. Take heed lest she gave cause to complain of thee, for fear that she should raise her hands to God and he should listen to her prayer." [The Hibbert Lectures, 1879, by P Le Page Renouf, p. 102.]

But though theoretically admitted by all, the obligation of child to parent has been in fact but little felt, and is very inadequately felt still; and there is still a very inadequate consciousness of the duty of discharging it as far as possible.

§ 440. Filial beneficence as currently conceived is not wide enough in its range. Except the utterly brutal, all feel that it is imperative to save parents from want or direct physical privations; but not many feel the imperativeness of those constant attentions, and small kindnesses, and manifestations of affection, which are really due. The reciprocity called for includes not material benefits only but moral benefits–such endeavors to make the old age of parents happy as shall correspond with the endeavors they made to render happy the early days of their children.

In few directions is existing human nature so deficient as in this. Though, among the civilized, the aged are not left, as among various rude savages, to die of bodily starvation, yet they are often left to pine away in a condition that may be figuratively called mental starvation. Left by one child after another as these marry they often come at length to lead lives which are almost or quite solitary. No longer energetic enough for the pleasures of activity and not furnished with the passive pleasures which the social circle yields, they suffer the weariness of monotonous days. From time to time there comes, now from one child and now from another, a visit which serves nominally to discharge filial obligation, and to still the qualms of conscience in natures which are sympathetic enough to feel any qualms; but there is rarely such an amount of affectionate attention as makes their latter days enjoyable, as they should be. For in a rightly constituted order, these latter days should bring the reward for a life well passed and duties well discharged.

Insistence on filial beneficence is a crying need; and there is no saying in what way it is to be met. It cannot properly come from the aged themselves, since they are to be the beneficiaries. From the young we cannot expect it in adequate measure, since the need for it implies their deficiency in the sentiment which makes it needful. And by the official ex pounders of rectitude the subject is but rarely dealt with, or is dealt with ineffectually.

If those who are appointed to instruct men in the conduct of life, fail properly to emphasize filial beneficence in the interests of parents, still more do they fail to emphasize it in the interests of the children themselves. Neglecting to enforce the claims of fathers and mothers on their offspring, they leave these offspring to suffer, in declining life, from the consciousness of duties unperformed, when there is no longer a possibility of performing them–leave them a prey to painful thoughts about the dreary latter days of those they should have tenderly cared for: dreary days which they begin to realize when their own latter days have become dreary.

[II-355]

CHAPTER IV.

AIDING THE SICK AND THE INJURED.↩

§ 441. Part of the subject matter of the preceding three chapters is included under the title of this chapter; for marital beneficence, parental beneficence, and filial beneficence, severally dictate solicitous care of any member of the family who is suffering from illness or from accident. In the natural order of things the house becomes at need a hospital and its inmates nurses.

Whether or not in respect of those outside the family group, beneficence requires that the sick and the hurt shall be succored, even at the risk of self-injury, it certainly requires that this shall be done inside the family group. If, as we see, the protecting of wife by husband is demanded as ancillary to continuance of species (since if the mother is unprotected the species must suffer), then, for the same reason, the care of wife when she is in any way prostrated is demanded. In like manner a reciprocal care of the breadwinner is called for as a condition to maintenance of the family. Still more obviously requisite is a diligent attendance on children who are ill: the obligation to nurse them being included in the general obligation to use all means of rearing them to maturity. Only in the case of afflicted parents having grown-up children, are we debarred from saying that the welfare of the species dictates the succoring of them. Here the fact that direct increase of happiness results from rendering the needful assistance, gives rise to the obligation.

As happens in the case of infectious diseases, obligations of this class have to be discharged, even at the risk of suffering and sometimes of death. Nature at large teaches us this lesson. Beyond the fact that among innumerable kinds of lower creatures, parental life is wholly sacrificed for the benefit of offspring, we see that among higher creatures the instincts are such as prompt, especially on the part of a mother, the facing of any danger for protection of the young: survival of the fittest has established this recklessness of evil. Hence it must be held that the risking of infection is ethically enjoined on a human mother: the only important check being the consideration that loss of life involves loss of ability to discharge obligations to the surviving members of the family. And there seems no reason why an equal obligation to meet the risk should not devolve on the father; unless it be that he has to provide the necessaries of life alike for the household at large and for its suffering member, and that his incapacity may bring starvation on all.

Are there any other checks to the self-sacrifices entailed on some of the family by the illness of another or others belonging to it? There are such other checks. A wise and duly proportioned beneficence does not countenance loss of the relatively worthy for preservation of the relatively worthless. Everyone can name persons wrecked in body and mind by cherishing invalid relatives–relatives who often thanklessly receive the sacrifices made for them. Here is a wife whose sole occupation for a decennium has been that of nursing a gouty husband; and who, as a result, dies of a worn-out physique before he does. Here is a daughter who, after many years' attendance on an invalid mother, is shortly after required to give similar attendance to an invalid aunt; and who, now that she has lived through these long periods of daily abnegations and wearisome duties, is becoming mentally unhinged. And here is a husband whose latter days are made miserable by the task of safeguarding, in his own house, an insane wife. Though in such cases (all of them occurring within my own small circle) beneficence demands great self-sacrifice, yet its dictates should be so far qualified as not to require that the lives of the healthy shall be lost in making the lives of the diseased more tolerable. Some compromise has to be made by which there may be achieved partial relief from the heavy burdens.

Especially is it proper that domestic invalids who make undue demands should receive a not unlimited attention. Often a whole household is subordinated to the exactions of a sickly member; and instead of gratitude there comes grumbling. This tyranny of the weak ought to be resisted. For the checking of their own egoism, as well as for the welfare of those around, the unreasonable sacrifices they continually ask should be refused. Such invalids are not only physically sick, but are morally sick also; and their moral sickness requires treatment as well as their physical sickness. Husbands in the decline of life who have married young wives, and presently make them little else than nurses–objecting even to have other nurses to share the labors with them–require awakening to a due sense not of others' duties to them but of their own duties to others. A man is not absolved from the obligations of beneficence because he is ill; and if he rightly feels these obligations he will insist that others shall not injure themselves for his benefit.

§ 442. Concerning that wider beneficence which expends itself in care for sick persons not belonging to the family, it is difficult to say anything definite. Each case is rendered more or less special by the character of the patient and the circumstances; so that general propositions can scarcely find place. We may set down, however, the considerations by which judgment should be guided.

If, as all will admit, the care of one who is sick devolves primarily on members of the family group, and devolves secondarily on kindred, it devolves only in smaller measure on unrelated persons. These may rightly limit themselves to indirect aid, where this is needed and deserved. Only in cases where there are no relatives, or none capable of undertaking relatives' duties, does it seem that beneficence demands from unrelated persons the requisite attentions.

How far such attentions shall be carried must, again, be determined in part by thought of the claims arising from character and conduct. If, with Friendly Societies around him throughout life, the man who is at length taken ill, refused to make any provision against sickness, it cannot be held fit that his necessities as an invalid shall be ministered to as well as they might have been had he made such provision. If sympathy prompts an equal attention to the improvident as to the provident, the sentiment of justice puts a veto. Then, again, there is the question of character. If as much sacrifice is made for the sick good-for-nothing as is made for the sick good-for-something, there is abolished one of those distinctions between the results of good and bad conduct which all should strive to maintain. Further, there is the allied question of value. Much more may rightly be done for one whose abilities or energies promise public benefit, than for one who is useless to his fellow men, or is a burden on them.

Besides the beneficiaries, their characters and circumstances, there have to be considered the constitutions and circumstances of the benefactors. On those who have but little vitality and but small recuperative power after illness, a rational beneficence does not impose as heavy duties as it does on those in high vigor, who can bear disturbances of health without permanent mischief. Differences of claims hence arising, are seen to be greater on remembering that those with low blood pressure, are more liable to contract infectious diseases than those in whom the tide of life rises higher: especially when, as commonly happens, there is fear in the one case and not in the other. To the check which, for these reasons, a reasonable egoism puts upon altruism, must be joined a check of an altruistic kind; namely consideration for those on whom evils will be entailed by contracting an infectious disease, or an illness caused by exhaustion. These evils are of several kinds. One who, engaged in nursing a stranger, comes home to the family group with a fever, risks their health and life as well as her own. Moreover, she entails on them the troubles and anxieties attendant upon nursing her, as well as the moral pains which her sufferings and perhaps her death, produce. Even when a fatal issue is escaped, there is necessarily for some time an inability to discharge such obligations as she has ordinarily to discharge; and, occasionally, a permanent inability to discharge them. Evidently, then, while beneficence prompts such aid to sick persons who have no claims of relationship, as may be given without considerable risk, it does not dictate the giving of such aid by those who have family ties and important duties.

Nevertheless we must not ignore the fact that such aid may be, and often is, given without injury by those who, if the above reason is valid, ought to hesitate in giving it. In a way somewhat remarkable, medical men (taking, however, in most cases some precautions) daily visit patients suffering from fevers or kindred diseases, and but rarely take them. We must suppose that use, and perhaps an acquired mental indifference, unite to give them immunity; and yet, even if so, it is not easy to see how, during the earlier stages of their professional lives, they escape. Hospital nurses, too, apparently become impervious. So that the risks of evil run by those whose sympathies prompt them to adopt nursing as an occupation, are not so great as at first appears; and where the nursing is of those suffering from other than infectious diseases, it may be consistent with fairly good health.

That strange emotion, so difficult to analyze, the luxury of pity is an incentive to the sacrifices which nursing implies; and when with this there coexists a large share of the maternal instinct, which is in essence a love of the helpless, the care of the helpless sick becomes a source of subdued pleasure, which in large measure neutralizes the pain, and even makes the occupation a gratifying one. Without enjoining the beneficence which issues in these results, one may fitly look on and admire.

§ 443. Though due regard for all circumstances puts some restraint on ministration to the sick who have no family claims, it puts no restraint on ministration to sufferers of another class–those who have met with accidents. Everyone is from time to time witness to injuries caused by falls, or by runaway horses, or by carriage collisions; and everyone is, in such cases, bound to render all possible assistance. None save those in whom the brutality of the barbarian still predominates, fail to feel contempt for the Pharisee in the parable and approval of the Samaritan.

But while the duty of caring for the injured is commonly recognized, as demanded even by the most ordinary beneficence, there is an ancillary duty which has only of late gained partial recognition–the duty of acquiring such knowledge and skill as shall make efficient the efforts to aid. Up to our own days, and even still in ninety-nine people out of a hundred, the wish to help the wounded or maimed is unaccompanied by instructed ability–nay, worse, is accompanied by an ignorance which leads to mischievous interferences. The anxiety to do something ends in doing harm; for there is commonly no adequate consciousness of the truth that there are many ways of going wrong to one way of going right.

Hence a provident beneficence suggests the acquirement of such surgical and medical knowledge as may be of avail to sufferers before professional aid can be obtained. Unqualified applause, then, must be given to those Ambulance Societies and kindred bodies, which seek to diffuse the requisite information and give by discipline the requisite skill. Unfortunately when there come the demands for the acquired knowledge and aptitude, the hoped for benefits are not always forthcoming: nervousness or indecision, or perhaps perplexity amid the various lessons which have been learned, leads to failure. Still, the inference to be drawn is not that such preparations for aiding the injured should be abandoned, but rather that they should be more thorough, and should in fact form a part of the education given to all.

[II-362]

CHAPTER V.

SUCCOUR TO THE ILL-USED AND THE ENDANGERED↩

§ 444. In everyone who is capable of ethical ideas and sentiments, more than one kind of motive prompts the defense of those who are aggressed upon: especially when they are weaker than the aggressors. There cooperate an immediate sympathy with the pains, mentally or bodily, inflicted; a feeling of indignation against the person who inflicts them; a sense of justice which is irritated by the invasion of personal rights; and (where there is a quick consciousness of remote results) an anger that the established principles of social order should be broken. Whoever is civilized, not in the superficial sense but in the profound sense, will feel himself impelled to aid one who is suffering violence, either physical or moral; and will be ready to risk injury in yielding the aid.

The courage shown by one of those hired men who unite in conquering small semicivilized nations and weak, uncivilized tribes, is to be admired about as much as is the courage of a brute which runs down and masters its relatively feeble prey. The courage of one who fights in self-defense, or who as a soldier fights to defend his country when it is invaded, is respectable–is a proper manifestation of direct egoism in the one case, and in the other case a manifestation of that indirect egoism which makes it the interest of every citizen to prevent national subjugation. But the courage which prompts the succoring of one who is ill used, and which, against odds of superior strength, risks the bearing of injury that the weaker may not be injured, is courage of the first order–a courage backed, not as in many cases by base emotions, but backed by emotions of the highest kind.

One might have thought that even in a pagan society the ill-treatment of the weak by the strong would be universally reprobated. Still more might one have thought that in a professedly Christian society, general indignation would fall upon a bully who used his greater bodily powers to oppress a victim having smaller bodily powers. And most of all one might have felt certain that in educational institutions, governed and officered by professed teachers of Christianity, ever enjoining beneficence, ill-treatment of the younger and weaker by the elder and stronger would be sternly forbidden and severely repressed. But in our clerically administered public schools, the beneficence just described as of the highest order, finds no place; but, contrariwise, there finds place an established maleficence. Bullying and fagging, in past times carried to cruel extremes, still survive; and, as happened not long since, a resulting death is apologized for and condoned by one of our bishops. There is maintained and approved a moral discipline not inappropriate for those who, as legislators and military officers, direct and carry out, all over the world, expeditions which have as their result to deplete pagans and fatten Christians.

But though public-school ethics and, by transmission, the ethics of patriotism so-called, do not in practice (whatever they may do in theory) include that form of beneficence which risks injury to self in defending the weak against the strong, the ethics of evolution, as here interpreted, emphasize this form of beneficence; since the highest individual nature and the highest social type, cannot exist without a strength of sympathy which prompts such self-sacrificing beneficence.

§ 445. And here, before considering the demands for self-sacrifice arising, not in the cases of injuries threatened by maleficent human beings, but in the cases of injuries threatened by the forces of nature, something should be said concerning the courage required for the last as for the first; and, indeed, frequently more required, since the forces of nature are merciless.

Very generally the virtue of courage is spoken of as though it were under all circumstances worthy of the same kind of applause, and its absence worthy of the same kind of contempt. These indiscriminating judgments are indefensible. In large measure, though not wholly, the development of courage depends on personal experience of ability to cope with dangers. It is in the order of nature that one who perpetually fails, and suffers from his failures, becomes increasingly reluctant to enter into conflict with either organic or inorganic agencies; while, conversely, success in everything undertaken fosters a readiness to run risks–sometimes an undue readiness: each fresh success being an occasion of extreme satisfaction, the expectation of which becomes a temptation. Hence, to a considerable extent, timidity and courage are their own justifications: the one being appropriate to a nature which is physically, or morally, or intellectually defective in a greater or less degree; and the other being appropriate to a nature which is superior either in bodily power, or strength of emotion, or intellectual aptitude and quickness. Errors of estimation in this matter may be best excluded by taking a case in respect of which men's preconceptions are not strongly established–say the case of Alpine explorations. Here is one who has constitutionally so little strength that he is prostrated by climbing two or three thousand feet; or whose hands are not capable of a powerful and long-sustained grip; or whose vision is not keen enough to make him quite sure of his footing; or who cannot look down a precipice without feeling dizzy; or who so lacks presence of mind that he is practically paralyzed by an emergency. All will admit that any one of these physical or mental deficiencies rightly interdicts the attempt to scale a mountain peak, and that to make the attempt would be a mark not of courage but of folly. Contrariwise, one who to strength of limb adds power of lungs, and with these joins acute senses, a clear and steady head, and resources mental and bodily which rise to the occasion when danger demands, may be held warranted in a risky undertaking; as, for instance, descending into a crevasse to rescue one who has fallen into it. His courage is the natural accompaniment of his ability.

Such contrasts of natures should ordinarily determine such contrasts of actions; and estimates of conduct should recognize them–should, in large measure, take the form of pity for the incapacities of one or other kind which fear implies, and respect for the superiorities implied by courage. "In large measure," I say, because there are degrees of timidity beyond those which defects justify, and degrees of courage beyond those appropriate to the endowments; and while the first of these rightly deserves reprobation, the last may be duly admired, supposing it is not pushed to the extent of irrational imprudence.

Speaking generally, then, the sanction for courage must take into account the relation between the thing to be done and the probable capacity for doing it. The judgment formed must obviously vary according to the age–cannot be the same for the young or the old as for one in the prime of life; must vary with the state of health, which often partially incapacitates; must vary with what is called the "personal equation," since, when in danger, slowness of perception or of action is often fatal. The single fact that heart disease produces timidity–a timidity appropriate to that inability which failure of circulation involves–suffices alone to show that, both in self and in others, the estimated obligation to run a risk must always be qualified by recognition of personal traits.

Even without taking account of such special reasons, there is, indeed, a prevailing consciousness that some proportion should be maintained between the degree of danger and the ability to meet the danger. It is usual to condemn as "rash," conduct which disregards this proportion. The saying that "discretion is the better part of valor," though by implication referring only to the risks of battle, is applicable to other risks; and implies that there should be not approval but disapproval if the danger is too great. Similarly the epithet "foolhardy," applied to one who needlessly chances death or great injury, is an epithet of reprobation; and implies, too, the perception that not unfrequently a large part of that which passes for courage is simply stupidity–an inability to perceive what is likely to happen. There is in fact generally felt a certain kind of obligation not to risk life too recklessly, even with a good motive.

While the injunction uttered by positive beneficence to succor those who are endangered by the merciless powers of nature, must be thus qualified, it must, as we shall presently see, be further qualified by recognition of the collateral results, should the effort to yield the succor prove fatal.

§ 446. From the general we may turn now to the special. Let us ask what is the obligation imposed by beneficence to rescue one who is drowning. In what cases is the duty positive, and in what cases must it be doubtful or be negatived?

Clearly a man who, being a good swimmer, has the requisite ability, and yet makes no effort to save the life of one who, at no great distance, is in danger of sinking, is not only to be condemned as heartless but as worse. If at small risk to himself he can prevent another's death and does not, he must be held guilty of something like passive manslaughter. The only supposable excuse for him is his consciousness that one who is drowning is apt to grapple his rescuer in such way as to incapacitate him, and cause the deaths of both–a liability, however, which he might know is easily excluded by approaching the drowning person from behind.

But what are we to say when there is less fitness in strength, or skill, or both, to meet the requirements? What if weakness makes long-continued exertion impracticable? Or suppose that though he has general strength enough, the bystander has not acquired an ability to swim more than fifty yards, while the person to be rescued is considerably further off. Or suppose that, the scene of the threatened disaster being the sea, the power of the breakers is such that once in their grasp there is small chance of getting out again: even alone, much less when helping one who is drowning. Here it seems manifest that however much an unthinking beneficence may prompt running the risk, a judicial beneficence will forbid. An irrational altruism has in such cases to be checked by a rational egoism; since it is absurd to lose two lives in a hopeless effort to save one.

Other restraints have usually to be taken into account. A man who is without a wife or near relatives, so that his death will inflict no great amount of mental suffering–a man who is not responsible for the welfare of children or perhaps aged parents, may fitly yield to the immediate promptings of sympathy, and dare to do that which should not be done by one whose life is needful to other lives. In such cases beneficence urges and beneficence restrains. Quite apart from the instinct of self-preservation, the sense of duty to dependents may forbid the attempt to give that succor which fellow feeling instigates.

So that nothing definite can be said. Save in the instances first indicated, where the obligation is manifest, the obligation must be judged by the circumstances of each case: account being taken, not only of the qualifications named, but the value of the person for whom the effort is made; for the same risks should not be run on behalf of a criminal as on behalf of one who is noble in character, or one who is highly serviceable to his society.

§ 447. Difficult as are the questions sometimes raised in presence of probable death from drowning, they are exceeded in difficulty by questions raised in presence of probable death from fire. In the one case the ability of the rescuer, resulting from his strength, skill, and quickness, counts for much; and the actions of the element, now quiet now boisterous, with which he has to contend, may be fairly well gauged by him; but, in the other case, he has to contend with an agent the destructive actions of which are much more terrible, much less calculable, and not to be overcome by strength.

From time to time we read of those who, at the peril of their lives, have rescued relatives and even strangers from burning houses; and again we read of others whose efforts of like kind have proved fatal. Are we then, under parallel circumstances, to say–Go thou and do likewise? Does beneficence demand disregard of self, carried to the extreme that it may very likely end in the sacrifice of a second life without the saving of a first? No general answer can be given. The incidents of the case and the special emotions–parental, filial, fraternal, or other–must decide. Often the question is one which cannot be answered even if there is absolute self-abnegation; as when, having brought out a child from one room which is in flames, a parent has to decide whether to rush into an upper room and rescue another child, at the same time that fire on the staircase threatens death to all. Evidently in such a chaos of conditions and feelings and obligations and risks, nothing can be said. And what is true in this extreme case is true in a large proportion of the cases. Ethics is dumb in presence of the conflicting requirements.

When not the life of the rescuer only is concerned, but when loss of his life must make other lives miserable, and leave grave obligations undischarged, interdict rather than injunction may be the ethical verdict.

§ 448. Doubtless it is well for humanity at large to maintain the tradition of heroism. One whose altruistic promptings are so strong that he loses his own life in an almost hopeless effort to save another's life, affords an example of nobility which, in a measure, redeems the innumerable cruelties, brutalities, and meannesses, prevailing among men, and serves to keep alive hope of a higher humanity hereafter. The good done in occasionally putting egoism to the blush, may be counted as a setoff against the loss of one whose altruistic nature should have been transmitted.

But in all questions of the kind dealt with in this chapter, we may fitly fall back on the ancient doctrine of the mean. When throwing dice with death, the question whether death's dice are loaded may fitly be asked. Even the extreme maxim "Love thy neighbor as thyself" does not imply that each should value his own life at a less rate than that of another. Hence it seems inferable that though positive beneficence enjoins succoring the endangered where there seems an overbalancing probability that life will be saved, it does not enjoin more than this.

[II-370]

CHAPTER VI.

PECUNIARY AID TO RELATIVES AND FRIENDS.↩

§ 449. A curious change of sentiments has accompanied a curious change of obligations, during the transition from that ancient type of social structure in which the family is the unit of composition to that modern type in which the individual is the unit of composition. The state of things still existing among the native Australians, under which the guilt of a murderer is shared in by all his kindred, who severally hold themselves subject to vengeance–the state of things which, throughout Europe in early days, made the family or clan responsible for any crime committed by one of its members, seems strange to us now that we have ceased to bear the burdens, criminal or other, not only of our remote relatives but even of our near relatives.

From one point of view the ancient system seems ethically superior–seems more altruistic. From another point of view, however, it is the reverse; for it goes along with utter disregard of, and very often enmity to, those not belonging to the family group. The modern system, while it does not recognize such imperative claims derived from community of blood, recognizes more than the old, claims derived from community of citizenship, and also claims derived from community of human nature. If we bear in mind that the primary ethical principle is that each individual shall experience the effects of his own nature and consequent conduct, and that under the ancient system sundry effects of his conduct were visited as readily on his relatives as on himself, whereas, under the modern system, they are visited on himself only; we shall infer that the modern system is the higher of the two. And we shall infer this the more readily on remembering that it is accompanied by a more equitable political regime, and consequent social ameliorations.

Acceptance of this inference will guide our judgments respecting obligations to assist relatives. The claims of immature children on parents, are directly deducible from the postulate that continuance of the species is a desideratum–a postulate from which, as we have seen, ethical principles in general originate. The reciprocal claims of parents on children are directly deducible from the position of indebtedness in which parental care has placed the children. But no other claims of relationship have anything like a fundamental authority. Community of blood arising from community of parentage, has not in itself any ethical significance. The only ethical significance of fraternity is that which arises from community of early life, and reciprocal affections presumably established by it. Brethren and sisters usually love one another more than they love those who are outside the family circle; and the accepted implication is that the stronger attachments which have arisen among them, originate stronger dictates to yield mutual aid. If, as is rightly said, relatives are ready-made friends, then children of the same parents must be regarded as standing in the first rank of such friends. But their obligations to one another must be held as consequent not on their common origin but on their bonds of sympathetic feeling–bonds made to vary in their strengths by differences of behavior, and which therefore generate different degrees of obligation.

This view, which will probably be dissented from by many, I enunciate before asking how far positive beneficence requires brothers and sisters to yield one another pecuniary aid. And I enunciate it the more emphatically because of the extreme mischiefs and miseries apt to result from the making and conceding of claims having no other warrant than community of parentage. Within these three years I have become personally cognizant of two cases in which, here impoverishment and there ruin, have been brought on sisters who have lent money to brothers. Ignorant of business, incapable of criticizing plausible representations, prompted by sisterly regard and confidence, they have yielded to pressure: being further led to yield by belief in a moral obligation consequent on the relationship. A rational beneficence countenances no such concessions. A brother who, in pursuit of his own advantage, wishes thus to hypothecate the property of sisters, who will grievously suffer should he not succeed, is a brother who proves himself devoid of proper fraternal feeling. The excuse that he feels sure of success is an utterly inadequate excuse. It is the excuse made by men who, to tide over emergencies, appropriate the funds they hold in trust, or by men who forge bills which they hope to be able to meet before they are due. And if in such cases it is recognized as criminal thus to risk the property of others on the strength of a hoped-for success, we cannot absolve from something like criminality a brother who, on the strength of a similar hope, obtains loans from trustful sisters. One who does such a thing should no longer be considered a brother.

But what is to be done when a loan is asked not from a sister but from a brother–a brother who has considerable means and is a competent judge? The answer here is of course indeterminate. The prospective creditor may in this case be capable of estimating the probable results–capable of estimating, too, his brother's business ability; and he may also rightly have such confidence in his own power of making money that he can reasonably risk a considerable loss. Especially if it is a case of difficulty to be met, sympathy may join fraternal affection in prompting assent. Even here, however, there may fitly be hesitation on both sides. Where there is in the matter an element of speculation, the one who needs money, if a conscientious man, will scarcely like to receive, much less to ask–will feel that it is bad enough to play with anyone the game "Heads I win, tails you lose"; and worse still with a brother.

§ 450. Respecting those who are more remotely related or who are not related at all, much the same incentives and restraints may be alleged. If affection and fellow feeling, rather than common parentage or common ancestry, are the true prompters to needful monetary aids, then a friend with whom a long and kindly intercourse has established much sympathy, has a stronger claim than a little known relative, whose conduct has led now to disapproval now to dislike. Recognition of personal worth, or recognition of value as a citizen, may also rightly guide beneficent feeling to yield assistance where a difficulty, and especially an unforeseen difficulty, threatens evil. When it comes to the question of advancing means, not for preventing a probable disaster, but for entering upon some new undertaking, a longer pause for reflection is demanded. The worth and honesty of the borrower being taken for granted, there have still to be considered the amount of his energy, his appropriate knowledge, his proved capacity; and there have still to be considered the effects which will be felt should he fail. For the act must be considered from the egoistic side as well as from the altruistic side; and the degree of possible self-sacrifice may be greater than ought to be asked. Balanced judgments are in such cases hard to reach.

Much the same things may be said concerning that indirect hypothecation which consists in giving security. Here the difficulty of deciding is often greater; since there is no reply but either yes or no, and since the amount risked is usually large. Between a proper altruism and a reasonable egoism there is much strain in such cases. On the one hand, to negative the obtainment of some desirable post, which may be the first step towards a prosperous life, seems cruel. On the other hand, to risk the possible ruin which may come from yielding, seems something more than imprudent. A much greater power of judging character than is common must be possessed by one who can safely furnish a warrant for another's behavior. The incongruity between appearance and reality is often extreme; and there are but few adequately on their guard against it. Agreeableness and plausible professions usually attract a confidence which is repelled by a brusque sincerity that makes little effort to please; and trustworthiness is wrongly identified with the one rather than with the other.

But manifestly in such cases, as in preceding ones, the strongest restraint on a too easy beneficence is that which comes from due regard for the claims of dependents. One who, with exalted generosity, is ready to risk the wreck of his own life, is not warranted in risking the wreck of lives for which he is responsible. A judicial beneficence, weighing the possible future mischiefs to others against the present benefit to one, will usually see reason to resist the pressure.

In these days, however, such considerations scarcely need setting down; for now that the principle of insurance has been extended to the giving of security for good behavior on payment of an annual sum, no right-minded man will think of asking a friend to become security for him. Anyone who now asks another thus to endanger himself, is thereby proved to be unworthy of confidence.

§ 451. To these counsels of kindness qualified by prudence, which are such as ordinary experience will suggest to most, there has to be added one other, which does not lie quite so much upon the surface. While desire for a friend's or relative's welfare may in some cases prompt the yielding of a large loan, a wise forethought for his welfare will often join other motives in refusing such aid.

For the beneficiary himself often needs saving from the disasters which his too sanguine nature threatens to bring on him. A large proportion of those who want loans may rightly be refused in their own interests. Anxiety to borrow so often goes along with incapacity to acquire, that we may almost say that money should be lent only to those who have proved their ability to make money. Hence, in many cases, the withholding of a desired accommodation is the warding off unhappiness from one who asks it.

I say this partly on the strength of a remark made in my hearing by a highly conscientious man who had carried on a business–a manufacture, I think–with borrowed capital. He said that the anxiety nearly killed him. The thought of the extent to which the welfare of others was staked, and the strain to fulfil his obligations, made his life a misery. Clearly, therefore, a far-seeing beneficence will in many cases decline, for the sake of the borrower, to furnish money, where a shortsighted beneficence would assent.

[II-376]

CHAPTER VII.

RELIEF OF THE POOR.↩

§ 452. We enter now upon the subject with which the conception of beneficence is almost wholly identified in some minds, and chiefly identified in many minds. With the word beneficence (or rather with the word benevolence, which commonly usurps its place) there usually springs up the idea of openhanded generosity to those in want. The giving of money or money's worth is so much the easiest and the most familiar mode of showing kindness, that by the unthinking, and especially by recipients, kindness is conceived as little else.

This species of beneficence, which, as we have seen, is one out of many, is daily presented to us in three different shapes. We have the law-established relief for the poor by distribution of money compulsorily exacted; with which may fitly be joined the alms derived from endowments. We have relief of the poor carried on by spontaneously organized societies, to which funds are voluntarily contributed. And then, lastly, we have the help privately given–now to those who stand in some relation of dependence, now to those concerning whose claims partial knowledge has been obtained, and now haphazard to beggars. We will consider these three kinds in the order here presented.

§ 453. After all that has been said in preceding parts of this work, it is needless to argue at length that relief of the poor from public funds raised by rates, is, if considered apart from certain antecedents to be presently named, inconsistent with that limitation of state functions which ethics insists upon. If, as repeatedly pointed out, the true function of the state is that of guarding the aggregate of citizens and the individual citizen against aggressions, external and internal, so that each may be able to carry on his life with no greater hindrance than that which proximity of other citizens involves–if the state's only other function is that of so controlling the uses made of the inhabited territory, as to prevent sacrifice of the interests of the joint owner, the community; then it follows that if it taxes one class for the benefit of another, it exceeds its functions, and, in a measure contravenes the first of them.

This conclusion, however, holds as I have said "if considered apart from certain antecedents to be presently named." The antecedents referred to are those which become visible on going back to prefeudal and feudal times, when serfs, though bound to the soil, had certain established rights to some produce of the soil; and those further antecedents which, at a later period, after cessation of serfdom and accompanying divorce of the serf from the soil, eventually reinstituted his connection and his lien by a Poor Law. While, in a measure, again tying him to his locality, this, in a measure, again recognized his claim upon its produce.

So regarded, a Poor Law may be said to have an equitable basis, and the poor relief administered under it to be something more than a charitable dole. Entire usurpation of the land by the landlord, and entire expropriation of the laborer, were unjust; and the reestablishment of the old relation in a freer form, may be interpreted as a roundabout mode of admitting afresh a just claim. Not improbably the relative stability of English institutions during later times, has been indirectly due to absence of that disaffection which results where the classes having no property are wholly at the mercy of the classes who have property.

The beneficence which takes the form of relief administered by public agencies, is difficult to deal with not only because it is thus complicated by considerations of justice, but because it is further complicated by considerations of accompanying injustices. Though, in early days, the legally enforced aid to the poor was contributed almost wholly by those who, as landowners, were rightly called on to contribute it; yet, in later days, it has come to be in large measure contributed by others than landowners–others on whom there is no just claim. Hence nothing beyond empirical judgments concerning compulsory beneficence seem possible.

When, however, we remember that beneficence, properly so-called, loses its quality when it is made compulsory, and that both benefactor and beneficiary then cease to have those feelings which normally accompany it, we shall be inclined to think that could the just claims of each member of the community as a part owner of the land be otherwise recognized, and beneficence wholly dissociated from governmental force, it would be far better. Let us contemplate the evils of the present system.

§ 454. While, as admitted above, the community as a whole is the ultimate owner of the territory inhabited, considered as unreclaimed (though not of that value which clearing and cultivation have given to it); and while each member of the community has a resulting lien upon it; yet no such "right to a maintenance out of the soil," irrespective of energy expended, as is often alleged, can be sustained. The land produces only in return for labor; and one who does not give the labor has no claim on its produce; or, at any rate, has a claim only to a share of the small amount it would yield if wild, which, with the existing population, would constitute nothing like a maintenance.

It is argued that the poor work for society while young and hale, and should be supported by society when sick and old. Under a socialist regime, which artificially apportioned payments for services, this would be a valid position; but, as it is, society gives to the laborer when young and hale as much as competition proves his work to be worth: so discharging its debt. Further, there is the reply that if, during his period of activity he has been underpaid, the underpayment has been in large part due to the fact that he has been burdened by having to help indirectly, if not directly, to support the idle and incapable. Giving necessaries of life to those who do not labor, inevitably takes away necessaries of life from those who do labor. The well-to-do are not pinched by this abstraction from the total supply of commodities. Those who are pinched are those who have but small margins. If they had not been thus depleted, they would have been able to provide for a period of unproductive life.

Apologists contend that rapid multiplication is ever producing a surplus of people for whom there is no work, but who must be supported. The first reply is that in proportion as provision is made for such a surplus, the surplus will go on continually increasing. The second reply is that only if the work to be done by the community is a fixed quantity, can the argument be sustained; since, otherwise, there must always be some further work which the surplus may be profitably employed on, in return for their maintenance. To say that some ought to do extra work that others may remain idle is absurd.

Occasionally it is urged that since there must always be a certain proportion of necessitous people–the diseased, the incapable, the unfortunate, the old–it is best that these should be relieved from funds administered by men appointed for the purpose, who will look carefully in each case and adjust the aid to the needs. This implies a faith in officialism at large which experience, repeated generation after generation, fails to dissipate. The assumption is that the agents employed, who in most cases aim to get their salaries with the least trouble, will be the best critics of the character, conduct, and wants of the recipients; and that guardians will administer public funds more wisely than private persons would administer their own funds. It ignores the enormous mass of evidence collected in Parliamentary Blue Books, as well as in special works on the subject, proving that under this system in past days corruptions and abuses of every kind were created and fostered, resulting in a universal demoralization.

Let us not forget that cruel injustice to individuals and mischief to the community, are caused by a heavy taxation of those who are but just able to maintain themselves and families, and are striving to do it. Numerous cases occur in which worthy and diligent men–sometimes thrown out of work by lack of demand and sometimes incapacitated for work by prolonged sickness–are compelled to pay rates; and even have their goods seized that money may be obtained for the maintenance of good-for-nothings. More than this; it not unfrequently happens that men who are employed in parishes at distances from their own, and could there maintain themselves but for the persecution of the poor-rate collector, have to abandon their places, return to their own parishes, get from it money to bring back their wives and children, and then apply for relief. So that there is a breaking up of healthy industrial relations to maintain a system which substitutes doles for wages.

Nor must we omit the fact that public administration of relief is doubly extravagant. It is extravagant in the sense that the distribution inevitably becomes lax, and, in the absence of personal interests, aid is given where aid is not required: often most lavishly to the least deserving. And it is extravagant in the sense that a large part of the total fund raised goes to maintain the machinery–goes in salaries of rate collectors, relieving officers, masters of workhouses and their subordinates, parish surgeons, &c.: a part amounting in extreme cases in Ireland to more than two-thirds, and in some cases in England at the present time to more than one-third– proportions which, if not paralleled generally, go along with high average proportions.

When we remember that law-enforced charity is, as already shown, inconsistent with justice, we are taught that in this as in all other cases, what is not just is in the long run not beneficent.[1]

§ 455. Less objectionable than administration of poor relief by a law-established and coercive organization, is its administration by privately established and voluntary organizations–benevolent societies, mendicity societies, &c. "Less objectionable" I say but still, objectionable: in some ways even more objectionable. For though the vitiating influences of coercion are now avoided the vitiating influences of proxy distribution remain. If we have not a machinery so rigid as that set up by the Poor Law, yet we have a machinery. The beneficiary is not brought in direct relation with the benefactor, but in relation with an agent appointed by a number of benefactors. The transaction, instead of being one which advantageously cultivates the moral nature on both sides, excludes culture of the moral nature as much as is practicable, and introduces a number of bad motives. Note the ill-workings of the system.

As with the Poor Law (especially the old Poor Law), those who were distressed but thrifty and well conducted got no help, while help came to the improvident and ill conducted; so with philanthropic societies in general. The worthy suffer rather than ask assistance; while the worthless press for assistance and get it. The Mansion House Fund of 188586, for instance, was proved to have gone largely for the support of "idlers, spendthrifts, and drunkards." "They did not see why they should not have some of the money going as well as their neighbors." In some cases applicants "demanded their share." Where, as in another case, employment was offered, less than one-fifth proved to be good for anything; showing that the unemployed, so generally pitied as ill used by society, are unemployed because they either cannot or will not work; and showing, by implication, that charitable agencies enable them to evade the harsh but salutary discipline of nature.

The encouragement of hypocrisy, which goes along with this neglect of the good poor who do not complain and attention to the bad poor who do, becomes conspicuous when religious professions are found instrumental to obtainment of alms. Clergy and pious women, easily deluded by sanctimonious talk, favor those who are most skilled in utterance of spiritual experiences, and in benedictions after receiving gifts. Hence a penalty on sincerity and a premium on lying; with resulting demoralization.

This evil is intensified by sectarian competition. There are competing missions which collect and distribute money to push their respective creeds, and bribe by farthing breakfasts and penny dinners. Nearly half the revenue of one mission is distributed in credit tickets, and "if the recipient wishes to cash his ticket, he cannot do so until after the evening service": this vicious system being carried even to the extent that the visitors try "to force its tickets on the most respectable and independent people"–pauperizing them to make hypocritical converts of them. Said one woman, poor but clean and tidy who saw how the emissaries of the church favored the good-for-nothings: "I didn't want any of the good lady's tickets. . . but it's very `urtful to the feelings to see that careless drinking people living like `ogs gets all, and them as struggles and strives may go without." And not only does there result a discouragement of virtue and an encouragement of vice, but there results a subsidizing of superstitions. Unless all the conflicting beliefs thus aided are right, which is impossible, there must be a propagation of untruth as well as a rewarding of insincerity.

Another evil is that easygoing people are exploité by cunning fellows who want to make places for themselves and get salaries. A crying need is found; prospectuses are widely distributed; canvassers press those on whom they call; and all because A, B, C &c., who have failed in their careers, have discovered that they can get money by playing the parts of manager, secretary, and collector. Then, if the institution vehemently urged is established, it is worked in their interest. But it is not always established. As there are bubble mercantile companies, so there are bubble philanthropic societies–societies kept up for a time merely for the purpose of getting subscriptions. Nay, on good authority I learn that there are gangs of men who make it their business to float bogus charities solely to serve their private ends.

Not even now have we reached the end of the evils. There is the insincerity of those who furnish the funds distributed: flunkeyism and the desire to display being often larger motives than beneficent feeling. These swindling promoters when writing to wealthy men for contributions, take care to request the honor of their names as vice presidents. Even where the institutions are genuine, the giving of handsome subscriptions or donations, is largely prompted by the wish to figure before the world as generous, and as filling posts of distinction and authority. A still meaner motive cooperates. One of the nouveaux riches, or even one whose business is tolerably prosperous, takes an active part in getting up, or in carrying on, one of these societies supposed to be originated purely by benevolence, because he likes the prospect of sitting on a committee presided over by a peer, and perhaps side by side with the son of one. He and his wife and his daughters enjoy the thought of seeing his name annually thus associated in the list of officers; and they contemplate this result more than the benefits to be given.

There are kindred vitiations of other organizations having beneficent aims–orphanages, provisions for unfortunate and aged tradesmen, &c. Here again, the least necessitous, who have many friends, are usually those to benefit, and the most necessitous, who have no friends, are neglected. Then there is the costliness and corruption of the selecting process–expensive and laborious canvassing, exchange of votes, philanthropic logrolling. Evidently the outlay for working the system, in money and effort, is such as would be equivalent to a maintenance for many more beneficianes, were it not thus wasted in machinery.

Nor is it otherwise with institutions thought by most people to be indisputably beneficial–hospitals and dispensaries. The first significant fact is that thirty percent of the people of London are frequenters of them; and the largeness of this proportion makes it clear that most of them, not to be ranked as indigent, are able to pay their doctors. Gratis medical relief tends to pauperize in more definite ways. The outpatients begin by getting physic and presently get food; and the system "leads them afterwards openly to solicit pecuniary aid." This vitiating effect is proved by the fact that during the forty years from 1830 to 1869, the increase in the number of hospital patients has been five times greater than the increase of population; and as there has not been more disease, the implication is obvious. Moreover the promise of advice for nothing, attracts the mean-spirited to the extent that "the poor are now being gradually ousted out of the consulting room by well-to-do persons." People of several hundreds a year, even up to a thousand, apply as outpatients, going in disguise: twenty percent of the outpatients in one large hospital having "given false addresses" for the purpose of concealing their identity. Swarming as patients thus do, it results that each gets but little attention: a minute being the average for each, sometimes diminished to forty-five seconds. Thus those for whom the gratis advice is intended get but little. Often "the assistance given is merely nominal"; and "is both a deception on the public and a fraud upon the poor." These gratuitous medical benefits, such as they are, "are conferred chiefly by the members of the unpaid professional staffs" of these charities. Some of them prescribe at the rate of 318 patients in three hours and twenty minutes–a process sufficiently exhausting for men already hard worked in their private practice, and sufficiently disheartening to men with little private practice, who thus give without payment aid which otherwise they would get payment for, very much needed by them. So that the £600,000 a year of the metropolitan hospitals, which, if the annual value of the lands and buildings occupied were added would reach very nearly a million, has largely the effect of demoralizing the patients, taking medical care from those it was intended for and giving it to those for whom it was not, and obliging many impecunious doctors and surgeons to work hard for nothing.[2]

These various experiences, then, furnished by societies and institutions supported by voluntary gifts and subscriptions, unite to show that whatever benefits flow from them are accompanied by grave evils–evils sometimes greater than the benefits. They force on us the truth that, be it compulsory or noncoinpulsory, social machinery wastes power, and works other effects than those intended. In proportion as beneficence operates indirectly instead of directly, it fails in its end.

§ 456. Alike in the foregoing sections and in the foregoing parts of this work, there has been implied the conclusion that the beneficence which takes the form of giving material aid to those in distress, has the best effects when individually exercised. If, like mercy it "blesses him that gives and him that takes," it can do this in full measure only when the benefactor and beneficiary stand in direct relation. It is true, however, that individual beneficence often falls far short of the requirements, often runs into excesses, and is often wrongly directed. Let us look at its imperfections and corruptions.

The most familiar of these is the careless squandering of pence to beggars, and the consequent fostering of idleness and vice. Sometimes because their sympathies are so quick that they cannot tolerate the sight of real or apparent misery; sometimes because they quiet their consciences and think they compound for misdeeds by occasional largesse; sometimes because they are moved by that other-worldliness which hopes to obtain large gifts hereafter by small gifts here; sometimes because, though conscious of mischief likely to be done, they have not the patience needed to make inquiries, and are tempted to end the matter with a sixpence or something less; men help the bad to become worse. Doubtless the evil is great, and weighs much against the individual exercise of beneficence–practically if not theoretically.

The same causes initiate and maintain the begging-letter impostures. Occasional exposures of these in daily papers might serve as warnings; but always there is a new crop of credulous people who believe what they are told by cunning dissemblers, and yield rather than take the trouble of verification: thinking, many of them, that they are virtuous in thus doing the thing which seems kind, instead of being, as they are, vicious in taking no care to prevent evil. That the doings of such keep alive numbers of scamps and swindlers, every one knows; and doubtless a considerable setoff to the advantages of individual beneficence hence arises.

Then, again, there meets us the objection that if there is no compulsory raising of funds to relieve distress, and everything is left to the promptings of sympathy, people who have little or no sympathy, forming a large part of the community, will contribute nothing; and will leave undue burdens to be borne by the more sympathetic. Either the requirements will be inadequately met or the kindhearted will have to make excessive sacrifices. Much force though there is in this objection, it is not so forcible as at first appears. In this case, as in many cases, wrong inferences are drawn respecting the effects of a new cause, because it is supposed that while one thing is changed all other things remain the same. It is forgotten that in the absence of a coercive law there often exists a coercive public opinion. There is no legal penalty on a lie, if not uttered after taking an oath; and yet the social disgrace which follows a convicted liar has a strong effect in maintaining a general truthfulness. There is no prescribed punishment for breaking social observances; and yet these are by many conformed to more carefully than are moral precepts or legal enactments. Most people dread far more the social frown which follows the doing of something conventionally wrong, than they do the qualms of conscience which follow the doing of something intrinsically wrong.[3] Hence it may reasonably be concluded that if private voluntary relief of the poor replaced public compulsory relief, the diffused sentiment which enforces the one would go a long way toward maintaining the other. The general feeling would become such that few, even of the unsympathetic, would dare to face the scorn which would result did they shirk all share of the common responsibility; and while there would probably be thus insured something like contributions from the indifferent or the callous, there would, in some of them, be initiated, by the formal practice of beneficence, a feeling which in course of time would render the beneficence genuine and pleasurable.

A further difficulty presents itself. "I am too much occupied," says the man of business when exhorted to exercise private beneficence. "I have a family to bring up; and my whole time is absorbed in discharging my responsibilities, parental and other. It is impossible for me, therefore, to make such inquiries as are needful to avoid giving misdirected assistance. I must make my contribution and leave others to distribute." That there is force in the reply cannot be denied. But when we call to mind the common remark that if you want anything done you must apply to the busy man rather than to the man of leisure, we may reasonably question whether the busy man may not occasionally find time enough to investigate cases of distress which are forced on his attention. Sometimes there may even result, from a due amount of altruistic action, a mental gain conducive to efficiency in the conduct of affairs.

At any rate it must be admitted that individual ministration to the poor is the normal form of ministration; and that, made more thoughtful and careful, as it would be if the entire responsibility of caring for the poor devolved upon it, it would go a long way towards meeting the needs: especially as the needs would be greatly diminished when there had been excluded the artificially generated poverty with which we are surrounded.

§ 457. But now, from this general advocacy of individual giving versus giving by public and quasi-public agencies, I pass to the special advocacy of the natural form of individual giving–a form which exists and which simply needs development.

Within the intricate plexus of social relations surrounding each citizen, there is a special plexus more familiar to him than any other, and which has established greater claims on him than any other. Everyone who can afford to give assistance, is brought by his daily activities into immediate contact with a cluster of those who by illness, by loss of work, by a death, or by other calamity, are severally liable to fall into a state calling for aid; and there should be recognized a claim possessed by each member of this particular cluster.

In early societies, organized on the system of status, there went, along with the dependence of inferiors, a certain kind of responsibility for their welfare. The simple or compound family group, formed of relatives standing in degrees of subordination, and usually possessing slaves, was a group so regulated that while the inferiors were obliged to do what they were told, and receive what was given to them, they usually had a sufficiency given to them. They were much in the position of domestic animals in respect of their subjection, and they were in a kindred position in respect of due ministration to their needs. Alike in the primitive patriarchal system and in the developed feudal system, we see that the system of status presented the general trait, that while dependents were in large measure denied their liberty, they were in large measure supplied with the means of living. Either they were directly fed and housed, or they were allowed such fixed proportion of produce as enabled them to feed and house themselves. Possession of them unavoidably brought with it care for them.

Along with gradual substitution of the system of contract for the system of status, this relation has been changed in such manner that while the benefits of independence have been gained the benefits of dependence have been lost. The poorer citizen has no longer any one to control him; but he has no longer any one to provide for him. So much service for so much money, has become the universal principle of cooperation; and the money having been paid for the service rendered, no further claim is recognized. The requirements of justice having been fulfilled, it is supposed that all requirements have been fulfilled. The ancient regime of protection and fealty has ceased, while the modern regime of beneficence and gratitude has but partially replaced it.

May we not infer, with tolerable certainty, that there has to be reinstituted something akin to the old order in a new form? May we not expect that without reestablishment of the ancient power of superiors over inferiors, there may be resumed something like the ancient care for them? May we not hope that without the formation of any legal ties between individuals of the regulating class, and those groups whose work they severally regulate in one or other way, there may come to be formed stronger moral ties? Already such moral ties are in some measure recognized. Already all householders moderately endowed with sympathy, feel bound to care for their servants during illness; already they help those living out of the house who in less direct ways labor for them; already from time to time small traders, porters, errand boys, and the like, benefit by their kind offices on occasions of misfortune. The sole requisite seems to be that the usage which thus shows itself here and there irregularly, should be called into general activity by the gradual disappearance of artificial agencies for distributing aid. As before implied, the sympathetic feelings which have originated and support these artificial agencies, would, in their absence, vitalize and develop the natural agencies. And if with each citizen there remained the amount now taken from him in rates and subscriptions, he would be enabled to meet these private demands: if not by as large a disbursement, yet by a disbursement probably as large as is desirable.

Besides reestablishing these closer relationships between superior and inferior, which during our transition from ancient slavery to modern freedom have lapsed; and besides bringing beneficence back to its normal form of direct relation between benefactor and beneficiary; thus personal administration of relief would be guided by immediate knowledge of the recipients, and the relief would be adjusted in kind and amount to their needs and their deserts. When, instead of the responsibility indirectly discharged through Poor Law officers and mendicity societies, the responsibility fell directly on each of those having some spare means, each would see the necessity for inquiry and criticism and supervision: so increasing the aid given to the worthy and restricting that given to the unworthy.

§ 458. And here we are brought face to face with the greatest of the difficulties attendant on all methods of mitigating distress. May we not by frequent aid to the worthy render them unworthy; and are we not almost certain by helping those who are already unworthy to make them more unworthy still? How shall we so regulate our pecuniary beneficence as to avoid assisting the incapables and the degraded to multiply?

I have in so many places commented on the impolicy. and indeed the cruelty, of bequeathing to posterity an increasing population of criminals and incapables, that I need not here insist that true beneficence will be so restrained as to avoid fostering the inferior at the expense of the superior–or, at any rate, so restrained as to minimize the mischief which fostering the inferior entails.

Under present circumstances the difficulty seems almost insurmountable. By the law-established and privately established agencies, coercive and voluntary, which save the bad from the extreme results of their badness, there have been produced unmanageable multitudes of them, and to prevent further multiplication appears next to impossible. The yearly accumulating appliances for keeping alive those who will not do enough work to keep themselves alive, continually increase the evil. Each new effort to mitigate the penalties on improvidence, has the inevitable effect of adding to the number of the improvident. Whether assistance is given through state machinery, or by charitable societies, or privately, it is difficult to see how it can be restricted in such manner as to prevent the inferior from begetting more of the inferior.

If left to operate in all its sternest, the principle of the survival of the fittest, which, as ethically considered, we have seen to imply that each individual shall be left to experience the effects of his own nature and consequent conduct, would quickly clear away the degraded. But it is impracticable with our present sentiments to let it operate in all its sternest. No serious evil would result from relaxing its operation, if the degraded were to leave no progeny. A shortsighted benefi cence might be allowed to save them from suffering, were a longsighted beneficence assured that there would be born no more such. But how can it be thus assured? If, either by public action or by private action, aid were given to the feeble, the unhealthy, the deformed, the stupid, on condition that they did not marry. the result would manifestly be a great increase of illegitimacy; which, implying a still more unfavorable nurture of children, would result in still worse men and women. If instead of a "submerged tenth" there existed only a submerged fiftieth, it might be possible to deal with it effectually by private industrial institutions, or some kindred appliances. But the mass of effete humanity to be dealt with is so large as to make one despair: the problem seems insoluble.

Certainly, if solvable, it is to be solved only through suffering. Having, by unwise institutions, brought into existence large numbers who are unadapted to the requirements of social life, and are consequently sources of misery to themselves and others, we cannot repress and gradually diminish this body of relatively worthless people without inflicting much pain. Evil has been done and the penalty must be paid. Cure can come only through affliction. The artificial assuaging of distress by state appliances, is a kind of social opium eating, yielding temporary mitigation at the eventual cost of intenser misery. Increase of the anodyne dose inevitably leads by and by to increase of the evil; and the only rational course is that of bearing the misery which must be entailed for a time by desistance. The transition from state beneficence to a healthy condition of self-help and private beneficence, must be like the transition from an opium-eating life to a normal life–painful but remedial.

[II-395]

CHAPTER VIII.

SOCIAL BENEFICENCE.↩

§ 459. Is each person under obligation to carry on social intercourse? May he, without any disregard of claims upon him, lead a solitary life, or a life limited to the family circle? Or does positive beneficence dictate the cultivating of friendships and acquaintanceships to the extent of giving and receiving hospitalities? And if there is such a requirement, what constitutes proper discharge of it?

Only vague replies to these questions seem possible. We may indeed say that, peremptory claims permitting, some amount of social intercourse is obligatory; since, without it, general happiness would fall short. If a community of solitaries, or of families leading recluse lives, would be relatively dull–if gatherings for the interchange of ideas and mutual excitation of emotions add, in considerable measure, to the gratifications of each and all; then there seems to be imposed on each the duty of furthering such gatherings.

Of course this duty is less peremptory than most other duties; and when it can be fulfilled must be fulfilled in subordination to them. Receptions entailing appreciable cost have no ethical sanction where there is difficulty in meeting family claims, the claims of justice, and the claims arising from the misfortunes of the worthy. Here that kind of social intercourse which may be carried on without expense (often the best social intercourse) is alone ethically enjoined.

Moreover, such obligation to cultivate the society of our fellows as beneficence imposes, it imposes only on condition that more pleasure than pain is caused. No countenance is given by it to the mechanical process of gathering and dispersing, carried on by those who are "in society," or in the wider circles which adopt the habits of society. Beneficence tells no one to help in keeping up the movement of "the social treadmill.'' Only supposing that the persons brought together, derive from one another's company amounts of enjoyment well purchased by the entailed trouble and cost, can beneficence be said to dictate the bringing of them together.

And here, indeed, it may be said that instead of enjoining mechanical social intercourse, beneficence dictates efforts to restrict and abolish it. Everyone finds that most of the entertainments people give and attend, fail to yield the gratifications sought, while they involve troubles and vexations to hosts and guests: all because display and conformity to conventional requirements are far more thought of than the pleasures of friendship. Many have found, too, that most endeavors to reestablish the reality, at present supplanted by the sham, are futile. Some who, early in the century, desiring to have occasional visits from people they cared about, notified that they would be "at home" on specified evenings, hoped by this abandonment of formalities to get what they wanted. But as fast as the practice spread, the "at-homes" became conventionalized, like all other gatherings; and now are not distinguishable from the "routs" of earlier days. The like has happened even with a more recently attempted remedy–the "at-homes" which are distinguished as "small and early"; for a small and early party has now come to mean one which consists of a room full of people who arrive between ten and eleven.

Social beneficence, then, does not include participation in these kinds of social intercourse which lose the aim in the preparation, and the actuality in the show. Contrariwise, it enjoins unceasing resistance to a system which achieves pain while seeking pleasure.

§ 460. Though the furthering of ordinary social intercourse of the genuine kind, will by many scarcely be classed under beneficence, there is another kind of social intercourse the furthering of which they will not hesitate so to class. I refer to the intercourse between those whose social positions are superior and those who hold inferior social positions.

At all times there has been more or less of this-in old days occasional feasts provided by feudal nobles for their retainers; and in later times entertainments given by squires to villagers at recurring periods, or on special occasions. After an interval during which such usages seem to have become less general, they have revived in new forms–garden parties at country residences to the neighboring poor people: gratis excursions of children and others from London into the country; village school treats, and so forth. Penny Readings, too, and concerts given by amateurs to listeners who are asked to pay little or nothing, are other forms taken by this species of social beneficence. They are in the main to be applauded; both for the immediate pleasures they give, and for their effects in cultivating good feeling between classes, with consequent increase of social cohesion. Usually they are genuine promptings of sympathy; and, in the better among those who are entertained, evoke some gratitude: both results being beneficial. Only in cases where the usage becomes mechanical–is given by routine on the one side and expected as a matter of course on the other, may we recognize a drawback. And only. in other cases, where such entertainments are got up in the interests of religious sects to gather adherents, may we recognize a further drawback. But the drawbacks are not greater, nor so great, as those attendant on the intercourse of the wealthier with one another; and we may safely say that social beneficence enjoins these various modes of bringing rich and poor together.

Not less to be approved, if not indeed more to be approved, are the efforts made by some to give instruction, as well as pleasure, to fellow citizens who are not so well off as themselves. Those who, a century ago, strove to dissipate the ignorance of artisans and laborers by Sunday Schools, deserve far more to be remembered than many whose names are familiar; and the tens of thousands of the middle classes who, for generations after, devoted large parts of their Sundays to teaching–bearing for many years the reprobation of those who considered themselves their "betters"–ought to be remembered with gratitude: with much more gratitude than those who have busied themselves to coerce people into giving and receiving Board-School lessons. Though this Sunday School system, spreading first among the Dissenters and then adopted by the church to prevent loss of its members, has been in part subordinated to sectarian purposes; yet the original aim was good, and the self-sacrificing fulfillment of the aim has been in the main good. Social beneficence has been in this way well exemplified.

Voluntary teaching of another kind has in recent days taken a serviceable development. I refer to lectures given in towns and villages by nonprofessional lecturers. Sometimes employer and employed are thus associated in a way other than by business contracts. A late friend of mine, the number of whose work people exceeded a thousand, besides occasional entertainments and excursions into the country. gave them from time to time explanatory accounts of various classes of physical phenomena, with illustrative experiments. But whether by a master to his hands, or by some local man, who has cultivated a specialty, to an assemblage of his neighbors, this gratis yielding of information is a beneficence to be commended. Especially does there need volunteered teaching in respect of topics touching the conduct of life and social affairs. The state of society might now have been far better had men capable of doing it, enlightened those living around them on political and moral questions. Many wild ideas now prevailing would probably never have arisen.

But in all cases customs tend to become laws–concessions to become rights; and these extensions of social intercourse giving instruction, as well as those giving pleasure, are apt to lose the quality of beneficence and fall into settled observances accompanied by little kindness on the one side or thanks on the other. How to prevent this usual decadence it is difficult to see.

§ 461. Thus far the requirements of social beneficence specified, if not practically fulfilled by readers, will be theoretically admitted by them. But we come now to less obvious requirements–requirements which, indeed, will by most be denied, and by many will even be considered at variance with social obligations. I refer to actions which have for their ends to change habits and usages that are opposed to general well-being.

Though they do not contend that conformity to conventions is a moral duty, yet the majority of people think it a duty; and they speak in reprobation of those who break any of the rules which society has tacitly enacted for the regulation of life and behavior. They may be unable to give good reasons for these rules; they may admit that many of them entail trouble and annoyance for no beneficial purpose; they may even condemn some as absurd. Yet they hold that these rules, even down to the color of an evening necktie, should be respected. While they regard disobedience as a transgression to be frowned upon, they do not ask whether the observance does not entail grave evils, and whether they ought not to try and abolish those evils.

One who does not pick up his opinions ready made, but elaborates them himself, will see clearly enough that along with other duties to his fellow men, there goes the duty of seeking to increase their happiness by rationalizing their modes of life. He will see that beneficence, rightly understood, is not limited to the giving of money, the yielding of assistance, the manifestation of sympathy, the uttering of kind words; but that it includes also the doing of various things which, though proximately painful to others, are remotely beneficial to them; and which, instead of bringing him smiles, bring him frowns. In a degree far beyond what the mass of people conceive, their lives are vitiated by observance of the regulations–many needless and others injurious–imposed by an unseen social power. Let us contemplate some of the mischievous mandates which should be disobeyed.

§ 462. Naturally there may be taken first in order those which concern dress. To denounce here the follies of fashion is superfluous: everyone recognizes them. No one however, or scarcely anyone, refuses to join in them. Not only do nearly all conform, but they defend their conformity. They laugh at the modes exhibited in old books of costume, and admit that were it not for habit they might think the current modes equally absurd. The needless expenditure entailed by discarding dresses which are still good, because they are no longer as is required, they recognize and even lament. They also complain occasionally of the amount of time and trouble and worry entailed by keeping their clothing up to date. Nevertheless the assertion that, alike on their own behalf and on behalf of others, they ought to resist a dictation which brings these mischievous results, they combat and even ridicule. Social beneficence, as conceived by them, includes submission rather than resistance.

Doubtless they may plead lack of courage. They dare not risk the deprecations of friends and the jeers of strangers. But, in the first place, the bearing of disagreeable consequences of right actions, is one of the forms which beneficence takes; and, in the second place, when a nonconformity which is intrinsically rational, obviously results neither from ignorance nor poverty but from independence, the world generally accepts the situation, and not only tolerates it but even secretly respects it.

Concerning dress, social beneficence has something more to say than to enjoin resistance to these perpetual changes from one absurd pattern to another. Beyond an improper obedience to an illegitimate control of dress, there is an undue regard for dress itself, considered apart from fashion. Here, again, protest is superfluous; since large expenditure of money and time in providing externals which shall evoke applause, is a stock subject for reprobation. What needs, perhaps, to be emphasized is the truth that undue devotion of life and thought to the gaining of admiration by personal adornment, often brings loss of admiration. The feeling with which an overdressed woman is regarded, shows this in a pronounced way; and this feeling is excited, if less strongly. by many who are not condemned as overdressed. For any such elaborate toilette as shows the beholder that desire for approbation has been dominant, causes in him a reactive emotion: disapproval of the moral trait being set against approval of the appearance achieved. Nobody thinks love of praise a fine characteristic.

To be beautiful without manifest cost, elegant without manifest thought, is that which dress should achieve. Such attention to appearance as implies a certain respect for those around is proper; and yet not an attention which implies great anxiety about their opinions. A dash of aesthetic genius, possessed by but few is requisite for success in this compromise. But it may be approached by others; and the approach to it should be aided and approved by that social beneficence which aims at rationalizing social usages.

§ 463. Allied to the undue regard for appearance in clothing is the undue regard for appearances in general. Time, among the women of the upper and middle ranks, is largely, and often mainly, spent in pursuit of the ornamental. To make things look pretty seems to have become with them the chief end of life; and they never ask whether there is any proper limit to aesthetic gratifications.

As was pointed out in the closing chapter of Part III, very much in the right conduct of life turns on a due proportioning of the various activities. Recognizing in a measure an ancient doctrine, we saw that concerning each kind of activity. judgment has to decide whereabouts between the two extremes lies the mean. And we also saw that, beyond this, judgment is called for to decide what is the proper ratio between each kind of activity and other kinds of activity. In contemplating the doings of people around, we see that this due proportioning is very little attended to; and, indeed, by many there seems to be no perception that it is needed. Here in respect of work, there in respect of amusement, now in respect of culture, and again in respect of a hobby, there is undue absorption of energy; and no one seems to pause and ask whether the pursuit of their particular aim does not unduly sacrifice the pursuit of other aims. It is especially thus with the pursuit of beauty, or that which is thought to be beauty. Into many minds, and especially feminine minds, there seems never to have entered the question whether the spending of time over ornamental surroundings may not be carried to excess. The tacit assumption is that achievement of the elegant and the decorative everywhere and always, is meritorious; and the consequent neglect of important ends is not recognized. In a degree which examination provides to be extreme, the mind is perverted and the body injured by this insane subordination of reality to show. While many things needful of satisfactory living are left undone, the mistress of the house spends much of her time in fancy work, in keeping ornamental things in order, in arranging flowers, &c.: much more time than she gives to procuring food of good quality and well cooked, and to superintending the education of her children.[4]

Not only is all this to be ethically disapproved as putting the less important ends of life before the more important ends, but it is even to be aesthetically disapproved. The pursuit of beauty carried to excess defeats itself. In the first place many domestic objects are not fit for decoration. Between an elaborately ornamented coal scuttle and its black, dirty contents, there is an absurd incongruity; and the time spent in making imitation leaves and flowers to cover a pie crust, stands in ridiculous contrast with the trivial result: the crust being destroyed nearly as soon as seen. A large proportion of things in a house should be simply unobtrusive or inoffensive. In the second place, if beauty is aimed at only in objects which exist exclusively for it as their end, and in other permanent objects which may be made beautiful without diminishing their usefulness, there results an increased totality of aesthetic pleasure; for, to be fully appreciated, beautiful things must have as their foils things which make no pretensions to beauty. A graceful statuette, or a fine watercolor landscape, looks far better amid surroundings that are relatively plain and inconspicuous, than in a room crowded with multitudinous pretty things or things supposed to be pretty. Moreover while the room, if filled with pictures and sculptures and vases and numerous curiosities, loses its individuality, it may, when containing only a small number of beautiful objects artistically arranged, become itself a work of art.

Similarly rooted in an undue desire for display, goes the practice of accumulating needless appliances. As a typical instance may be named a silver butter knife. It is an implement utterly superfluous. There can be no pretense that there is any chemical action of the butter on steel; for a steel knife is used by each person to spread it. There can be no pretense that a steel knife is not equally effective as a tool: indeed the butter knife is mechanically ill adapted for its purpose. It has no raison d’être whatever, save to show the possession of money enough to purchase an appliance which society prescribes. With various other domestic superfluities it is the same. Needless original outlay and daily cost in cleaning, are entailed by useless articles which people buy lest silent criticisms should be passed in their absence.

Social beneficence, then, enjoins efforts to diminish the sacrifice of use to appearance, and the accompanying expenditure of time, energy, and money for secondary ends to the neglect of primary ends.

§ 464. Endeavors to benefit fellow citizens by improvements in modes of life, have yet another sphere of action. There are various prescribed habits, and various social observances, which should be resisted, and modified or abolished, in the interests of men at large. Already philanthropy in some cases recognizes this duty.

We have, for example, the efforts made to check extravagant outlays for funerals. It is seen that the demands of custom weigh heavily on necessitous families: perhaps seriously diminishing the small sum left to meet the immediate wants of a widow and her children. Lack of a certain display is thought to imply lack of respect for the dead; and hence the peremptory need for disbursements which cannot be borne without suffering. The evil is far more intense among some slightly-civilized peoples, as those of the Gold Coast, where, according to Beecham, "a funeral is usually absolute ruin to a poor family." For discouraging lavish expenditure, even though among us it is far less, there are the further reasons that, as the costly burial rites are equally accorded to the bad and to the good, they fail to be signs of respect; and that were they generally abandoned, no slight would be implied by the absence of them.

Kindred reasons may be given for trying to moderate sun-dry wedding customs. These have in some places gone to extremes beyond any known in this part of the world; and have entailed astonishing mischiefs. In one case among the partially civilized, if not in more, the marriage feast has become so ruinously costly to the bride's family, that female infanticide is practiced as a remedy: daughters being put out of the way while infants, because of the expense they would one day entail if reared. Here, though parental expenditures entailed by weddings are less serious, there are concomitant evils which cry aloud for remedy. In old times the making of presents to a newly married couple, had for its purpose to start them in housekeeping; and now, as of old, presents given with this end are justified. But out of this once rational custom has grown an irrational one. Presents are showered in upon brides who, as well as the bridegrooms, are wealthy enough to provide for themselves amply in all ways, by friends prompted less by feelings of friendship than by fears of criticism: a heavy tax on those who have many friends, being the consequence. And now among the upper classes, the system has grown to the extent that, in an utterly shameless way. lists of the presents with the names of their donors are published in newspapers. So that we have a public boast of social position on the one side and generosity on the other.

A further group of observances may be named among those to be discouraged by everyone who has a far-seeing regard for social well-being. I refer to the various complimentary actions brought round by the seasons. It is said that in Paris the making of Easter presents has become so burdensome a usage, that not a few escape from it by going on a journey, for one or other alleged reason. People have created for themselves a system of mutual taxation. A feels bound to give to B, C, D, and the rest; B, to A, C, D, and the rest; and so on throughout the alphabet. Among ourselves have arisen in recent times, the less serious mischiefs accompanying distribution of Christmas cards and Easter cards. Beyond the expenditure of money and trouble and time, these entail both negative and positive evils–negative, because such customs, as fast as they grow general, lose their meaning and cease to give pleasure; and positive, because neglect of them produces ill-feeling. So long as these kindnesses are shown spontaneously to one or a few, specially liked or loved, they have their value; but as fast as they become matters of routine they become valueless or worse.

Let every one insist on reality and sincerity, and refrain as much as he can from complimentary usages which involve untruths. If each resolves to tell as few tacit lies as possible, social intercourse will be much healthier.

§ 465. Doubtless most readers have been surprised to find the three foregoing sections included in a work on ethics: having been unaccustomed to contemplate acts of social conformity under their ethical aspects. But, as has been contended from the beginning, all conduct which issues in increase or decrease of happiness, has its ethical aspect; and it cannot be questioned that the observances imposed by society either conduce to happiness or the contrary.

But the social beneficence which enjoins resistance to in- jurious customs, is by some disapproved because resistance is followed by a reputation for eccentricity, and this diminishes the ability to forward more important reforms: political and religious, for example. The conclusion might be granted, were the premise rightly admitted. It is not true that the reform of social usages is less important than other reforms. Consider the evil results of partially turning night into day, while breathing the bad air generated by artificial lights. Consider, too, the mischiefs entailed by ill-arranged meal hours–taking the chief meal at a time when digestive power is flagging, instead of at a time when it is greatest. Note, again, how this irrational arrangement abridges social intercourse, and increases the formality of what remains. Remember to what an extent, as shown in preceding sections, life, or at least the life of the well-to-do classes, is absorbed in fulfilling usages–now in needless changes of dress, in consulting dressmakers, in discussing fashions with friends; now in buying, or producing, pretty things so named, which are mostly in the way; now in making calls, often in the hope that those called on will not be at home.[5] When there is added the unceasing trouble and large cost entailed by parties yielding little satisfaction and much annoyance, it will be seen that the evils to be combated are anything but trivial. Those who diligently conform to the requirements, instead of being happy are simply playing at being happy.

Two illustrations occur to me as showing how, in social life as carried on according to rule, the reality is lost in the show. One of them was furnished by a lady pursuing the ordinary upper-class routine, to whom I was expressing my aversion to the weariness of railway traveling; and who said that, contrariwise, she always found it a great satisfaction to enter a train at Paris on the way to Algiers (where they had a residence), and to feel that for many hours she would be free from her wearisome occupations–no parties, no calls, no letters. The other was furnished by the testimony of some who have contrasted the trammeled life in England with an untrammeled colonial life. The early emigrants to New Zealand belonged to a more cultivated class than colonists generally do, and carried with them those observances of civilized life which originate in good feeling, while leaving behind those which are merely conventional. After experiencing for years the resulting pleasures, some who came back to England were so disgusted by the artificiality of its ways, that they returned to New Zealand. Two only of these colonists have I known, and both decided to end their days there.

Far from being true, then, is the belief that the rationalization of social observances is relatively unimportant. It may be doubted whether, as measured by the effects on happiness, it is not an end more important than any other. The simplification of appliances and usages, with resulting decrease of the friction of life, a well-wisher to his species will unceasingly strive for. Social beneficence here finds an object to be kept ever in view.

[II-410]

CHAPTER IX.

POLITICAL BENEFICENCE.↩

§ 466. The injunction ascribed to Charles I, "Touch no state matters," was one appropriately enough promulgated by a king; for a king naturally likes to have his own way. Ready conformity to the injunction, however, on the part of subjects, does not appear so natural; and yet throughout the past it has been general, and is not uncommon even now. There are many who, though they probably never heard of this rule of King Charles, unconsciously subordinate themselves to it, and seem to take a pride in their subordination. "I never meddle in politics," you may hear a tradesman say; and he says it in a way implying that he thinks the abstention creditable.

There have, indeed, been times–bad times–to which this mental attitude was fit. In days of exclusive militancy, when slavish submission was conducive to efficiency in war, individuality of thought and action was out of place. But under a political regime like that into which we have grown, taking a share in political life is the duty of every citizen; and not to do so is at once shortsighted, ungrateful, and mean: shortsighted, because abstention, if general, must bring decay of any good institutions which exist; ungrateful, because to leave uncared for these good institutions which patriotic an cestors established, is to ignore our indebtedness to them; mean, because to benefit by such institutions and devolve the maintenance and improvement of them entirely upon others, implies readiness to receive an advantage and give nothing in return.

For a free political organization to remain alive and healthy. all its units must play their parts. If numbers of them remain passive, the organization, in so far as they are concerned, is dead; and, in proportion as such numbers increase, must corrupt. Political beneficence includes the duty of preventing this. Let us glance at some of the evils arising from disregard of this duty, and the benefits which greater regard of it would bring, alike to self and to others.

§ 467. When the system of status has passed into the system of contract, it becomes requisite that the system of contract shall be properly carried out. Protection of life and liberty being presupposed, the one requisite to a social life carried on by voluntary cooperation, is that agreements shall be fulfilled–that for a given amount of work the specified wages shall be paid; that for a definite portion of a commodity there shall be handed over its price in money or an equivalent; that when certain actions are undertaken on certain conditions, the actions shall be performed and the conditions observed. While criminal law has to yield protection against direct aggression, civil law has to yield protection against indirect aggression. And each citizen is, to the extent of his ability, responsible for the efficient performance of these functions.

Unfortunately at present each citizen has little or no consciousness of any such responsibility. If he feels called on to take any share in political life, it is a share in electioneering, or a share in some agitation for shortening hours, or diminishing the number of licenses, or empowering municipal bodies to buy up waterworks, make tramways, &c. As to maintenance of the primary condition to a healthy social life–that each citizen shall have the entire benefit his actions bring while he shall not be allowed to impose on others any evils his actions bring, and that to achieve these ends each shall be compelled to do all he has undertaken to do, and be entitled to receive all he bargained to receive–as to these essential things, the ordinary citizen thinks little or nothing about them. He thinks only of superficial questions and overlooks the fundamental question. He forgets the folly of a legislature which, generation after generation, does nothing to make it possible for citizens to know what the laws are. He looks on vacantly at the absurd actions every year committed by Lords and Commons in heaping a number of new acts on to the vast heap of old acts: making the confusion worse confounded. And just as though it were an unchangeable course of nature, he stands idly by while, in law courts, equity is defeated by technical error; sums gained are eaten up by sums lost in gaining them; poor suitors ruin themselves in fighting rich suitors who defy them by appeals; and the great mass of people aggressed upon, submit to injustice rather than run the risk of greater injustice.

Political beneficence of the rational kind will seek removal of these enormous evils more energetically than it will seek constitutional changes or extensions of state management. For, in countless ways, the lives of all are vitiated by non-fulfillment of this primary condition to social cooperation. They eat adulterated food and wear clothes made of fabrics only partially genuine; all because there is no easy remedy for breach of contract in selling as one thing what is in part another thing. They pay more for every commodity than need be because, in each business, a certain average sum goes in law expenses which have to be met by extra rates of profit. And everyone is in danger of that grave loss which results when one with whom he has transactions suffers, perhaps to the extent of bankruptcy, from large dishonesties for which there is practically no redress. Were it not that in most cases the proximate hides from view the remote, men would see that in seeking a pure and efficient administration of justice, they are conducing to human happiness far more than in seeking the ends ordinarily classed as philanthropic.

§ 468. Probably all will admit that political life is healthy only in proportion as it is conscientious; but few will admit that, as a corollary, political life carried on by party warfare is unhealthy; and that political beneficence may fitly seek to mitigate, and as far as possible abolish, such warfare. It is manifest to us here that in the United States, where the advent of Democrats or Republicans to power is followed by the turning out of officeholders of the one kind and putting in those of the other, and where both ins and outs are heavily taxed to provide funds for those electioneering campaigns which give them or take from them places and incomes, the governmental machinery is made to work ill by the substitution of private ends for public ends. But it is not generally perceived that in England party government, with its struggles for office, has vices which if less are still very great.

One of these vices, always manifest, is daily becoming more conspicuous–the dishonesty of candidates who profess what they do not believe, and promise to do that which they know ought not to be done: all to get support and to help their political leaders. In simple language they try to gain power by force of falsehood. And when, in the House of Commons, many of them say by their votes that they think one thing, while in fact they think the opposite thing, what, in plain words, shall we call them? Actually it has come to this, that a vote, which, on the face of it, is an expression of belief, perhaps on a matter affecting the happiness of millions of people, ceases to be an expression of such belief; and, instead, merely implies the desire that such and such men should fill such and such posts!

"But party loyalty necessitates this sacrifice of private convictions," is the excuse put in. Yes, party loyalty has come to be a fancied virtue to which the real virtue of veracity is sacrificed. Whence comes the alleged virtue of party loyalty? In what system of ethics does it find a place? It is simply a dishonest mode of conduct disguised by a euphemistic phrase. It is simply demerit assuming the garb of merit.

So utter is the vitiation of sentiments and ideas produced by the system, that the few who will not conform to it are vilified, and represented as hindering political action. In America, where party organization is more developed than here, whoever declines to surrender his convictions, and follow in the mob which is led by a "boss" to the polls, is labeled with the contemptuous name of "Mugwump"; and is condemned as pharisaic and as of an unsocial disposition. In "the land of liberty" it has become a political crime to act on your own judgment. Representative government, rightly so called, has become a sham; under the disguise of which there exists an oligarchy of officeholders, office seekers, and men who exercise irresponsible power.

So far is party government from being an appliance for carrying out the national will, it continually becomes an appliance for overriding the national will. A ministry raised to power by electors many of whom have been misled by promises never to be fulfilled, represents perhaps, the predominant opinion of the nation on some leading question. Once in office, the chiefs of the party backed by a compact majority, can for years do with a free hand many things they were never commissioned to do. By the aid of submissive supporters prompted by "party loyalty," a small knot of men, headed by one of great influence, enacts this or that law, which, were it put to a plebiscite, would be decisively rejected. Thus, in a second way too, party government defeats representative government. A single man with his troop of obedient servants can for some time impose his will on the nation, just as he might do were he a despotic king.

"But how can public life be carried on in any other way?" This question is thought to embody an unanswerable defense of party government. Says an American, whose advocacy of the system I have just been reading–"Every public measure must have one party in its favor and another against it. There never can be more than two parties on living, practical issues." Here the fallacy is transparent. The argument implies that a party has never more than one question to decide. It assumes that those who agree with its leaders on some issue which brought them into office, will agree with its leaders on all other issues which may arise during their term of office–an absurd assumption. But a further question is put–"How is a ministry to retain office unless its opinion subordinates the individual opinions of its supporters? and what must happen if ministries are perpetually thrown out by the votes of recalcitrant members of their parties?" Here we have one among countless illustrations of the errors caused by assuming one thing changed while other things remain unchanged. If politicians were conscientious; if, as a result, no one would vote for a thing which he did not believe good; and if, consequently, the body of representatives fell, as it must do, not into two large parties but into a number of small parties and independent members, no ministry could count upon anything like a constant majority. What would happen? A ministry would no longer be required to resign when in a minority; but would simply accept the lesson which a division gave it. It would not, as now, be for a time the master of the House, but would be always the servant of the House: not dictating a policy to it, but accepting that which was found to be its policy. Hence no measure could be carried unless it obtained the sincere support of the average of its many parties, and was thereby proved to be most likely in accordance with the national will. If, as may be contended, this would lead to great delay in the passing of measures, the reply is–So much the better. Political changes should never be made save after overcoming great resistances.

But apart from these considerations, the ethical dictum is clear. There are lies told by actions as well as lies told by words, and ethics gives no more countenance to the one than to the other. As originating from ultimate laws of right conduct, beneficence and veracity must go together; and political beneficence will be shown by insisting on political veracity.

§ 469. Among the tasks enjoined by political beneficence are not only such general ones as enforcement of equitable laws made known to all, and sincerity of political conduct, but there is also the maintenance of pure and efficient administration.

Manifestly included in this task is the choice of good representatives, general and local. Though there is some perception of the need for deliberate effort in this direction, the perception is an unenlightened one. There is no adequate consciousness of the share of duty which each elector has, not simply in giving his vote, but also in seeing that a good choice shall be made possible by a preceding good naming of candidates. At present, while there is a carefully devised machinery for choosing among nominated men, there is only a hole-and-corner machinery for deciding what men shall be nominated: this last function being really more important than the first. For it is of little use to have the overt power of deciding between A and B, when secret powers have picked out for choice an A and a B who are both undesirable. At present the local caucus of each party, more or less under direction of a central caucus in London, overrides the wills of electors by forcing them to say which of two or more they will have; often leaving them practically to say which they dislike least. Under this system there is very little regard for true fitness in a representative. Has he been a large local benefactor? Does he bind himself to support the head of the party? Is he in favor of this or that pet scheme? Can he bring to bear family influence or command votes by popularity of manner? These, and such as these, are the questions which determine his selection by the caucus, and therefore his selection by the constituency. Whether he has wide political knowledge; whether he has much administrative experience; whether he is far-seeing; whether he is conscientious and independent; whether he will promise nothing that he does not approve, or does not feel himself able to perform–these are questions scarcely asked. Of course the general result is a House of Commons made up of political incapables, popularity hunters, and time servers, who, believing in common with their constituents that a society is not a growth but a manufacture, carry on their legislative work under the profound delusion that things can be effectually arranged this way or that way at will; and in pursuit of their party and personal ends, do not inquire what may be the ultimate effects of their temporary expedients. Of course, political beneficence dictates strenuous exertions against this system; and enjoins the duty of seeking some way in which constituents may acquire a real instead of a nominal choice, and be led to choose men who will be fit lawmakers instead of fit tools of party.

Those on whom devolves the choice of men for county councils, municipal bodies, vestries, and the like, are spurred into activity by their leaders when members of such bodies are to be elected; but, forthwith lapsing into their usual quiescence, most of them give small attention to the doings of these bodies, or if they are made aware of inefficiency and corruption, are not prompted by a sense of public duty to seek remedies. A shopkeeper does not like to move because some of his customers, directly or indirectly interested in the misdoings he perceives, may be offended. Among a doctor's patients there are probably a few who, if not implicated with those whose carelessness or incapacity needs exposing, are on friendly terms with them; and he does not feel called upon to risk alienation of such. Even a man of means, whose pecuniary interests will not be endangered by any course he may take, hesitates lest he should make himself unpopular. He knows that enmities will be generated and no compensating friendships formed. And then there are many who, if not deterred by motives above indicated, do not see why they should give themselves trouble for no personal benefit. Abuses are consequently allowed to rise and grow.

Thus is it very generally with administrations. There is no conception that political beneficence requires of each man that he shall take his share in seeing that political machinery, general and local, does its work properly.[6]

§ 470. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance," said one of the early American statesmen; and eternal vigilance is also the price of well-working institutions. In proportion as human nature is defective, the organizations formed out of human beings must be defective too. And they will become far more defective than they would else be, if there are not constant detections of their defects and constant efforts to prevent increase of them.

Hence a proper sense of public duty will prompt endeavors to stop abuses the moment they become visible, without waiting for them to become serious. The misdoings which, in course of time, make useless or mischievous this or that administration, begin with trivial derelictions of duty, which no one thinks it worth while to protest against. Each increment of mischief, similarly small, is passed over as unimportant; until at length the evil is found to have grown great and perhaps incurable. A good illustration of the way in which ultimate disasters result from the disregard of trifling imperfections, has often struck me when watching the emptying of a canal lock. Here and there in the wall, as the water descends, may be observed a small jet issuing from a crevice–a crevice through which the water enters again when the lock is refilled, and from which there again issues a jet when the water again falls. In an old and neglected lock, not only are these jets numerous but some have become very large. At every use of the lock, a cavity which has been gradually formed behind each of these, is charged and discharges itself; and the larger it becomes the more rapidly does the powerful ingoing and outgoing stream increase it and its channel. Eventually, if nothing is done, the joints of the stonework are so much eaten away, and the back of the wall so much hollowed, that one or other part collapses. In an analogous way the insignificant abuses in an institution, which are initiated by carelessness or self-interest, and tolerated by indifference, or what seems good nature, increases little by little until the whole structure becomes worthless or injurious.

The "eternal vigilance" required to maintain not only liberty but purity, should have for its guide a principle just opposite to the principle commonly followed. Most men, alike in public affairs and private business affairs, assume that things are going right until it is proved they are going wrong; whereas their assumption should be that things are going wrong until it is proved they are going right. Though in churches they continually hear asserted the ingrained wickedness of men, and though in every day's newspaper they find exposed various dishonesties and deceptions, not of simple kinds only but of those complex kinds which bubble companies and swindling syndicates practice; yet they seem to think that in the transactions of any political or social organization they are concerned with, there are, and will be, no corruptions. Though every receipt they take is a precaution against dishonesty. though every law deed makes many provisions to prevent breaches of understanding, and though every act of Parliament is full of clauses implying the belief that some will do wrong if there are any openings left for them to do wrong, people argue that unless evidence has raised it, there should be no suspicion respecting the doings of incorporated bodies or official organizations; and this notwithstanding the daily proofs that bank failures and company disasters arise from ill-grounded beliefs in the conscientiousness of all concerned, and the lack of checks against possible roguery.[7]

missing para?? ...

Political beneficence, then, prompting this "eternal vigilance," will, I say, be ever ready to detect possible modes of corruption ; ever ready to resist insignificant usurpations of power ; ev^er prepared to challenge transactions w^hich in the smallest ways deviate from the proper order ; and ever ready to bear the odium consequent on taking such courses.

[II-422]

CHAPTER X.

BENEFICENCE AT LARGE.↩

§ 471. Most readers have been surprised by much which has, in the foregoing chapters, and especially the later ones, been included under the head of beneficence. Only special parts of social and political conduct are usually thought of as having ethical aspects; whereas here most parts of them have been dealt with as having such aspects. But the reader who bears in mind the doctrine laid down at the outset and recently reenunciated, that all conduct which in an indirect, if not in a direct way, conduces to happiness or misery, is therefore to be judged as right or wrong, will see that the various topics touched upon could not rightly be omitted. After the conduct which is of individual concern only, and affects others in but remote ways, if at all; and after the conduct comprehended under the head of justice, which sets forth restraints on individual life imposed by social life; nearly all the remainder of conduct becomes the subject matter of beneficence, negative or positive. For nearly all this remainder of conduct pleasurably or painfully affects others from hour to hour.

After thus conceiving the sphere of beneficence, it becomes obvious that even more has to be included than has yet been included. Large space would be required to treat in detail the incentives and restraints which should guide behavior to those around. There are words and tones and facial expressions which throughout daily intercourse continually excite disagreeable emotions, and others which excite agreeable emotions; and the amounts of happiness or of misery created by them, often far exceed the amounts created by maleficent or beneficent actions of conspicuous kinds. Not, indeed, that agreeableness or disagreeableness of behavior is to be wholly ascribed to the presence or absence of beneficent promptings. The presence or absence of a desire for approbation is commonly a chief cause. But the sweetness of manner which springs from sympathy. is in most cases easily distinguishable. Acted goodness of feeling rarely produces the same effect as real goodness of feeling.

Though beneficence of other kinds may be produced by general sense of duty, by desire to establish right human relations, by a high ideal of conduct, this kind of beneficence can be produced only by active fellow feeling. In a few finely constituted natures, this fellow feeling is dominant, and spontaneously shows itself: beneficence has in so far become with them organic. Everyone feels the better for their presence. They are natural centers of happiness. Those of inferior natures, forming the immense majority, can here fulfill the dictates of beneficence only in so far as they can subordinate themselves to an ideal of behavior; and even then in but a partial way. Occasionally, it may be possible for them to recognize in time some nascent manifestation of unamiable feeling and check it, or to perceive with sufficient quickness an opportunity of showing sympathy, and even of arousing it by a quick imagination of the circumstances. By keeping in mind the requirements of beneficence, some small amount of self-discipline may thus be achieved.

Beyond the beneficent regulation of conduct toward members of the family and towards friends, there is the beneficent regulation of conduct towards those who occupy positions of subordination, or of lower social status. A large sphere for the anodyne influence of sympathy is here opened. From the militant regime, with its graduated ranks and obedience coercively maintained, there have descended those modes of behavior which continually recall the relations of superior and inferior. Pervading social life they influence all in ways difficult to resist. Though, among the better natured on the one side, there is a dislike to usages which make others feel their inferiority, and though the more independent on the other side, vaguely resent such usages; yet it seems impossible to change forthwith the established manners, and to get rid of the unbeneficent emotions accompanying them. Doubtless, along with the substitution of the system of contract for the system of status, there has been a relaxation of those customs which remind men of their respective grades. This has gone so far that in modern days a true gentleman is described as aiming to make those who rank below him in the social scale, at ease in his presence: seeking, not to emphasize any distinction between himself and them, but rather to obliterate the consciousness of the distinction.

As regulating such intercourse, beneficence has the function of increasing the happiness of the less fortunate by raising them for the time being to the level of the more fortunate, and making them as much as possible forget the difference in position or in means.

§ 472. The foregoing paragraphs will probably raise in many minds a silent protest, several times before raised, against the tacit acceptance of a social system which they reprobate. Impatient with the multitudinous evils which humanity at present suffers, and ascribing these to the existing organization of society, they reject indignantly all conclusions which take for granted that this organization is to continue. Let us hear what they say.

"Your conception of beneficence is a radically unbeneficent one. Your remarks about restraints on free competition, and on free contract, imply the belief that all men are hereafter, as now, to fight for individual gain. Services rendered by the ill-off to the well-off are taken for granted in your remarks about restraints on blame. The various modes of administering charity, condemned or approved by you, assume that in the future there must be rich and poor as at present. And some of the immediately foregoing exhortations concerning behavior, presuppose the continued existence of superior and inferior classes. But those who have emancipated themselves from beliefs imposed by the past, see that all such relations of men to one another are bad and must be changed. A true ethics–a true beneficence–cannot recognize any such inequalities as those you take for granted. If ethical injunctions are to be carried out, then all social arrangements of the kinds we now know must be abolished, and replaced by social arrangements in which there are neither caste differences nor differences of means. And, under the implied system, large parts of the actions you have classed as beneficent will have no place. They will be excluded as needless or impossible."

Unquestionably there is an a priori warrant for this protest. A society in which there are marked class distinctions cannot fulfill the conditions under which only the fullest happiness can be achieved. Though it is not within the range of possibility that all the units shall be equal in respect of their endowments (a dreadful state, could it be reached), yet it is possible that there may be reached such kind of equality as results from an approximately even distribution of different kinds of powers–those who are inferior in some respects being superior in others: so producing infinite variety with a general uniformity, and so excluding gradations of social position. Some such type of human nature, and consequent social type, are contemplated by absolute ethics.

But it is forgotten that during the stages through which men and society are slowly passing, we are chiefly concerned with relative ethics and not with absolute ethics. The dictates of absolute ethics being kept before us as the ideal, we have little by little to mold the real into conformity with them, as fast as the nature of things permits. Sudden transformation being impossible, sudden fulfillment of the highest ethical requirements is impossible.

§ 473. Those who, not content with that progress through small modifications which is alone permanent, hope to reach by immediate reorganization a high social state, practically assume that the human mind can forthwith have its qualities so changed that its bad products will be replaced by good products. Old beliefs in the wonders to be worked by a beneficent fairy, were not more baseless than are these new beliefs in the wonders to be worked by a revolutionized social system.

A world which, from the far east of Russia to the far west of California and from Dunedin in the North to Dunedin at the Antipodes, daily witnesses deeds of violence, from the conquests of one people by another to the aggressions of man on man, will not easily find place for a social order implying fraternal regard of each for each. A nature which generates international hatreds and intense desires for revenge–which breeds duelists and a contempt for those who do not seek to wipe out a slight by a death, is not a nature out of which harmonious communities can be molded. Men who rush in crowds to witness the brutalities of football matches, who roar out ferocious suggestions to the players, and mob the umpires who do not please them, so that police protection is required, are not men who will show careful consideration of one another's claims when they have agreed to work together for the common good. Not by any ingenuity can there be framed well-working institutions for people who shoot those who will not enter the political combinations they form, who mutilate and torture the cattle of dissentients, who employ emissaries to blow up unconcerned persons and cause a panic, and who then, when the wretches have been convicted, are indignant that they are not released. Only to a wild imagination will it seem possible that a social regime higher than the present, can be maintained by men who, as railway employees, wreck and burn the rolling stock of companies which will not yield to their demands–men who, as ironworkers, salute with bullets those who come to take the wages they refuse, try by dynamite to destroy them along with the houses they inhabit and seek to poison them wholesale–men who, as miners, carry on a local civil war to prevent a competition they do not like. Strange, indeed, is the expectation that those who, unscrupulous as to means, selfishly strive to get as much as possible for their labor and to give as little labor as possible, will suddenly become so unselfish that the superior among them will refrain from using their superiority lest they should disadvantage the inferior!

Without having recourse to such extreme illustrations, we may see, on contemplating a widely diffused habit, how absurd is the belief that egoistic conduct may forthwith be changed into altruistic conduct. Here, throughout the whole community, from the halls of nobles and the clubs frequented by the upper ten thousand, down through the trading classes, their sons and daughters, and even to the denizens of kitchens and the boys in the street, we find gambling and betting; the universal trait of which is that each wishes to gain by his neighbor's loss. And now we are told that under a new social system, all those who have greater ability will submit to loss that those who have less ability may gain! Without any transformation of men's characters, but merely by transforming social arrangements, it is hoped to get the effects of goodness without the goodness!

§ 474. While the majority believe that human nature is unchangeable, there are some who believe that it may rapidly be changed. Both beliefs are wrong. Great alterations may be wrought, but only in course of multitudinous generations: the small alterations, such as those which distinguish nation from nation, taking centuries, and the great alterations, molding an egoistic nature into an altruistic one, taking eras. Nothing but a prolonged discipline of social life–obtainment of good by submission to social requirements, and suffering of evil from disregard of them–can effect the change.

This would scarcely need saying were it not that the education received by the upper classes, and now diligently forced by them on the lower, leaves all with nature's open secrets unlearned. One of these is that there can be no social or political actions but what are determined by the minds, separate or aggregated, of human beings; that these human beings can have no mental processes and consequent activities which are not parts of their lives, subject to the laws of their lives; and that the laws of their lives are included within those most general laws to which life at large must conform. Could statesmen and politicians and philanthropists and schemers recognize this truth, which profoundly concerns them, they would see that all social phenomena, from the beginning down to the present, and onward through the future, must be concomitants of the readaptation of mankind to its new circumstances–the change from a nature which fitted men for the wandering and predatory habits of the savage, to a nature which fits them for the settled and industrial habits of the civilized. They would see that this long process, during which old aptitudes and desires have to dwindle, while new aptitudes and desires have to be developed, is necessarily a process of continued suffering. It would become manifest to them that this suffering, caused by the constant overtaxing of some powers and denying to others the activities they crave, cannot by any possibility be escaped. And they would infer, lastly, that to suspend the process by shielding individuals and classes from those stern requirements imposed by the social state, must not only fail to prevent suffering but must increase it; since the loss of adaptation consequent upon relaxation of the conditions, has eventually to be made good. The readaptation has to be gone through afresh, and the suffering borne over again.

Thus, along with those permanent functions of beneficence which will become more dominant in an ultimate social state, there must, for thousands of years, continue those temporary functions of it proper to our transitional state. After men's attempts to realize their ideals, and reform society without reforming themselves, have ended in disaster, and, sobered by sufferings, they submit themselves afresh to the hard discipline which has brought us thus far, further progress may be made. But there must be great changes before this progress can go on unimpeded. Over the greater part of the earth, men have ceased to devour one another, and to receive honor in proportion to their achievements in that way; and when societies shall have ceased to devour one another, and cease to count as glory their success in doing this, the humanization of the brute may become comparatively rapid. It is impossible that there can be much advance towards a reign of political justice internally, while there is maintained a reign of political burglary externally. But when the antagonism between the ethics of amity and the ethics of enmity has come to an end, there may go on without much check, the rise toward that high state vaguely foreshadowed by the distorted visions of our social schemes.

Meanwhile, the chief temporary function of beneficence is to mitigate the sufferings accompanying the transition; or rather, let us say, to ward off the superfluous sufferings. The miseries of readaptation are necessary; but there are accompanying unnecessary miseries which may, with universal advantage, be excluded. The beneficence which simply removes a pain must, considered apart from other effects, be held intrinsically good. The beneficence which yields present relief so far as consists with the individual's welfare, is better. But the beneficence which takes into account not only the immediate and remote results to the individual, but also the results to posterity and to society at large, is best. For this is the beneficence which is so dominated by the sense of responsibility, that it consents to bear immediate sympathetic pain, rather than be subject to the consciousness of having helped to entail greater and more widespread pains. The highest beneficence is that which is not only prepared, if need be, to sacrifice egoistic pleasures, but is also prepared, if need be, to sacrifice altruistic pleasures.

§ 475. And here we come again to the conclusion once before reached, that these self-sacrifices imposed by the transitional state, gradually diminishing, must eventually occupy but small spaces in life; while the emotions which prompted them, ceasing to be the mitigators of misery, will become the multipliers of happiness. For sympathy, which is the root of all altruism, causes participation in pleasurable feelings as well as in painful feelings; and in proportion as painful feelings become less prevalent, participation in pleasurable feelings must be its almost exclusive effect.

As was pointed out in section 93, quick and wide sympathies would intensify and multiply miseries, did they exist during stages in which the pains of average lives exceeded the pleasures. If the better constituted and the more fortunately circumstanced, were fully conscious of all which their fellow creatures have to bear, the result would be to make them as unhappy as the rest, and so increase the total unhappiness. Life would be intolerable to the highly sympathetic, could they vividly represent to themselves the tortures inflicted on Negroes by Arab slave catchers, the dreadful years passed by kidnapped Kanakas, who are slaves under another name, the daily sufferings of Hindu ryots, half-starved and heavily taxed, the dreary existence of Russian peasants, conscripted, or even in the midst of famine, bled to support conscripts. Acute fellow feeling would be a curse to its possessors, did it bring vividly before them the states of body and mind experienced even by the masses around–the long persistence in work under protesting sensations, the poor food often insufficient in quantity, the thin clothing, the insufficient fire, the scanty bedding, the crying children, the wife soured by privation and the husband occasionally brutalized by drink: all joined with hopelessness–with the consciousness that most of this has to be borne throughout the rest of life, and much of it to be intensified as old age comes on. Evidently the altruistic sentiments, while they serve in a measure to mitigate the sufferings accompanying the readaptation of the race, are continually repressed or seared by the presence of this irremediable misery, and can develop only in proportion as it diminishes. Slightly decreased suffering may be followed by slightly increased sympathy; and this, rightly directed, may further decrease the suffering; which, again, may make more sympathy possible; and so on pari passu. But only when the amount of suffering has become insignificant, can fellow feeling reach its full development.

When the pressure of population has been rendered small–proximately by prudential restraints and ultimately by decrease of fertility–and when long-range rifles, big guns, dynamite shells, and other implements for wholesale slaughter which Christian peoples have improved so greatly of late, are to be found only in museums; sympathy will probably increase to a degree which we can now scarcely conceive. For the process of evolution must inevitably favor all changes of nature which increase life and augment happiness: especially such as do this at small cost. Natures which, by the help of a more developed language of emotion, vocal and facial, are enabled to enter so fully into others' pleasurable feelings that they can add these to their own, must be natures capable of a beatitude far greater than is now possible. In such natures a large part of the mental life must result from participation in the mental lives of others.

Thus, along with increasing readaptation, altruism will become less and less the assuager of suffering and more and more the exalter of happiness.

§ 476. To most this conclusion will not commend itself: dissent being in some intellectually prompted and in others emotionally prompted. The first constitute the class of men who, while believing in organic evolution, and knowing that many of the multitudinous transformations effected by it are so marvellous as to seem scarcely credible, nevertheless tacitly assume that no further transformations will take place–not even such relatively small ones as would raise the higher types of men to a type fitted for harmonious social cooperation. The second constitute the much larger class, to whom the future of humanity is not a matter of much interest; and who regard with indifference a conclusion which holds out no promise of benefit to themselves, either here or hereafter.

But there exist a few who differ intellectually from the one of these classes and morally from the other. To them it seems not only rational to believe in some further evolution, but irrational to doubt it–irrational to suppose that the causes which have in the past worked such wonderful effects, will in the future work no effects. Not expecting that any existing society will reach a high organization, nor that any of the varieties of men now living will become fully adapted to social life, they yet look forward through unceasing changes, now progressive now retrogressive, to the evolution of a humanity adjusted to the requirements of its life. And along with this belief there arises, in an increasing number, the desire to further the development. The anxieties which in many now go beyond the welfares of personal descendants, and include the welfare of the nation and its institutions, as well as, in some cases, the welfares of other nations and other races, will more and more become an anxiety for human progress at large.

Hereafter, the highest ambition of the beneficent will be to have a share–even though an utterly inappreciable and unknown share–in "the making of man." Experience occasionally shows that there may arise extreme interest in pursuing entirely unselfish ends; and, as time goes on, there will be more and more of those whose unselfish end will be the further evolution of humanity. While contemplating from the heights of thought, that far-off life of the race never to be enjoyed by them, but only by a remote posterity, they will feel a calm pleasure in the consciousness of having aided the advance towards it.

[II-437]

APPENDIX A.

THE KANTIAN IDEA OF RIGHTS.↩

Among the tracks of thought pursued by multitudinous minds in the course of ages, nearly all must have been entered upon if not explored. Hence the probability is greatly against the assumption of entire novelty in any doctrine. The remark is suggested by an instance of such an assumption erroneously made.

The fundamental principle enunciated in the chapter entitled "The Formula of Justice," is one which I set forth in Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified and the First of Them Developed, originally published at the close of 1850. I then supposed that I was the first to recognize the law of equal freedom as being that in which justice, as variously exemplified in the concrete, is summed up in the abstract. I was wrong, however. In the second of two articles entitled "Mr. Herbert Spencer's Theory of Society," published by Mr. F. W. Maitland (now Downing Professor of Law at Cambridge) in Mind, vol. viii. (1883), pp. 508—9, it was pointed out that Kant had already enunciated, in other words, a similar doctrine. Not being able to read the German quotations given by Mr. Maitland, I was unable to test his statement. When, however, I again took up the subject, and reached the chapter on "The Formula of Justice," it became needful to ascertain definitely what were Kant's views. I found them in a recent translation (1887) by Mr. W. Hastie, entitled The Philosophy of Law, An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right. In this, at p. 45, occurs the sentence: "Right, therefore, comprehends the whole of the conditions under which the voluntary actions of any one person can be harmonized in reality with the voluntary actions of every other person, according to a universal law of freedom." And then there follows this section:

Universal Principle of Right

Every action is right which in itself, or in the maxim on which it proceeds, is such that it can coexist along with the Freedom of the Will of each and all in action, according to a universal law.

If, then, my action or my condition generally can coexist with the freedom of every other, according to a universal law, anyone does me a wrong who hinders me in the performance of this action, or in the maintenance of this condition. For such a hindrance or obstruction cannot coexist with Freedom according to universal laws.

It follows also that it cannot be demanded as a matter of Right, that this universal Principle of all maxims shall itself be adopted as my maxim, that is, that l shall make it the maxim of my actions. For anyone may be free, although his Freedom is entirely indifferent to me, or even if I wished in my heart to infringe it, so long as I do not actually violate that freedom by my external action. Ethics, however, as distinguished from Jurisprudence, imposes upon me the obligation to make the fulfillment of Right a maxim of my conduct.

The universal Law of Right may then be expressed, thus: "Act externally in such a manner that the free exercise of thy Will may be able to coexist with the Freedom of all others, according to a universal Law." This is undoubtedly a Law which imposes obligation upon me; but it does not at all imply and still less command that I ought, merely on account of This obligation, to limit my freedom to these very conditions. Reason in this connection says only that it is restricted thus far by its Idea, and may be likewise thus limited in fact by others; and it lays this down as a Postulate which is not capable of further proof. As the object in view is not to teach Virtue, but to explain what right is, thus far the Law of Right, as thus laid down, may not and should not be represented as a motive-principle of action.

These passages make it clear that Kant had arrived at a conclusion which, if not the same as my own, is closely allied to it. It is, however, worth remarking that Kant's conception, similar though it is in nature, differs both in its origin and in its form.

As shown on a preceding page, his conclusion is reached by a "search in the pure reason for the sources of such judgments"–forms a part of the "metaphysic of morals"; whereas, as shown on pp. 67—68 of the original edition of Social Statics, the law of equal freedom, there shadowed forth and subsequently stated, is regarded as expressing the primary condition which must be fulfilled before the greatest happiness can be achieved by similar beings living in proximity. Kant enunciates an a priori requirement, contemplated as irrespective of beneficial ends; whereas I have enunciated this a priori requirement as one which, under the circumstances necessitated by the social state, must be conformed to for achievement of beneficial ends.

The noteworthy distinction between the forms in which the conception is presented is this. Though (on p. 56) Kant, by saying that "there is only one innate right, the birthright of freedom," clearly recognizes the positive element in the conception of justice; yet, in the passages quoted above, the right of the individual to freedom is represented as emerging by implication from the wrongfulness of acts which aggress upon this freedom. The negative element, or obligation to respect limits, is the dominant idea; whereas in my own case the positive element–the right to freedom of action–is represented as primary; while the negative element, resulting from the limitations imposed by the presence of others, is represented as secondary. This distinction may not be without its significance; for the putting of obligation in the foreground seems natural to a social state in which political restraints are strong, while the putting of claims in the foreground seems natural to a social state in which there is a greater assertion of individuality.

[II-440]

APPENDIX B.

THE LAND-QUESTION.↩

The course of nature, "red in tooth and claw," has been, on a higher plane, the course of civilization. Through "blood and iron" small clusters of men have been consolidated into larger ones, and these again into still larger ones, until nations have been formed. This process, carried on everywhere and always by brute force, has resulted in a history of wrongs upon wrongs: savage tribes have been slowly welded together by savage means. We could not, if we tried, trace back the acts of unscrupulous violence committed during these thousands of years; and could we trace them back we could not rectify their evil results.

Landownership was established during this process; and if the genesis of landownership was full of iniquities, they were iniquities committed not by the ancestors of any one class of existing men but by the ancestors of all existing men. The remote forefathers of living Englishmen were robbers, who stole the lands of men who were themselves robbers, who behaved in like manner to the robbers who preceded them. The usurpation by the Normans, here complete and there partial, was of lands which, centuries before, had been seized, some by piratical Danes and Norsemen, and some at an earlier time by hordes of invading Frisians or old English. And then the Celtic owners, expelled or enslaved by these, had in bygone ages themselves expropriated the peoples who lived in the underground houses here and there still traceable. What would happen if we tried to restore lands inequitably taken–if Normans had to give them back to Danes and Norse and Frisians, and these again to Celts, and these again to the men who lived in caves and used flint implements? The only imaginable form of the transaction would be a restoration of Great Britain bodily to the Welsh and the Highlanders; and if the Welsh and the Highlanders did not make a kindred restoration, it could only be on the ground that, having not only taken the land of the aborigines but killed them, they had thus justified their ownership!

The wish now expressed by many that landownership should be conformed to the requirements of pure equity, is in itself commendable; and is in some men prompted by conscientious feeling. One would, however, like to hear from such the demand that not only here but in the various regions we are peopling, the requirements of pure equity should be conformed to. As it is, the indignation against wrongful appropriations of land, made in the past at home, is not accompanied by any indignation against the more wrongful appropriations made at present abroad. Alike as holders of the predominant political power and as furnishing the rank and file of our armies, the masses of the people are responsible for those nefarious doings all over the world which end in the seizing of new territories and expropriation of their inhabitants. The filibustering expeditions of the old English are repeated, on a vastly larger scale, in the filibustering expeditions of the new English. Yet those who execrate ancient usurpations utter no word of protest against these far greater modern usurpations–nay, are aiders and abettors in them. Remaining as they do passive and silent while there is going on this universal land-grabbing which their votes could stop; and supplying as they do the soldiers who effect it; they are responsible for it. By deputy they are committing in this matter grosser and more numerous injustices than were committed against their forefathers.

That the masses of landless men should regard private landownership as having been wrongfully established, is natural; and, as we have seen, they are not without warrant. But if we entertain the thought of rectification, there arises in the first place the question–which are the wronged and which are the wrongers? Passing over the primary fact that the ancestors of existing Englishmen, landed and landless, were, as a body, men who took the land by violence from previous owners; and thinking only of the force and fraud by which certain of these ancestors obtained possession of the land while others of them lost possession; the preliminary question is–Which are the descendants of the one and of the other? It is tacitly assumed that those who now own lands are the posterity of the usurpers, and that those who now have no lands are the posterity of those whose lands were usurped. But this is far from being the case. The fact that among the nobility there are very few whose titles go back to the days when the last usurpations took place, and none to the days when there took place the original usurpations; joined with the fact that among existing landowners there are many whose names imply artisan-ancestors; show that we have not now to deal with descendants of those who unjustly appropriated the land. While, conversely, the numbers of the landless whose names prove that their forefathers belonged to the higher ranks (numbers which must be doubled to take account of intermarriages with female descendants) show that among those who are now without land, many inherit the blood of the land-usurpers. Hence, that bitter feeling towards the landed which contemplation of the past generates in many of the landless, is in great measure misplaced. They are themselves to a considerable extent descendants of the sinners; while those they scowl at are to a considerable extent descendants of the sinned-against.

But granting all that is said about past inequities, and leav ing aside all other obstacles in the way of an equitable rearrangement, there is an obstacle which seems to have been overlooked. Even supposing that the English as a race gained possession of the land equitably, which they did not; and even supposing that existing landowners are the posterity of those who spoiled their fellows, which in large part they are not; and even supposing that the existing landless are the posterity of the despoiled, which in large part they are not; there would still have to be recognized a transaction that goes far to prevent rectification of injustices. If we are to go back upon the past at all, we must go back upon the past wholly, and take account not only of that which the people at large have lost by private appropriation of land, but also that which they have received in the form of a share of the returns-we must take account, that is, of Poor Law relief. Mr. T. Mackay, author of The English Poor, has kindly furnished me with the following memoranda, showing something like the total amount of this since the 43rd Elizabeth (1601) in England and Wales.

Sir G. Nicholls [History of Poor Law, appendix to Vol. II] ventures no estimate till 1688. At that date he puts the poor rate at nearly £700,000 a year. Till the beginning of this century the amounts are based more or less on estimate.

The above represents the amount expended in relief of the poor. Under the general term "poor rate," moneys have always been collected for other purposes–county, borough, police rates, &c. The following table shows the annual amounts of these in connection with the annual amounts expended on the poor.

In addition, therefore, to sums set out in the first table, there is a further sum, rising during the century from 1 1/4 to 7 1/2 millions per annum "for other purposes."

Mulhall on whom I relied for figures between 1853 and 1875 does not give "other expenditure."

Of course of the £734,000,000 given to the poorer members of the landless class during three centuries, a part has arisen from rates on houses; only such portion of which as is chargeable against ground rents, being rightly included in the sum the land has contributed. From a landowner, who is at the same time a Queen's Counsel, frequently employed professionally to arbitrate in questions of local taxation, I have received the opinion that if, out of the total sum received by the poor, £500,000,000 is credited to the land, this will be an underestimate. Thus even if we ignore the fact that this amount, gradually contributed, would, if otherwise gradually invested, have yielded in returns of one or other kind a far larger sum, it is manifest that against the claim of the landless may be set off a large claim of the landed–perhaps a larger claim.

For now observe that the landless have not an equitable claim to the land in its present state–cleared, drained, fenced, fertilized, and furnished with farmbuildings, &c.–but only to the land in its primitive state, here stony and there marshy, covered with forest, gorse, heather, &c.: this only, it is, which belongs to the community. Hence, therefore, the question arises–What is the relation between the original "prairie value" of the land, and the amount which the poorer among the landless have received during these three centuries. Probably the landowners would contend that for the land in its primitive, unsubdued state, furnishing nothing but wild animals and wild fruits, £500,000,000 would be a high price.

When, in Social Statics, published in 1850, I drew from the law of equal freedom the corollary that the land could not equitably be alienated from the community, and argued that, after compensating its existing holders, it should be reappropriated by the community. I overlooked the foregoing considerations. Moreover, I did not clearly see what would be implied by the giving of compensation for all that value which the labor of ages has given to the land. While, as shown in chap. 11, I adhere to the inference originally drawn, that the aggregate of men forming the community are the supreme owners of the land–an inference harmonizing with legal doctrine and daily acted upon in legislation–a fuller consideration of the matter has led me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject to state suzerainty, should be maintained.

Even were it possible to rectify the inequitable doings which have gone on during past thousands of years, and by some balancing of claims and counterclaims, past and present, to make a rearrangement equitable in the abstract, the resulting state of things would be a less desirable one than the present. Setting aside all financial objections to nationalization (which of themselves negative the transaction, since, if equitably effected, it would be a losing one), it suffices to remember the inferiority of public administration to private administration, to see that ownership by the state would work ill. Under the existing system of ownership, those who manage the land, experience a direct connection between effort and benefit; while, were it under state ownership, those who managed it would experience no such direct connection. The vices of officialism would inevitably entail immense evils.

[II-445]

APPENDIX C.

THE MORAL MOTIVE.↩

Some months after the first five chapters of this volume appeared in The Nineteenth Century, the Rev J. Llewelyn Davies published in The Guardian for July 16, 1890, some criticisms upon them. Such of these criticisms as concern other questions I pass over, and here limit myself to one which concerns the sentiment of duty, and the authority of that sentiment. Mr. Davies says:

To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Spencer, though often challenged, has never fully explained how, with his philosophy, he can take advantage of the ordinary language and sentiment of mankind about . . . . I have to repeat a criticism which I offered in my former paper. Mr. Spencer seems to me to imply what he professes not to recognize. To construct the idea and sentiment of justice, he implies a law having authority over the human mind and its conduct–viz., that the well-being of the species is to be desired, and an acknowledgment by the human mind of that law, a self-justifying response to it. Whilst he confines himself to tracing natural evolution, he has no right to use the terms of duty. What can be added to the dictum of Kant, and how can it be confuted?

If we fix our eyes simply upon the course of nature, the ought has no meaning whatever. It is as absurd to ask what nature ought to be as to ask what sort of properties a circle ought to have. The only question we can properly ask is, What comes to pass in nature? just as we can only ask, What actually are the properties of a circle?

When Mr. Spencer inveighs with genuine moral vehemence against aggression and other forms of illdoing, when he protests, for example, against "that miserable laisse-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims"–he is borrowing our thunder, he is stealing fire from heaven.

And then, after further argument, Mr. Davies ends his letter by asking for "some justification of the use of ethical terms by one who professes only to describe natural and necessary processes.

As Mr. Davies forwarded to me a copy of The Guardian containing his letter, my reply took the form of a letter addressed to him, which appeared in The Guardian for August 6. With the exception of an omitted part, relating to another matter, it ran as follows:

Fairfield, Pewsey, Wilts, July 24, 1890

Dear Mr. Davies–The copy of the Guardian has just reached me, and I have read your criticism with much interest. Would that criticisms in general were written in the same spirit!

*****

In asserting the illegitimacy of my use of the words "duty," "ought," "obligation," &c., you remind me of the criticisms of Mr. Lilly. By such community as exists between you, amid your differences, you are both led to the assumption that the idea of "duty" can have no other than a supernatural origin.

This assumption implies that men's actions are determined only by recognition of ultimate consequences, and that if recognition of ultimate consequences does not lead them to do right, they can have no motive to do right. But the great mass of men's actions are directly prompted by their likings, without thought of remote results; and among actions thus prompted are, in many cases, those which conduce to other men's welfare. Though, on reflection, such actions are seen to be congruous with the ends ranked as the highest, yet they are not prompted by thought of such ends.

The relation of direct to indirect motives is best seen in a familiar case. Any normally constituted parent spends much labor and thought in furthering the welfare of his children, and daily, for many years, is impelled to do this by immediate liking–cannot bear to do otherwise. Nevertheless, while he is not impelled to do what he does by the consciousness that he ought to do it, if you ask the reasons for his self-sacrificing conduct he will say that he is under obligation; and if you push your inquiries to the end, you will compel him to assign the fact that if men in general did not do the like the race would disappear. Though the consciousness of obligation may serve to justify, and perhaps in a small degree to strengthen, the promptings of his natural affections, yet these are quite sufficient of themselves.

Similarly is it with the idea of obligation in respect of conduct to our fellow men. As you must know from your personal experiences, such conduct may be effectually prompted by immediate desire, without thought of other consequence than the benefits given. And though these benefits are given from simple desire to give them, if the question be raised whether they should be given, there comes the answer that it is a duty to minister to human welfare.

You contend that my theory of moral guidance gives me no warrant for anger against aggression, or other ill doing: saying of me that, in such case, "he is borrowing our thunder." This implies the assertion that only those who accept the current creed have any right to feel indignant when they see other men wronged. But I cannot allow you thus to monopolize righteous indignation. If you ask what prompts me to denounce our unjust treatment of inferior races, I reply that I am prompted by a feeling which is aroused in me quite apart from any sense of duty quite apart from any thought of Divine command, quite apart from any thought of reward or punishment here or hereafter. In part the feeling results from consciousness of the suffering inflicted, which is a painful consciousness, and in part from irritation at the breach of a law of conduct on behalf of which my sentiments are enlisted, and obedience to which I regard as needful for the welfare of humanity in general. If you say that my theory gives me no reason for feeling this pain, the answer is that I cannot help feeling it; and if you say that my theory gives me no reason for my interest in asserting this principle, the answer is that I cannot help being interested. And when analysis shows me that the feeling and the principle are such as, if cherished and acted upon, must conduce to the progress of humanity towards a higher form, capable of greater happiness, I find that though my action is not immediately prompted by the sense of obligation, yet it conforms to my idea of obligation.

That motives hence resulting may be adequately operative, you will find proof on recalling certain transactions, dating back some eight years, in which we were both concerned. You can scarcely fail to remember that those who were moved by feelings and ideas such as I have described, and not by any motives which the current creed furnishes, displayed more anxiety that our dealings with alien peoples should be guided by what are called Christian principles than is displayed by Christians in general.[1] I am, sincerely yours,

Herbert Spencer

P.S.–Should you wish to publish this letter as my response to your appeal, I am quite willing that you should do so. Other claims on my time will, however, prevent me from carrying the discussion further.

Along with this letter, when published in The Guardian, there appeared a rejoinder from Mr. Davies, which, omitting, as before, a part concerning a different question, ran thus:

Kirkby Lonsdale, July 28, 1890

Dear Mr. Spencer–I am much obliged to you for responding so kindly to the challenge which I ventured to address to you. You will not think it ungracious, I hope, if, notwithstanding the purpose which you intimate in your postscript, I make public some of the reflections which your letter suggests to me.

*****

Most amply do I acknowledge the generous zeal for human welfare, the indignation against oppression, shown by yourself and others who recognize no supernatural sanction of morality. The Christianity of today owes much to–has, I hope, really gained much from–your own humane ardor and the bold protestations of the followers of Comte. A Christian's allegiance is not to the Christian world, not even to Christianity but to the law of Christ and the will of the Heavenly Father; and he may as easily admit that Christians have been surpassed in Christian feeling and action by agnostics as that the priest and the Levite were put to shame by the Samaritan.

I have also no difficulty in acknowledging that the performance of good offices may arise out of sympathy and pleasure in doing them. l do not understand why "the assumption that the idea of ‘duty’ has a supernatural origin" should be supposed to imply "that men's actions are determined only by recognition of ultimate consequences, and that if recognition of ultimate consequences does not lead them to do right, they can have no motive to do right." I never thought of questioning that men act, in a great part of their conduct, from the motives you describe. What I wish to know is why, when the thought of duty comes in, a man should think himself bound to do, whether he likes it or not, what will tend to the preservation of the species. It is quite intelligible to me that you "cannot help" trying to protect other men from wrong: what I still fail to see clearly is how your philosophy justifies you in reproaching those who can help being good. It is nature, you say, that makes the thoughtful parent good, that makes the generous man sacrifice himself for the benefit of his fellow men. But nature also makes many parents selfishly regardless of the interests of their children; nature makes some men hardened freebooters. If they also cannot help being what they are, is there any sense, from your point of view, in saying that they act as they ought not to act? Would they feel that you were appealing to their sense of duty if you explained to them as a fact of nature that, should other men do as they are doing, the race would tend to disappear? To Mr. Huxley, as a philosopher, a taste for good behavior belongs to the same category as an ear for music–some persons have it and others are without it; the question which I cannot help asking is whether that is the ultimate word of your ethics. I cannot see how a man who is made aware that he acts only from natural impulse can reasonably consider whether he ought or ought not to do a certain thing, nor how a man who knows that he acts only for the gratification of his own desires can reasonably throw himself away for the sake of any advantage to be won for others.

As I do not quite know what "the current creed" may be on the questions at issue, I beg leave to sum up my own belief as follows: The Unseen Power is gradually creating mankind by processes of development, and the human consciousness is so made as to be responsive to the authority of this Power; justice is the progressive order which the Maker is establishing amongst human beings, and it is binding upon each man as he becomes aware of it, and is felt to be binding, because he is the Maker's creature. Believe me, very truly yours,

J. Llewelyn Davies

Before proceeding to discuss further the special question at issue, I may remark, respecting the more general question involved in Mr. Davies' closing paragraph, that there is a curiously close kinship between his view and that which I have myself more than once expressed. In section 34 of First Principles I have said, in reference to the hesitating inquirer:

It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a product of the time. He must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future; and that his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief.

And then in the Data of Ethics, section 62, speaking of the different types of ethical doctrine as severally presenting one or other aspect of the truth, I have said:

The theological theory contains a part. If for the divine will, supposed to be supernaturally revealed, we substitute the naturally revealed end towards which the Power manifested throughout Evolution works; then, since Evolution has been, and is still, working towards the highest life, it follows that conforming to those principles by which the highest life is achieved, is furthering that end.

Returning now to the special question, I have first to remark that Mr. Davies, and those who take kindred views, tacitly assume that the conception of "ought" is a universal and a fixed conception; whereas it is a variable conception, and is in large measure relevant to the social needs of the time being. In an article on "The Ethics of Kant," published in The Fortnightly Review for July 1888 and now contained in the third volume of my Essays, I have given seven authorities in support of the conclusion that "the lower races of men may be said to be deficient in the idea of right": they have no such feeling of "ought" as is general with us, and where it exists it is often quite otherwise directed. Among various savage peoples the duty of blood revenge is of all duties the most sacred. A Fijian slave tribe "said it was their duty to become food and sacrifices for the chiefs"; and Jackson tells of a Fijian chief who was thrown into religious frenzy from a belief that the god was angry with him for not killing more of the enemy. Nor is it among the inferior races that we meet with conceptions of "ought" utterly different from those which Mr. Davies assumes are recognized by men as of supreme authority. Among the Riff pirates of the Morocco coast, the greatest insult a man can receive is to be told that his father died in his bed–that he did not die fighting while engaged in robbery: the implication being that he ought to have so died. Similarly is it with European peoples in respect of duels. The aggrieved man is forced by a strong sense of obligation to challenge one who has injured him; and the injurer entertains no doubt that he ought to accept the challenge–feels, in common with all his associates, that it is his duty to do this thing which is condemned by the creed he professes. And in the German Emperor's recent applause of dueling clubs as giving to the youth "the true direction of his life," we see a deliberate advocacy of usages utterly at variance with the nominally accepted principles of right conduct.

These cases show, I think, that the conception of "ought" is relevant, partly to sentiments predominant in the individual, partly to the feelings and ideas instilled during education, and partly to the public opinion which prevails: all of them variable factors. The truth is that every desire, seeking as it does gratification, carries along with it the idea that its gratification is proper or right; and when it is a powerful desire it generates, when it is denied, the idea that the denial is wrong. So true is this that a feeling which prompted a wrong action, but was effectually resisted, will, in some cases, afterward generate regret that the act prompted was not committed; while, conversely, a good action at variance with the habitual bad actions may be followed by repentance: instance the miser who feels sorry that he was betrayed into a piece of generosity. Similarly the consciousness of "ought," as existing among men of superior types, is simply the voice of certain governing sentiments developed by the higher forms of social life, which are in each individual endorsed by transmitted beliefs and current opinion–a sanction much stronger than that which any of the inferior feelings have.

A full answer to the question put by Mr. Davies, presented in a different and much more elaborate form, has been already given in The Data of Ethics. In the chapter entitled "The Psychological View," and more especially in sections 42—46, the genesis of the feeling of obligation is explained at considerable length.

Perhaps he will still ask–Why, having the feeling of obligation, should a man yield to it? If so, the answer is of the same general nature as that which may be given to the question–Why, having an appetite for food, should a man eat? Though, in the normal order, a man eats to satisfy hunger, and without definite consciousness of remoter ends, yet, if you demand his justification, he replies that, as conducive to health, strength, and ability to carry on life and do his work, the yielding to his appetite is needful. And similarly one who performs an act which his sense of duty prompts, if asked for his reason, may fitly reply that though he yielded to the feeling without thought of distant consequences, yet he sees that the distant consequences of such conformity are, on the average of cases, beneficial not only to others but in the long run to himself. And here let me repeat a truth which I have elsewhere insisted upon, that just as food is rightly taken only when taken to appease hunger, while the having to take it when there is no inclination implies deranged physical state; so, a good act or act of duty is rightly done only if done in satisfaction of immediate feeling, and if done with a view of ultimate results, in this world or another world, implies an imperfect moral state.

[After the publication of the first edition of this work, I received from Mr. Davies a letter containing, among others, the following paragraph:

"Allow me to demur to one statement you make in the Appendix on the moral motive. I think I, for one, do not tacitly assume that the conception of ‘ought’ is ‘a fixed conception.’ I hold that the notions of what is right vary with the variations, and advance with the progress, of the social order."

Hence it appears that in a further respect Mr. Davies' views and my own diverge in a smaller degree than at first appeared.]

[II-451]

APPENDIX D.

CONSCIENCE IN ANIMALS.↩

Shortly after the publication in The Guardian of the correspondence reproduced in the preceding Appendix, I received from a gentleman residing in Devonshire the letter which I here quote:

Dear Sir–The following careful observations on animals other than man may be of interest to you as supporting your idea that the idea of "duty" or "ought" (owe it) may be of non-"supernatural" origin. ["Supernatural" is used in usual sense without committing the writer to any opinion.]

My dog has an aversion to injure living flesh or anything that is "shaped." He will not bite any animal except under the greatest provocation. If l press a sharp-pointed pen-knife against the skin of the back, he seizes my wrist between his hind teeth. The mechanical advantage is such, that if he closed his jaw he could crush flesh and bone. But no matter how I increase or prolong the pressure he will not close his jaw sufficiently to mark the flesh. l have repeated this and similar experiments may times. I can't find how the "ought" was established. It is not hereditary. The father was a good-tempered "fighting" dog–the mother most vicious; but I never allowed her to come into contact with the pup but in the dusk, in order to avoid imitation or unconscious education.

Until "Punch" was three yrs. old I never knew him give an angry growl. I sat down on his tail, doubling it under me accidentally one day, when I heard a growl of a totally different timber to what I had ever before. The odd thing was–when I rose the dog begged pardon for the unusual tone and temper in a way that could not be mistaken.

Evidently he recognized his own violation of an "ought" existing in his mind (conscience).

Further, if I tease him with a rough stick he seizes it and crushes it, but if with my crutch (l am lame) or my mahl stick, he seizes it; but will not leave the mark of his teeth in anything that has had "work" done on it to any extent.

The "ought" may be established as an obligation to a higher mind, in opposition to the promptings of the strongest feelings of the animal, e.g.

A bitch I had many years ago showed great pleasure at the attentions of male dogs, when in season. I checked her repeatedly, by voice only. This set up the "ought" so thoroughly, that tho' never tied up at such times, she died a virgin at 13 1/2 yrs. old.[2] By the time she was 4 she resented strongly any attention from the male, and by seven she was a spiteful old maid, resenting even the presence of the males.

Dogs can form a standard of "ought" as to skill or powers of doing. This bitch was a powerful swimmer. A young smooth Scotch terrier was introduced into the house. They became playfellows, chasing and running all over the grounds. One day they were crossing the Prince's Street Ferry, Bristol. The bitch sprang from the ferry boat as usual into the water and the young dog followed; but began to drown. She saw his efforts, seized him by the back of neck and swam ashore with him. A few seconds after, she seized him and shook him violently for some time. Ever after, she bit or shook him if he attempted to play. [Contempt on discovery of want of power she apparently regarded before as normal?]

Further, "indignation" is not confined to human beings. I used to pretend to beat a younger sister and she feigned crying. The bitch flew at me. Reversing the conditions, the bitch growled and finally flew at my sister. We tried the experiment many times with other actors and same results. Her sympathies were always on the side of the persons attacked, unless she had a previous dislike to them.

Further observation showing her the attacks were feigned, she often joined in them with uproarious hilarity, but this state of mind did not arise till after repeated observation.

Pardon these records of observation if they appear trivial. Unfortunately I have only been able to make myself acquainted very partially with your works, and such facts may have come under your observation to a greater extent than under mine.

I am yours obdtly.,
T. Mann Jones

Northam, Devon,
14/8/90

My response, thanking Mr. Jones and recognizing the value of the facts set forth in his letter, drew from him a second letter, in which he says:

Pray make what use you like of the letter, but it is only right to say that some of the facts are in the possession of Prof. Romanes. You can depend upon the accuracy of the observations–I learned to observe from the Belfast naturalists, Pattison, the Thompsons and others and I trained my wife, before marriage, to help me, and not run away with mere impressions.

The idea of "ought" is abnormally strong in Punch, the dog I spoke of–his tastes too are unusual. He cares more for sweets than meat. When he was about 6 months old I found out some way he had gained the meaning of Yes and No. I have hundreds of times offered him a knob of sugar–when he was on the point of taking it said No! He draws back. If he has taken it in his mouth a whispered No! causes him to drop it. If he is lying down and I place sugar all round whispering No! the lumps remain untouched till a "Yes" is said. But–but–but–the dog differs from the human being! He will rarely accept a first Yes, tho' he does a first No! Experience has taught him the Yes may be followed by a No! and he waits expectantly. There is no eagerness to set aside the "ought" when an excuse offers. (Special probably, not general in dogs.) The minds of dogs discriminate between great and small departures from their standard of "ought." If I dropped a fair-sized piece of sugar, neither Fan (the bitch) nor Punch, considered they had the slightest right to touch it. If the piece were very small both hesitated–and if No! were not said, finally ate it. I have tried graduating the lumps to find out where the "ought" came in. The male has a finer conscience than the female. I need hardly say I carefully avoided loud tones and gesticulation.

No! Oh! So! Go! are equivalents to a dog's ear, but the sibilant must be very soft. So also "Yes," "bess," "press," but they recognize various forms of expression as equivalent. "Yes," or "You may have it," are same value to Punch. My pony is nervously anxious to obey the "ought." Woh! Halt! Stop! &c., are of equal value. The dog appears to me to study the tone less than the pony and to pay more attention to sound and its quantity. Many of the acts of both strike me as possibly acts of "worship" in its simplest form, e.g., the fact I think I mentioned in my letter, of the dog's anxiety to "propitiate" on the occasion of his first angry growl, when three years old; though l had not recognized the "ought" in the dog's mind nor had l ever punished him.

Along with this letter Mr. Mann Jones inclosed a series of memoranda which, while they are highly interesting and instructive, also serve to show how carefully and critically his inquiries have been conducted, and how trustworthy, therefore, are his conclusions. With the omission of some paragraphs, they are as follows:

Recognition of duty or ought in a bitch–deliberate violation of the principle recognized–simulation of indignation at the ought being set at nought by a cat

Prior to ’85 I had satisfied myself that domestic animals recognized duty. I was anxious, however, to procure as thoroughly degraded an animal as I could to test-1st, whether the "ought" might not proceed from two very different classes of motives, which I had been accustomed to distinguish as (A) the Rectal-moral and (B) the selfish or conventional-moral. 2ndly, I wanted to test whether the idea set forth by some theologians that the "most noxious animal was innocent," and that moral responsibility only attached to man, was true.

I observed a very handsome bitch at Mardock station repeatedly drive a large number of fowls belonging to the stationmaster off the line and platform so soon as she heard the distance signal.

I asked her history and found she had been accidentally left by a lady traveling in a first-class carriage some months before. I inferred she was likely to have been "spoiled" and as she was evidently aged, she would not easily lose any bad habits. Further, I ascertained she was gluttonous, passionate, yet sulky, lascivious, a coward, not fond of children, without any strong attachments, and dirty in her habits. She seemed so much like the worst specimen of "fallen humanity" the putaine, that I asked but one more question ‘she is very intelligent, you have taught her to clear the station at proper time?' `She is very sharp, but I did not teach her; she watched the boy a few times doing the work and then took it as her duty. Now, though she is very greedy, if we are late in the morning, she comes without her breakfast and has nothing till late in the day rather than not clear the line.' This trait decided me. I thought if I removed her from the stationmaster's house, she would drop the last "duty" that was at all unselfish, and be thoroughly "bad-all-round."

I took her home. She went willingly, shewing no fright and making herself at home on reaching my house. I kept her in a house and an outhouse 24 hours, feeding her well, then took her to the station when she showed little pleasure at seeing her master and little inclination for the old duty. By end of a fortnight she took no notice of either.

The third morning the stableboy, Ben, came to me. `Sir, Judy is mad. I was sweeping near her over 2 hours ago and stooped to pat her. She first bit my hand and then my leg' (both wounds bled) `and she has sat in the corner, with her back crushed into it, ever since.' I went to the stable, spoke kindly to her and then stooped to pat her. She snapt viciously, Letting the muscles of the hand balance so that the finger bones and metacarpals played loose on each other and the wrist, I struck her heavily over the eyes. She snapt again and I struck as she snapt. The contest continued 5 minutes, when I left her, nearly blind eyed and tired. 1 asked Ben two hours after how she was. `Oh! I think she is mad. She is as sulky as ever and sits as she was in the corner.' When I went in, she came forward and fawned upon me. From that day I never struck her. She was most obedient, good tempered, gentle and anxious to please me. To a certain extent she showed the same character to my wife and to a servant, the cook, who was very decided, but to the boy and a younger servant she showed the old character and also to others. In fact henceforth she lived a double life, altering her apparent character the moment she heard my footstep. I saw here that her sense of duty and her obedience had no ethical value: they were simply effects of fear, or, in some degree, hope of gain. They formed no part of her real character.

I took care she was frequently and well fed, purposely with a large variety of food. I therefore left no motive for theft. About a fortnight after 1 bought her, the cook came to my wife–Ma’m, I am constantly missing things off the kitchen table. Either one of the cats has turned thief or Judy takes the things, yet I can't tell how she gets at them. 1 don't leave a chair near enough the table for her to use–besides she is so stiff and long-backed that if she tries to get on the chair she slips over the other side.'

I give a diagram of kitchen and surroundings to make clear what follows. I caused a number of articles of food brought out of dining room, to be placed on the table: the chair being put too far off for use. Sending some of the family in the dining room with injunctions to keep still till I called I left the two cats and Judy at their plate, f. I then went into the garden but returned quietly to window b, which had a colored muslin half-blind that hid me from observation. As soon as all was quiet Judy left her dinner, went to door d, apparently listened intently and looked repeatedly up and down passage. She then went to x and reared herself on her hind legs, walking along so as to see the whole surface of table and going backward so as to get better view. She then went to one of the cats and hustled her to the chair. The cat at length understood Judy, jumped on chair, thence on to table and dragged a meat bone down to f. Judy shook her–took the bone and began to pick it. I gave the signal and a light-footed girl ran into the kitchen. As soon as Judy heard the footsteps, which was not till the girl got to the door, she flew at the cat with a growl and worried her and finally chased her through a hedge 200 feet off.

I saw the whole of this drama enacted on two occasion–parts on several; others saw parts many times. The same caution to ascertain the "coast was clear," the same employment of one or other of the cats and the same feigned indignation and attempt by gesture to fix the theft on the cat, occurred every time.

I don't think I am wrong in concluding that Judy recognized that the cat had no right to get on the table after the food; that she was instigating breach of duty, and that she simulated anger in order to shift responsibility which her mind acknowledged.

Space and time prevent my giving many more illustrations of her character. She was an extreme type, but I have had other animals like her, who recognized duty and "moral obligation" to a greater or less extent as something expected of them by a superior, but which they performed entirely from hopes of reward or fear of punishment generally, occasionally from liking (which was not sympathy) but that form arising from the object giving pleasure or profit to the subject so "liking." The idea of duty, justice, "ought," in all such cases arose from selfishness. I class them as "selfish-moral," conventional-moral, fashion-moral acts of duty, or shortly as "Judyism."

I now proceed briefly to consider the "sense of duty" or "ought" in another of my teachers–the dog Punch. I have given details before but briefly. He wills not to injure any living thing, nor anything that shows by its shape that work has been expended upon it. The most striking instance is that l have repeatedly purposely caused him severe and long continued pain by pressing upon and even cutting the subcutaneous loops of the nerves without ever being able to induce him to bite me or even snap at me. In the same way, when bitten by dogs, often severely, he will not bite them. There appears to me to be here a "sense of duty," or of "ought," which is specifically different from all those varieties I have styled Judyism.

I ask why does he not bite?

It may be said he is afraid of you. I think that if anyone saw the relations between us they would soon dismiss this as the motive. I appreciate him too much as a valuable "subject" to make the blunder of inspiring fear. I would as soon think of doing so as the electrician would think of using his most sensitive electroscope roughly. The dog and his pupil are so en rapport that if the former wants a door opened, or a thorn or insect removed, he comes to me, say I am at my desk, stands up, puts his right paw on my arm and taps my shoulder with the left repeatedly till l attend to him, when he clearly indicates what he wants, and if the want is to have thorn or insect removed he clearly indicates the surface, often to a square inch or nearer.

It may be urged that he will not hurt me because he has such trust or faith in me–he thinks I would not willingly hurt him. There appears something in this at first sight, and it gains color from the fact that when he was less than 12 months old, a gamekeeper shot at him when near, and deposited about 30 pellets of shot in his head and body, which I extracted. The memory of these operations might lead him to class my pressure of the knife point as something curative.

But then, where does such an explanation come in, in his behavior to my mahl stick, which he will not break under the same circumstances that cause him to crush an unshaped stick to splinters? It may be said that when bitten by another dog, he does not retaliate because he is a coward. The explanation won't do. He barks remonstratively, as he does when I hurt him when we are romping, but he won't run away. I can't get him away often, and he is frequently bitten more severely in consequence. An incident that occurred a few days back threw some more light on the idea of "right" in Punch's (or Monkey's) mind–he answers indifferently to both names. I was coming through the very narrow street of West Appledore when a much larger dog seized him, and bit Punch so severely about the face as to make him bleed. Punch then resisted for the first time, to my knowledge, not by biting, but by a Quaker-like defense that was most scientific. He seized the other dog firmly by the hind leg above the heel, and raised the leg so high off the ground as to throw the dog's body into unstable equilibrium. The dog stood still for some time, evidently afraid to move for fear of falling on his back and being at the mercy of his opponent. He was in no pain, for Punch was not biting but simply holding firmly. At length the attacking dog tried to get his head round to bite Punch again, but the latter frustrated this by lifting the leg higher and carrying it gradually round in the opposite direction to the dog's head, so as to preserve the original distance. At the end of about 2 minutes I was compelled to interfere, as a horse and cart were coming close. The dog slank off whilst Punch jumped vertically, bounding many times off the ground in a manner that I can only compare with the bounding of a football, barking merrily at the same time.

Hundreds of similar instances to the few I have given, convince me that this dog has in his mind a sense of duty totally different in kind from that which l have illustrated and characterized as Judyism. It is in fact "Do-as-you-would-be-done-by-ism." I have observed this species of sense of duty, of the "ought" (or morality) in a number of animals, and l have become accustomed to call this kind "Rectal sense of duty" and hence to divide "morality" into selfish, emotional, clique, "fashion" morality, or Judyism, and Rectal morality.

I never met with two such extreme types of the dominance of the two kinds of motive before. Most animals are actuated by the two species of sense of duty in varying ratio, many only by selfish or Fashion-morality; but some individuals appear affected little by either. These form the utterly "immoral." So far as my inductions from observations of animals go, the division into Rectal and conventional "sense of duty" is exhaustive and inclusive. All acts that recognize an "ought" appear to me to come under one or the other.

There is a remarkable difference in the animal according to which sense of duty is predominant–which species of morality rules its life. If Rectal, the animal is trustworthy, and reliable. If conventional, untrustworthy, changeable and shifty. So much for results in outward conduct. I apprehend that the results on the mind or ethical sense, of conventional morality is on the whole disintegrating. In fact I have observed this in animals, though l have not been able to pursue my observations so far as I could wish.[3]

On the other hand, the Rectal sense of duty in animals is, in the phraseology of the philosopher, a developing force. The Rectal morality of the animal increases with time. In the phraseology of some theologians it may perhaps be termed a regenerating or "saving" force. (Those who believe that a profession of a creed is the only saving force, would scarcely admit it had more value than the conventional "ought," or perhaps not as much in some cases.)

As to the origin of the Rectal sense of duty or rectal morality, so far as my observations go, the chief thing I can predicate is that it is unselfish. It seems to be closely connected with "sympathy," as distinguished from "feeling" of the kind before defined. The individuals among the higher animals who act from the rectal sense of duty appear to be remarkable, so far as my observations go, for ability to "put-yourself-in-his-place-edness" which is at the root of true "sympathy." The tendency is always "to do as they would be done by." In most cases that I have observed it appeared to be inborn, but developed as the animal got older.

The division 1 have been led to, by hundreds of observations on individuals of different species, of the "Idea of duty," and consequently all morality, into Rectal and conventional (mores) l have never seen formulated. Probably other observers have made the distinction. It is tacitly recognized, however, in most of the oldest writings I know anything of. The recognition of the value of the Rectal appears to me to run through many of the books collected as the Bible, and the O.T. and N.T. Apocrypha, like a vein of gold in quartz, and to be the very protagon or "nerve-center stuff" of most of Christ's teaching. I have seen the distinction tacitly admitted in many theological works, tho' I think I am right in asserting (1 say it as the oratorians speak–under correction) there is a want of recognition of the fact that the chief (if not only) value of the conventional "sense of duty," or selfish "ought," is to prevent friction.

Not only do animals (other than man) act upon the "ought" in their minds, but some of the more intelligent act as if they expected or believed that it existed in the minds of some men

In August `86 l was driving Prince (my pony) and at the same time discussing an interesting point in science with my wife. I generally guided him entirely by the voice, but in the heat of the argument unthinkingly emphasized my points with the whip (which had had a new knotted lash on that day) on the pony's flanks. He stopped about the third blow and looked round. This attracted my wife's attention–"Prince is remonstrating: You struck heavily." Later on I must have struck him repeatedly. When he was loosed from the harness, I was standing out of his direct line to the stable door. Instead of going to the stable, as was usual, he walked up to me, and after repeated attempts to draw my attention, touched me with his nose and then approached his nose as closely as he could to the wales. This he repeated until I had the places bathed.

About two months later, on a similar occasion, he repeated the same actions.

In autumn ’86 I was in Ware with my pony. Coming out of a shop, I was on the point of stepping into the carriage when I noticed the pony (Prince) watching me. (He was accustomed to my boy jumping up when the vehicle was in motion.) I told my wife to start him. She tried repeatedly, but he would not move till he saw I was seated, when he started at once. (The experiment was repeated many times subsequently.) The strange thing is the complicated train of thought that evolved an "ought" differing in the case of a lame man from the duty in other cases.

The same autumn, we were driving from Wearside to Hadham. On the road we met with a group of children with two perambulators. They were in awkward positions: several children being close to the lefthand hedge, a perambulator and children further to right, the second further still, as in diagram:

the distance between c.p¹, p² and right hedge being about equal. There was room to pass between p¹ and p² easily, but the children were confused and passed repeatedly between the two points. My wife said, "See if Prince will avoid the children." I dropped the reins on his neck. He went on at a smart trot till 7 or 8 yards from the children at a, when he fell into a walk, turned to the right, and passed them with the right wheel near the hedge, turning his head more and more to see whether he was dearing the right or outer perambulator. He left it about 3 yards in the rear, and then returned sharply to the left side of road and resumed his trot without any intimation he was to do so.

In Nov. ’87, after the death of my wife, a relative came to live with me and she drove the same pony. She is so deaf, she cannot hear a vehicle overtaking her. Consequently I always went with her, and if she had the reins, signed with my left hand if a vehicle were coming up behind, for her to draw over to left.

As she was driving one day up a steep hill (therefore with slack reins) on road to Ware, I heard a brewer's cart coming behind. The man had been drinking and followed close in our wake, though there was plenty of room to pass if he had kept well to the right. I gave my relative no signal, as I wanted to observe the pony's actions. He appeared nervous and restless, turning his head as far as he could to the right to see what was wrong. The man drove the heavy cart very close behind but the pony could not see the horse or vehicle. After 3 or 4 minutes anxiety (I use the word advisedly: the working of the ears and the "twitching" of his muscles justifies me), receiving no sign, he deliberately drew as closely as possible into the lefthand hedge and waited. As soon as the waggon passed, he went off at a brisk trot.

After many experiments on different days I found that if I were driving and a vehicle overtook us, Prince waited for me to tighten the left rein, but if my relative were driving, he decided by the sound when to draw to the left. Even if she tightened the right rein–he disobeyed the sign. After many experiments l had full confidence he would always act, if she were driving, on the evidence of his own hearing; and she often subsequently drove without me, the pony evidently recognizing his new duties.

Examples of animals (other than men) initiating cooperation in duty. [simultaneous occurrence of the idea of duty, suggested by same circumstances]

In the autumn of 1886, l started after 10 o'clock p.m. from my cottage at Baker's End to drive some friends homeward. On descending from the high ground, I passed into a dense fog, which the carriage lights failed to penetrate 6 feet–the fog reflected the light like a wall. Some distance past the Mardock Station road, my road turned almost at right angles. Here we so thoroughly failed to find the turning that the horse was driven against the bank, up which he reared a ashing into the hedge at the top. We all alighted and my friends went on. I turned pony and carriage and got in, to drive back: the pony moved slowly, but almost dragging the reins out of my hands. I got out thinking the reins were caught on the shaft as the pony had always shown a liking for a very tight rein down hill and our road here was a descent. I could find nothing wrong with the reins. Taking out a lamp I went to the pony's head, which he was still holding as low as he could. Then I saw his nose was nearly on the back of my black dog Jack (the father of Punch) who was standing in front with his nose near the ground, but pointing homeward. I got in; said "Go on"; did not use the reins, but as we went at a walking pace, tried frequently to measure with the whip handle the distances they kept from each hedge. They took me safely into the yard behind my house, and my measurements showed they kept the middle of the road the whole way; except at one place, where there is a deep gully on the right, separated from the road by a very slight fence. Here they kept within 18 inches of the left (or further side from the gully). Altho' the night was cold and the pace that of the Dead March, the horse was wet with perspiration and the dog panting with tongue out when we got into the yard, probably from the anxiety to do the duty they had undertaken. There are 6 turns in the road and three of them are right angles, narrow in all cases, but not more than the full length of horse and carriage, in two cases I think, and my memory is pretty clear.

There was a little episode when we got into the yard, illustrating the close analogy between the feelings of these animals and human feelings under similar circumstances. The horse rubbed his head repeatedly against Jack, whilst Jack "nosed" or rubbed his face against the pony's. No expression of mutual gratulation on the completion of a self-imposed duty could have been more significant.

There is an interesting parallelism between the conclusions drawn by Mr. Jones from his observations on the motives of animals and the conclusions concerning human motives contained in chapter 4, "The Sentiment of Justice." The distinction between "rectal-moral" and "conventional-moral" made by him, obviously corresponds with the distinction made in that chapter between the altruistic sentiment and the proaltruistic sentiment. This correspondence is the more noteworthy because it tends to justify the belief in a natural genesis of a developed moral sentiment in the one case as in the other. If in inferior animals the consciousness of duty may be produced by the discipline of life, then, a fortiori, it may be so produced in mankind.

Probably many readers will remark that the anecdotes Mr. Jones gives, recall the common saying–"Man is the god of the dog"; and prove that the sentiment of duty developed in the dog arises out of his personal relation to his master, just as the sentiment of duty in man arises out of his relation to his maker. There is good ground for this interpretation in respect of those actions of dogs which Mr. Jones distinguishes as "conventional-moral"; but it does not hold of those which he distinguishes as "rectal-moral." Especially in the case of the dog which would not bite when bitten, but contented himself with preventing his antagonist from biting again (showing a literally Christian feeling not shown by one Christian in a thousand) the act was not prompted by dutifulness to a superior. And this extreme case verifies the inference otherwise drawn, that the sentiment of duty was independent of the sentiment of subordination.

But even were it true that such sentiment of duty as may exist in the relatively undeveloped minds of the higher animals, is exclusively generated by personal relation to a superior, it would not follow that in the much more developed minds of men, there cannot be generated a sentiment of duty which is independent of personal relation to a superior. For experience shows that, in the wider intelligence of the human being, apart from the pleasing of God as a motive, there may arise the benefiting of fellow men as a motive; and that the sentiment of duty may come to be associated with the last as with the first. Beyond question there are many who are constrained by their natures to devote their energies to philanthropic ends, and do this without any regard for personal benefit. Indeed there are here and there men who would consider themselves insulted if told that what they did was done with the view of obtaining divine favor.

[II-461]

APPENDIX E.

REPLIES TO CRITICISMS.↩

[The following replies to criticisms originally appeared in Mind for January 1881. I have thought it well to give them here a permanent place, because, in making them, I have had occasion further to elucidate certain of the doctrines set forth in the preceding pages.]

An ethical writer who was required to treat of right and wrong conduct, while saying nothing about any purpose to be effected by conduct, would be greatly perplexed. Were he forbidden to bring in the thoughts of good, better and best in relation to results, moral distinctions among actions would not be easily expressed. I make this remark because Mr. Sidgwick, in his article in Mind, XVIII, entitled "Mr. Spencer's Ethical System," quoting from me the phrase, "conduct falling short of its ideal," remarks: "The frankly teleological point of view from which, in this book, Mr. Spencer contemplates the phenomena of life generally, seems worthy of notice, since in his Principles of Biology he seems to have taken some pains to avoid `teleological implications.'"

That a science which has for its subject matter the characters of the ends pursued by men, and the characters of the means used for achieving such ends, can restrict itself to statements in which ends are not implied, is a strange assumption. Teleology of a kind is necessarily involved; and the only question is whether it is of the legitimate or the illegitimate kind. The contrast between the two may readily be shown by a biological illustration. If I speculate concerning the stony shell of a gromwell seed, so hard that it is uninjured by the beak of a bird which swallows the seed, and effectually resists the grinding actions of the bird's gizzard, and if I argue that this hard shell was provided for the purpose of protecting the seed and thus securing its eventual germination, I am arguing teleologically in the vicious way. If, on the other hand, my interpretation is that among the seeds of some remote ancestral plant one with an unusually thick shell passed away uninjured by a bird's beak and stomach, while the rest with thinner shells were broken up and digested; and if I infer that among the seeds of the plant originating from the undigested seed, generally inheriting this greater thickness, those most frequently lived and propagated which had the thickest or hardest shells, until, by survival of the fittest, shells of this extreme density. completely protective, were produced; and if I argue that maintenance of the species was throughout this process the end more effectually subserved; I am also arguing teleologically, but in the legitimate way. There enters the conception of a cause for the genesis of the hard shell, which is, in a sense, a final cause–not that proximate cause constituted by the physiological processes going on in the plant, but a cause remote from these, which, nevertheless, so far determines them that in its absence they would not exist. And it is thus with biological interpretations of structures and functions in general. The welfare of the organism, or of the species, is in every case the end to further which a structure exists; and the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate teleology is that, while the one explains its existence as having gradually arisen by furthering the end, the other gives no explanation of its existence other than that it was put there to further the end–a final cause of the "barren virgin" sort.

Throughout the Data of Ethics, as throughout every ethical treatise, ends are constantly in view, and the interpretations have unceasing reference to them. I have, indeed, in a chapter on "The Physical View" of ethics, treated of conduct as low or high, according as it subserves in a less or greater degree, maintenance of a moving equilibrium; which is, I think, a more unteleological way of regarding it than has been followed by any ethical writer. In this chapter, the evolution of that which we ordinarily conceive as higher conduct, is presented as a process expressible in terms of matter and motion. For the implication of the argument (in harmony with an argument contained in two chapters in the Principles of Biology on direct and indirect equilibration) is that, inevitably, those aggregates in which the moving equilibrium is the best, are those which remain outstanding when others disappear; and that so, by inheritance, the tendency is to the establishment of an ever-better moving equilibrium: higher conduct is defined apart even from consciousness–apart from alleged human ends or assumed divine ends. When, in the next chapter, it is shown that what we call, in physical language, a better moving equilibrium, is, in biological language, a better fulfillment of functions, and, consequently, a life which is at once wider and longer; the implication is that a wider and longer life being the end, conduct is to be judged by its conduciveness to this end; and throughout two subsequent chapters this point of view is maintained. But these chapters are nowhere illegitimately teleological. Had I accepted the moral-sense doctrine as ordinarily understood–had I alleged in mankind a supernaturally-given consciousness of obligation–had I asserted that men are endowed with sympathy to enable them the better to cooperate in the social state; I should have been chargeable with teleological interpretation of the vicious kind. But since my interpretation is avowedly opposed to this–since I regard those faculties, which produce a conduct favorable to welfare under the conditions imposed by the social state, as themselves the products of social life, and contend that they have step by step established themselves by furthering social life, the charge seems to me peculiarly inapplicable.

Another criticism made by Mr. Sidgwick is that I have not given that disproof of pessimism which, for the substantiation of my doctrine, I am bound to give. He writes: "Now, after all that has been said of the importance of considering human conduct in connection with the `universal conduct' of which it is a part, I think that this transition from `quantity of life' which was stated to be the end of the latter to `quantity of pleasure' is too rapidly and lightly made. Pessimism, as Mr. Spencer himself says, stands in the way, declaring that life does not bring with it a surplus of agreeable feeling. We expect therefore a scientific confutation of Pessimism; and I am unable to perceive that this expectation is ever adequately realized. Indeed I am unable to find any passage in which Mr. Spencer expressly undertakes such a confutation. And yet he can hardly think that Pessimism is sufficiently confuted by demonstrating that the common moral judgments of mankind imply the assumption that life, on the average, yields a surplus of pleasure over pain. This is not establishing morality on a scientific basis."

I am surprised that one so acute in making distinctions as Mr. Sidgwick, should have so greatly misapprehended my position. It is perfectly true that I nowhere expressly undertake a confutation of Pessimism; but it is also true that it nowhere devolves upon me to do this. If Mr. Sidgwick will re-read the chapter in which is referred to the controversy of Pessimism versus Optimism, he will perceive that I have uttered no judgment concerning the issue, and that, for the purpose of my argument, no such judgment is called for. My motive for comparing their views, was to show that "there is one postulate in which pessimists and optimists agree. Both their arguments assume it to be self-evident that life is good or bad, according as it does, Or does not, bring a surplus of agreeable feeling." By proving that the two schools have this postulate in common, I am not committed to any judgment concerning the truth of either of their conclusions. I have said that if the pessimist is right, "actions furthering its [life's] continuance, either in self or others, must be reprobated"; while, conversely, they must be approved if the optimist is right: the implication being that opposite systems of ethics emerge according as one or other of their estimates of life is accepted, but that both systems proceed upon the assumption that happiness is the end of conduct. The sole object of the chapter is to show "that no school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim, a desirable state of feeling, called by whatever name–gratification, enjoyment, happiness." Surely it is one thing to contend that optimists and pessimists agree in the belief that life is of value only if it has, on the average, an accompaniment of desirable consciousness, and another thing to contend that it has such an accompaniment. Had Mr. Sidgwick said that by the general argument of the work I have tacitly committed myself to the optimistic view, he would have said rightly. But, as shown, my reference to the controversy was made without any such purpose as that of justifying optimism; and my position was clearly enough implied to be that the arguments of the work are valid only for optimists.

But now, having pointed out that the conclusions contained in the Data of Ethics, in common with the conclusions contained in ethical treatises at large, can reasonably be accepted only by those who hold that life in the aggregate brings more pleasure than pain, or, at any rate, is capable of bringing more pleasure than pain, I go on to show that the tacit optimism which pervades the work, has a wider basis than Mr. Sidgwick recognizes. He says that "in Mr. Spencer's view, pessimism is indirectly confuted by the argument–given as an `inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution-which shows that `necessarily throughout the animate world at large, pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare.'" This is true as far as it goes; but, ignoring as he does all passages concerning the universal process of adaptation, Mr. Sidgwick omits a large part of the evidence favoring optimism. The chapter on the "Relativity of Pains and Pleasures," sets forth and illustrates the biological truth that everywhere faculties adjust themselves to the conditions of existence, in such wise that the activities those conditions require become pleasurable. The pains accompanying the inactions of faculties for which changed conditions have left no spheres, diminish as the faculties decrease; while the pains accompanying the actions of faculties overtaxed under the new conditions, diminish as the faculties grow, and become pleasures when those faculties have acquired the strengths which fulfillment of the conditions requires. This law is alike inferable a priori and proved a posteriori, and yields a qualified optimism as its corollary–an optimism qualified by the conclusion that the life of every species of creature is happy or miserable according to the degree of congruity or incongruity between its nature and its environment; but that everywhere, decrease of the misery or increase of the happiness, accompanies the inevitable progress towards congruity. Whence it follows that in the case of mankind, pessimism may be locally true under certain conditions (as those which have fostered the creed which makes annihilation a blessing), while optimism may be locally true under conditions of a more favorable kind; but that with the increasing adaptation of humanity to social life, the excess of pleasures over pains which warrants optimism, must become ever greater. And here let me point out in passing, how, in so far as judgment of an ethical system depends on the tacit acceptance of optimistic or pessimistic views, it can be rightly guided only by a knowledge of biological laws. Mr. Sidgwick is at one with moralists in general in thinking that the truth or falsehood or moral doctrines may be determined without study of the laws of life. He asks, "In what way then does science–that is, biology, psychology, and sociology–provide a basis for this `truer ethics'"; and in a large measure the purpose of his criticism is to show that such science does this in no appreciable way. Above, however, we see that the ac ceptability of a system of ethics, depending as it does on the preacceptance of optimism or pessimism, depends on the preacceptance or prerejection of certain ultimate biological generalizations. It is, indeed, looked at broadly, a remarkable belief that while ethical science is concerned with certain phenomena of life, it is a matter of indifference in judging about these phenomena, whether the laws of life are known or not.

The way in which Mr. Sidgwick ignores biological generalizations, is curiously shown in a subsequent passage, in which, respecting the ethical method I contend

For instance, its scientific claims are plainly declared in chapter v., on "Ways of Judging Conduct"; from which we learn that Mr. Spencer's way of judging it is to be a high priori road. He will not rely on mere generalization from observation of the actual consequences of different kinds of conduct; it is the defect of current utilitarianism that it does not get beyond these merely empirical generalizations; Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, proposes to "ascertain necessary relations" between actions and their consequences, and so to "deduce from fundamental principles what conduct must be detrimental and what must be beneficial." Those are brave words, &c.

If, concerning an artillery officer who, instead of ascertaining experimentally the ranges given by certain elevations of his gun, calculated these ranges from the laws of motion and atmospheric resistance, Mr. Sidgwick were to say that he pursued the "high priori road," he would apply this expression with much the same propriety; since the method I contend for is that of deducing from the laws of life under given conditions, results which follow from them in the same necessary way as does the trajectory of a cannon shot from the laws of motion and atmospheric resistance. All developed science may be characterized as "high priori," if the drawing of deductions from premises positively ascertained by induction, is to be so called. Had I given no explanation of my meaning, I should have been less surprised at the passage above quoted. But by a series of examples, beginning with the innutrition of a limb which follows tying of its main artery and ending with the social mischiefs caused by calumny, I have, in section 22, shown what I mean by the derivation of ethical principles from the laws of life; and I have, in subsequent chapters, exhibited this derivation systematically. Nevertheless, because, during our transitional state, in which humanity is changing and social conditions are changing, this method does not suffice for development of a code of conduct in full detail, Mr. Sidgwick, ignoring the derivations of the leading moral restraints in the section I have named, and in the subsequent chapters, thinks the reader will be "disappointed." With equal reason might he represent the biological student as disappointed because, from physiological laws as at present ascertained, the details of pathology and therapeutics cannot be inferred.

All this, however, is introductory to Mr. Sidgwick's criticism on the view I take of the relation between absolute ethics and relative ethics. My position is that, as all ethical theory is concerned with ideas of worse and better in conduct, and that as the conception of better involves the conception of best, there is, in all cases, an ideal conduct tacitly assumed; that before valid conclusions can be drawn, this ideal conduct must be conceived not in a vague and shifting way, but definitely and consistently; and that no definite and consistent conception of ideal conduct can be framed without assuming ideal social conditions. Mr. Sidgwick does not, I think, show that this position is untenable, but contents himself with raising difficulties. Into the details of his criticism I cannot follow him without occupying too much space. I may, however, deal generally with the view he finally implies, that such an ideal is useless, and that the theory of human and social evolution has no practical bearing on the guidance of conduct. He says:

Even if we could construct scientifically Mr. Spencer's ideal code, I do not think such a code would be of much avail in solving the practical problems of actual humanity . . . Even supposing that this ideal society is ultimately to be realized, it must at any rate be separated from us by a considerable interval of evolution; hence it is not unlikely that the best way of progressing towards it is some other than the apparently directest way, and that we shall reach it more easily if we begin by moving away from it.

And Mr. Sidgwick concludes that "the humble and imperfect empirical method" can be our only guide.

Here, then, we have a distinct statement of the opinion that for practical purposes it comes to the same thing whether we do or do not entertain an ideal of conduct and of society. In our estimate of a proximately best, it will make no difference whether we have or have not any conception of an ultimately best. So long as the immediate effects of a measure promise to be good, it is needless to consider whether, while achieving them, we cause changes in men and society, and whether, if we cause changes, these will carry men and society toward, or away from, their highest forms. This position may be dealt with first generally and then more specially.

The empirical method, as upheld by Mr. Sidgwick, estimating, as well as may be, good and evil results, that is, totals of pleasures and pains, postulates as a necessary basis for its conclusions, constancy of relation between pleasures and their causes and between pains and their causes. If, from experience of men as we now know them, it is inferred that a certain policy will be conducive to a surplus of pleasures over pains; and if the establishment of that policy, say by public institutions, is considered as therefore ethically justifiable, or rather, imperative; then the implied assumption is that the surplus of pleasures over pains producible by this course in existing men, will also be producible in their descendants. This, however, cannot be inferred unless it is assumed that men will remain the same. Hence the question whether men are or are not changing, becomes an essential question. If they are not changing, the empirical estimates may be valid. If they are changing, these estimates must be doubtful, and may be entirely false. It needs but to contrast the pleasures of combat, which a Norseman conceived as those of his heaven, with the pleasures pursued by a modern man of letters, or to contrast the repugnance which a savage shows to continued industry, with the eager pursuit of business by a citizen, to see that this change in the relations between actions and the accompanying feelings, is no nominal difficulty in the way of the empirical method. It becomes manifest that if humanity is undergoing modifications, then, guidance of conduct by valuations of pleasures and pains, assuming as it does that what is true now will continue to be true, is a guidance likely to be erroneous. Be it a policy advocated, a law passed, an agency set up, a discipline used, an injunction urged, if its sole warrant is that of furthering the happiness of men as they are, then, if men are becoming other than they are, furtherance of their happiness in future cannot be inferred; and there may result hindrance to their happiness.

Mark, now, another implication. If it is admitted, as it must be, that guidance by estimated surplus of pleasures over pains, as now observable, is vitiated if the relations between actions and feelings change; then it must also be admitted that guidance by such estimated surplus can be made trustworthy, only by knowledge of the ways in which these relations change. If we simply know that these relations between actions and feelings will change, without knowing how they will change, then we simply know that our empirical guidance will go wrong, without knowing the way in which it will go wrong. Hence the question, whether there is at work that adaptation of constitution to conditions which the doctrine of evolution implies, becomes the cardinal question. If, recognizing the relativity of pleasures and pains, we conclude that those activities which social life necessitates in men, tend to become more pleasurable, while the pains caused by the restraints on unfit activities diminish, then the question of first importance becomes–What general form of activities is it to which humanity is being adjusted?–what are the ideal social conditions to which men's natures are being so molded that they will have no desires out of harmony with those conditions? If we can frame a conception of the ideal social state, and of human conduct as carried on in it, then we have a means of correcting whatever empirical guidance may be obtained by valuation of pleasures and pains as now experienced; since, beyond the immediate effects of any course, we are enabled to see whether the ultimate effects are such as further or hinder the required remolding of human nature.

The contrast between Mr. Sidgwick's belief and mine, respecting the relation between ethical doctrine and the theory of human and social evolution, will best be shown by an analogy. In the moral education of a child, proximately good results may be obtained in various ways. Its crying may be stopped by a bon-bon; or its mother may alarm it by a threat; it may be led to learn a lesson by fear, or by the promise of a treat, or by the desire to please; and in later childhood there may come, on the part of the father, a control which maintains order by regulating every action, or one which allows a considerable amount of freedom and concomitant experience of good and evil results. Is it, or is it not, desirable to keep in view the fact that presently the child will be a man, and to frame a conception of what the man ought to be? Very frequently the mother, pursuing the empirical method and achieving proximately good results, ignores the question of this ideal and the conduciveness of her discipline to achievement of it; and not uncommonly the father, especially if of the clerical sort, making numerous peremptory rules, considers scarcely at all whether his much-regulated boy is acquiring the qualities which will make him a self-regulating man. Shall we say that such proximately beneficial methods are the best which can be devised; or shall we not rather say that there can be no good education which does not bear the ideal constantly in view, and consider methods partly in reference to their immediate results, but still more in reference to their ultimate results? And if so, must we not say the same with respect to adult humanity, which undergoes an education by social discipline? Of course if Mr. Sidgwick agrees with those who hold that human nature is unchangeable, his position is tenable. But if he admits that man is adaptable, it becomes of some importance to consider of every proposed course, whether, by the entailed modification of conditions, it furthers or hinders progress towards the highest conditions and the highest human nature accompanying them. Though our steering must doubtless be proximately guided by recognition of rocks and sandbanks, yet, if we believe in a haven to be eventually reached, it is needful from time to time to consult the compass, and see whether, while avoiding the rocks and sandbanks, we are also moving toward our haven.

Had this reply to Mr. Sidgwick been published immediately after his criticism, I should probably have said no more in defense of my views. But there have since appeared in Mind two other criticisms, respecting which it now seems needful to say something. The first in order of date is that of Professor Means (No. XIX.). Space will not allow me to deal with it more than briefly.

Professor Means considers that I am unjustified in saying of current utilitarianism that it is purely empirical, and in contrasting it with what I distinguish as rational utilitarianism. Considering that, as we have just seen, Mr. Sidgwick, who is now the foremost representative of utilitarianism as hitherto conceived, argues against me that it must continue to be purely empirical, the injustice of my allegation is not apparent. By way of showing that Mr. Mill, in his Logic, takes the same view that I do, Professor Means says:

The very illustration used by Mr. Spencer in regard to "the course of one who studies pathology without previous study of physiology" as resembling the usual course of moralists, is one used by Mill for precisely the same purpose: "Students in politics thus attempted to study the pathology and therapeutics of the social body, before they had laid the necessary foundation in its physiology."

And there follows what seems to be an insinuation that I was cognizant of this passage. Some thirty years ago I probably was. I read Mr. Mill's Logic in 1851 or 1852, and save those parts which, in successive editions, have concerned the amicable controversy carried on between us respecting the test of truth, I have not read it since. I go on to remark that, as the passage itself shows, and as appears more fully on turning to the volume, the analogy as used by Mr. Mill refers to social science; while the analogy is used by me in elucidation of ethical science. Professor Means says it is "used by Mill for precisely the same purpose." Now though it is true that politics and morals are intimately related, the belief that they are identical is, I think, peculiar to Professor Means, and is likely to remain so.

Let us, however, turn to the main issue–whether the utilitarianism of Mr. Mill and previous writers of the same school, did or did not recognize that dependence of ethical laws upon the laws of life, which I have insisted upon, and did or did not propose to establish them deductively from such laws. To whatever extent it may be true that utilitarians have been conscious of a relation between rules or right conduct and the furtherance, direct or indirect, of vital activities, there could not come the full conception of a resulting method, until biological generalizations of the widest kind had been reached and accepted as data for ethical reasoning. Now up to recent times, biological generalizations of this widest kind had either not been reached at all, or were known only by naturalists, and accepted by very few of these. In Bentham's day, the consequences deducible from the universal law of adaptation, could not take their place in ethical speculation; for the reason that, in the sense involved by the doctrine of evolution, this law had not been heard of by ninety-nine cultivated people out of a hundred, and was pooh-poohed by nearly all those who had heard of it. Again, whatever occasional observations had been made respecting the relations of pleasures and pains to bodily welfare, could not lead to any such ethical conclusions as those involved by acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, which implies that life of the sentient kind has continued and developed only in virtue of these relations. Nor, without the doctrine of the relativity of pains and pleasures, established by a wide biological induction, could there be completed the necessary basis for a scientific ethics. Similarly, into that division of ethics which is concerned with its psychology, the theory of mental evolution enters as an indispensable factor. Though Mr. Mill did not combat the hypothesis of inherited mental modifications, yet he never adopted it in such a way as to qualify his experiential interpretation of ideas and feelings; and, consequently, he was debarred from entertaining that view of the moral sentiments and moral intuitions, which yields an explanation of their varying functions under varying social conditions, and affords a warrant for inferring their ultimate adjustment to an ultimate social state. In brief, then, the laws of life and of mind, referred to by me as those from which a scientific ethics is to be deduced, are laws which were either not known, or not admitted, by utilitarians of the empirical school; and it was therefore not possible for them to entertain that conception of rational ethics which I have put in antithesis to empirical ethics.

Professor Means comments on the contrast I have drawn between justice as an end and happiness as an end. He quotes me as saying that

Justice "is concerned exclusively with quantity under stated conditions, whereas happiness is concerned with both quantity and quality under conditions not stated." It refers to "the relative amounts of actions, or products, or benefits, the natures of which are recognized only as far as is needful for saying whether as much has been given, or done, or allowed, by each concerned, as was implied by tacit or overt understanding, to be an equivalent."

To which he objects that

"Differences of age, of growth, of constitutional need, differences of activity and consequent expenditure, differences of desires and tastes," which Mr. Spencer thinks impossible to be estimated by a utilitarian, must all be estimated before any course of action can be said to be equivalent to any other course. And if a comparison of pleasures is impossible, this estimate is impossible.

The reply is that justice as I have defined it, justice as formulated in law, and justice as commonly understood, is satisfied when those concerned have so acted that no one has been trespassed against by another, and, in case of contract, each has done all that was agreed to be done by him. If there has been direct aggression, greater liberty of action has been taken by the aggressor than by the one aggressed upon. If there has been indirect aggression by breach of contract, such greater liberty of action has again been taken: one has broken the understanding while the other has not–one has seized some advantage beyond that given as an equivalent, while the other has not. Justice is not concerned with the relative values of benefits or happinesses, as Professor Means implies, but only with the relative degrees of freedom used in pursuing benefits or happinesses; and if neither by direct or indirect trespass have these degrees been made unequal, there is no injustice. If it be said, as by Professor Means concerning wages given for labor, that very often men are practically coerced by social arrangements into making agreements they would not otherwise have made; then, the injustice exists not in the agreements unwillingly made, but in the social arrangements which have interfered with free volition. If, as appears from his argument, Professor Means holds that justice comprises, not simply a regulation of actions such that each man shall leave others as much freedom to pursue their ends as he himself takes, but that justice involves the establishment of equivalence between advantages gained by cooperation, then the reply is that I am not concerned with justice as so conceived. There are socialists who hold that there should be an equal division of benefits among men, irrespective of the values of their several labors. To many it seems unjust that the hard work of a ploughman should bring in a week, not so much as a physician easily gains in a quarter of an hour. Some persons contend that it is unjust that children born to the poor should not have educational advantages like those of children born to the rich. But such deficiencies in the shares of happi ness some men get by cooperation, as arise from the inferior natures they inherit, or from the inferior circumstances into which their inferior ancestors have fallen, are deficiencies with which justice, as I understand it, has nothing to do. The injustice which entails on posterity diseases and deformities–the injustice which inflicts on offspring the painful results of stupidity and misconduct in parents–the injustice which compels those who inherit incapacities to struggle with resulting difficulties–the injustice which leaves in comparative poverty the great majority, whose powers, of low order, bring them small returns, is an injustice of a kind lying outside of my argument. We have to accept, as we may, the established constitution of things, though under it an inferiority for which the individual is not blamable, brings its evils, and a superiority for which he can claim no merit, brings its benefits; and we have to accept, as we may all those resulting inequalities of advantages which citizens gain by their respective activities. But while it does not devolve upon me to defend the order of Nature, I may say again, as I have said at greater length already (sec. 69), that only in virtue of the law under which every creature takes the good and bad results entailed by its inherited organization, has life advanced to its present height and can continue to advance. A so-called justice which should equalize advantages apart from capacities, would be fatal; while the justice, rightly so-called, which insists that each shall be as free as others to make the best of his powers, and that nothing shall intervene between his efforts and the returns they naturally bring (as decided by agreement) is beneficent immediately and remotely. This is the justice which, as an end, I have contended is more intelligible than happiness as an end; and I decline to be entangled by Professor Means in the difficulties which arise when there is substituted a justice which contemplates equivalence of results.

The remainder of Professor Means' criticisms I must pass over with the remark that, throughout, they similarly display an unusual facility in identifying things which are different. I turn, now, to the article of Mr. Alfred W. Benn, "Another view of Mr. Spencer's Ethics," contained in the last number of Mind. Here, too, I must limit myself to the earlier criticisms.

Mr. Benn blames me for expressing a positive opinion respecting the inevitableness of the hedonistic view of morals. He says: "To declare pleasure a necessary form of moral intuition must in the present state of the controversy be pronounced a piece of unwarrantable dogmatism." As commonly understood, dogmatism implies authoritative assertion without the giving of reasons. Considering that the passage to which Mr. Benn refers, closes a chapter devoted to an examination of all the various standards of goodness in conduct; and considering that the analysis aims to show, and does, I think, show, that happiness as an ultimate end is in every case involved; it seems to me an unusual application of the word to characterize as dogmatic, a proposition which sums up the results of the inquiry. A dogmatism which appeals step by step to the judgment of the reader, is of a species not before known.

I remark this by way of introduction to Mr. Benn's first criticism. Respecting my statement that optimists and pessimists by their arguments both imply acceptance of the hedonistic view, Mr. Benn says:

Here with all deference I must observe that Mr. Spencer is doubly if not trebly mistaken. In the first place, although Schopenhauer and his school are hedonists, it is perfectly possible to be a pessimist without thinking that pleasure is the end of life and that we do not get enough of it. Some persons if they were convinced that certain knowledge was unattainable, even if they expected it to yield them no pleasure, might regard that as a reason for preferring nonexistence to existence. In the second place, as it is generally better if possible to meet your adversary on his own ground, an optimist who believes that life affords a surplus of pleasurable feeling may very well advance that argument without conceding that such a surplus alone makes life worth having. And, thirdly as a matter of fact the optimists do not make this concession. M. Caro, an eminent representative of the spiritualistic school in France, has distinctly declared that granting the excess of pain over pleasure to be possible and even probable, he still remains an optimist, that even an unhappy life is worth living, and that suffering is preferable to nonentity.

The first of the three proofs that I am mistaken is curiously hypothetical. "Some persons" "might regard" nonexistence as preferable to existence, if they thought "certain knowledge was unattainable," even if they expected no pleasure from attaining it. Disproof of my statement concerning the beings we know, by the help of supposable beings, is not, I think, very satisfactory. But passing over this, let me point out that if the attainment of "certain knowledge" were an adequate motive for existence, and inability to attain it a motive for preferring nonexistence, it is difficult to conceive otherwise than that the attainment of it would be a satisfaction; and a satisfaction of whatever nature is a kind of pleasure. To say that the attainment of the knowledge was not expected to yield them any pleasure, is to say that they would regard the attainment of the knowledge with indifference; and if they were indifferent to the attainment of it, how could attainment of it be regarded as a sufficient reason for preferring existence to nonexistence?

Mr. Benn's second disproof, somewhat hypothetical also, does not, I think, much strengthen his case. He says: "An optimist who believes that life affords a surplus of pleasurable feeling may very well advance that argument without conceding that such a surplus alone makes life worth having." Is this really another disproof, or only the same restated? Without naming any end, other than pleasurable feeling, which "makes life worth having," it alleges that even an optimist may believe in such an end. I do not see that by leaving this end unspecified, and supposing an optimist who thinks it a sufficient end, the argument is made different from the last, and the same reply serves. The end, of whatever nature, being one which it is desirable to attain rather than not attain, implies satisfaction of desire, or pleasure. The third argument states in the concrete that which is stated in the abstract in the preceding two, and is the sole argument. This argument is that M. Caro thinks "even an unhappy life is worth living." Now I suspect that were M. Caro cross-examined, it would turn out that the unhappy life which he thinks worth living, is one which, though it brings misery to the possessor, does not bring misery to others, but conduces to their happiness.[4] If M. Caro means that life is worth living even on condition that its possessor, suffering misery himself in common with all individuals, shall aid them in living that they may continue to suffer misery, and shall beget and rear children that they. too, may pass lives of misery; and if M. Caro means that misery is to be the fate of all, not only here but during the hereafter he believes in: then, indeed, and only then, does he exclude happiness as an end. But if M. Caro says he believes that even under such conditions life would be worth living, then I venture to class him with those who have not practiced introspection. I once heard a person assert that a cat thrown across a room could drop in the middle if it pleased; and, presumably, this person thought he could himself do the same. The defective consciousness of his mechanical powers which this person displayed, is, I think, paralleled by M. Caro’s defective consciousness of his mental powers, if he thinks he can believe that existence would be preferable to nonexistence did it bring pain to all men throughout all time.

Mr. Benn, however, regards this testimony of M. Caro as conclusive. If there is anyone who says he thinks that universal and eternal human misery is better than nonexistence, we must accept his self-interpretation as settling the question; for men never misconceive their own thoughts or fail to understand their own feelings. And then Mr. Benn continues: "A fortiori would such persons maintain that a perfectly neutral state of consciousness, a life totally devoid both of pleasure and pain, is worth having. Thus the appeal to authority completely breaks down, a single recusant being enough to invalidate it." Passing over the question whether any such recusant exists, it may be as well, before admitting the alleged breakdown, to ask what is the meaning of the word "worth," as used in the above relation. There presents itself the problem to define "worth" in terms which exclude all reference, direct or indirect, to satisfaction, or pleasure, or gratification. It is required to find a case in which men, or things, or acts, are contrasted as having worth and as being worthless, without there entering the conception of preference; or if the conception of preference enters, then it is required to state what kind of preference it is which takes place between things of which one is not liked more than the other; or if difference of liking is admitted, then the question to be answered is what kind of liking is it which does not connote pleasure. Similarly with the words used in a sentence which shortly follows: "For the question is not whether pleasure is a good and pain an evil, but whether pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil." Which question at once raises the inquiry for the kind of evil which, neither proximately nor remotely, to the actor or to any other being, now or hereafter, produces any pain. Until some such kind of evil has been pointed out, I do not see any proposition against which I have to contend. There is merely the alleged possibility of a proposition.

As already hinted, I cannot follow further the course of Mr. Benn’s argument, but must leave its validity to be judged by that of this first portion. The only remark I will add, concerns, not a matter of argument but a matter of evidence. Referring to my account of the origin of the religious sanction, Mr. Benn says: "It seems a pity to disturb such an ingenious and symmetrical theory, but I am not aware that it is supported by any external evidence, while there are strong reasons for dissenting from it." Does Mr. Benn mean that no such external evidence is contained in the Data of Ethics? If he does, then the reply is that such evidence, occupying more space than that afforded by the entire volume, would have rather too much interrupted the thread of the argument. Does he mean that I have not given such external evidence elsewhere? Then the reply is that in the first division of the Principles of Sociology, evidence so great in quantity is set forth, that I have been blamed for overburdening my argument with it; and a further reply is that if Mr. Benn wishes for still more such evidence, he will find abundance of it in Nos. II, III, IV, V and VI of the Descriptive Sociology, where the religious ideas of some eighty uncivilized and semicivilized peoples are described in detail. In disproof of my view concerning the genesis of the political and religious controls, Mr. Benn goes on to say: "Modern inquiries into the history of jural conceptions show that among primitive men kings were not legislators but judges," and by way of showing what happens among "primitive men" he instances "the original judgments or Themistes" of the Greeks. On this my comment is that Mr. Benn seems unacquainted with inquiries, more "modern" than those he refers to, which show that theories about primitive ideas and institutions, based on facts furnished by historic peoples, are utterly misleading. The origins of religious and jural conceptions and usages, Mr. Benn thinks may fitly be sought in the traditions of the early Greek world; though, as Curtius remarks (Bk. I. 136—37), this "is not. . . a world of beginnings; it is no world still engaged in an uncertain development, but one thoroughly complete, matured and defined by fixed rules and orders of life." For myself, in seeking for origins, I prefer to look for them among peoples who have not yet arrived at a stage in which there are metal weapons and metal armor, two-horse war chariots, walled towns, temples, palaces, and seagoing ships.

I had originally intended to notice briefly, certain other criticisms–one by Professor Calderwood, which formed the inaugural lecture to his class at Edinburgh in the session of 1879, and was afterward published in the Contemporary Review; and the other by Professor Wace of King’s College, which was first addressed to the Victoria Institute, and also afterward published in the Contemporary Review. But I have already occupied as many pages of Mind as I can reasonably ask for; and, further, I cannot longer suspend more important work for which my time and energies are already insufficient. Replying to criticisms is, indeed, a bootless undertaking, save in those cases where the positions defended are further elucidated, and so rendered more acceptable to those who are not committed to antagonist views. On such as are committed to antagonist views, replies, however conclusive, produce no appreciable effects; and especially is this so when such antagonist views are involved in theological problems.